Jeffrey Tayler: Let’s offend religion more often

March 2, 2015 • 11:00 am

I continue to be amazed and impressed by Jeffrey Tayler’s anti-theist writings at Salon (see here, here and here for earlier examples). And I’m nearly as amazed that Salon, the bastion of New Atheist bashing, publishes this stuff.

Tayler, a contributing editor at The Atlantic who lives in and reports about Russia, and has written many books about various places, has a new and productive sideline in going after religion. His latest effort in Salon has the pull-no-punches title, “We must offend religion more: Islam, Christianity and our tolerance for ancient myths, harmful ideas.” Unless you’re one of the few religionists who reads this site, you’ll like it, for it’s positively Hitchensian in its eloquence and “stridency.”

Tayler takes off from the Charlie Hebdo affair, and his message is to de-fang religion by constantly calling it out for its harms, which, he says, will eventually reduce those harms—at least the incessant terrorism directed at journalists, bloggers, and outspoken critics of Islam.  A few apposite quotes:

Let’s dispense straightaway with the juvenile argument of “offense” (to religious sentiment) as grounds for declining to publish or say anything.  No Western constitution or legal code guarantees citizens the right to go about life free from offense.  Laws provide for freedom of expression (with some restrictions, especially regarding state security, hate crime and incitement to violence), but they cannot forbid potentially offensive expression without destroying the very right they are meant to protect.  (French law forbids denying the Holocaust, which does create contradictions and harm free speech, but that is another matter.)

If we decided to recognize such offense as an actionable private wrong, how would we, in any case, measure it, or determine what is de jure offensive?  To devout Muslims, the sight of uncovered women and the serving of pork and alcoholic beverages cause offense.  Devout Hindus would certainly find beef offensive.  Devout Catholics could draw up their own list, and Jews, another.  In short, a lot of things might offend a great number of people all over the place.  In a world ever more connected by the Internet – the means by which “offensive” Muhammad cartoons reached Muslim-majority countries as distant from Europe as Indonesia – there is no way to guard against offending someone, somewhere.  We should not be obligated to take into account a work’s potential for inciting murderous mass tantrums in faraway lands or slaughter at home when evaluating it for publication.

To those who defended Columbia University’s “this-is-a-safe-space-where-we-shall-offend-no-one” signs, read that second paragraph again. And remember that a room containing a devout Muslim and a female Columbia student with visible ankles or uncovered hair, is not a “safe space” for that Muslim. Nor is a room in which a hyper-Orthodox Jew must sit next to a woman.

But wait! There’s more! With the lovely paragraphs above, you get this as a bonus:

A surfeit of slipshod thinking and befuddled verbiage has complicated our discourse about both the Charlie Hebdo and Lars Vilks affairs.  Notwithstanding logic and the damage done to our prospects for self-preservation, we avoid frank talk about Islam – the main faith today inspiring terrorism.  It helps no one to hurl poppycock slurs such as “Islamophobe” or Islamophobic” at those who talk forthrightly about this.  And remember, unless you solemnly believe in the Quran, there is nothing – absolutely nothing — in it to “respect.”  (The same goes for the Bible and the Torah, of course.)  Attempts to shield religions from censure in the face of overwhelming evidence – President Obamaleads the pack of invertebrate Western politicians doing this — amount to nothing more than pandering acceptance of ancient myths, harmful ideas and the increasingly gruesome violence to which they often lead.  Ideologies merit no a priori respect; people do.

(The word “invertebrate” comes, I suspect, from Mencken via Hitchens, and it’s exactly appropriate.) We should adopt the last sentence of that paragraph as a motto. One reader suggested to me, and I think it’s a great idea, that we replace “Islamophobe” with “Muslimophobe.” The latter term is much clearer as an indication of bigotry, while the former conflates dislike of Islam with bigotry against Muslims, a conflation that many people deliberately promote.

Finally, I didn’t realize that sharia councils were still going things in the UK. I’d heard about them, of course, but thought that they’d been abolished. Apparently I was wrong. Nor did I know that those councils were approved by, of all people, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Britain should deep-six them immediately.

We have, in fact, begun surrendering in the West, and not just by buying into the notion that criticizing Islam is tantamount to attacking Muslims as people.  We should shiver with revulsion at the example of multicultural “tolerance” with which the United Kingdom has furnished us.  There, for Muslims who turn to them (for women, this is not necessarily a voluntary move), 85 Shariah councils dispense “justice” in “family matters” – marriage and divorce, inheritance and domestic violence.  That is, in matters in which girls and women are most vulnerable.  (A campaign is underway to abolish the councils.)  In pursuing this path of “tolerance” the United Kingdom has traduced Muslim women hoping for a decent life in a “developed” country, including those who just want to keep their clitorises safe from the savage ritual of female genital mutilation.  The U.K. outlawed this in 1985, but families often send their young daughters back to the home country for a “vacation,” during which local butchers set to work slicing off their clitorises and sowing up their vaginas – at times without anesthesia.  A 2003 law would throw parents in jail for 14 years for forcing such a “holiday” on their daughters, but so far, no one has been convicted.  The practice continues.

Who came up with the idea of establishing Shariah courts in the land of Shakespeare and Byron?  Not Muslims angry at being discriminated against.  No, none other than a good Christian “man of the cloth” – the bland sobriquet should really be one of foul opprobrium — the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams.  In 2008 Williams declared that such a sickening “beau geste” toward (radical and not so radical) imams would lead to better “community relations.”  This is the sort of “multicultural tolerance” beloved by all those “men of faith” (of whatever sect, and I do mean men) who slyly scheme or openly militate for the second-class status of women, for interference with a woman’s right to do as she pleases with her body, for the stigmatization (or worse) of sexual minorities, for a culture of shame attaching to sex, and for the child-abuse teaching in schools of ludicrous explanations about our entirely non-celestial origins.  With bishops like Williams, who needs imams for enemies?

Like it or not, we are engaged in a struggle for the soul of our Enlightenment civilization.

. . . In this war, the best weapon, by far, is the truth.  Now more than ever, telling the truth counts.  So please, do it.

Now isn’t that refreshing after the waffling, dissimulation, and pandering of unctuous people like Reza Aslan, Karen Armstrong, and Glenn Greenwald? Let’s hope Tayler continues to turn these out at Salon. Even if we agree with him already, it gives us a frisson of pleasure to hear this again. And perhaps those on the fence will be converted as well. It’s not impossible, for people like Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris, despite their supposedly strident rhetoric, turned many away from faith.

72 thoughts on “Jeffrey Tayler: Let’s offend religion more often”

    1. I couldn’t watch more than a minute of this. F**k Pat Condell. I am a progressive feminist and have NEVER backed away from criticizing Islam where warranted, especially in regard to women’s rights, including on Twi**er. I have also made clear my disdain for those who champion women’s and LGBT rights but then stick up for those Muslims who oppose those same things. Most feminists are like me – the ones he is talking about are a minority, albeit a vocal one, but still a minority. This is the sort of conspiracy rubbish we get from groups like Justice for Men and Boys and A Voice for Men, whose real agenda is betrayed by the fact that almost everything they publish on their websites in not about supporting men’s causes (of which there are several valid ones) but about attacking women.

      1. Hi Heather,

        That’s an interesting assertion you’ve made that the vast majority of feminists have been and are very vocal (globally) against the subjugation of women in Islam. I wonder why it is that someone like me, who keeps my finger on the pulse of the media and world events, somehow missed all of what you’re referring to.

        It is also perplexing that while Pat Condell is actually on your side for the emancipation of women globally, your pour contempt on him. I have to wonder why that is. Perhaps he struck a nerve with you. I respectfully suggest that you view the video in its entirety, and see if you can hear beyond the [valid] criticism of your own little sect, and hear what he’s really saying.

        Closing your ears after one minute doesn’t bode well for your position.

        1. edit: “you” not “your” pour contempt….

          Is there no way to edit our posts?

          1. “Is there no way…?” Yes: Read before posting.
            The phrase “struck a nerve” is often a dishonest ad hominem debating tactic, but I’m not even sure that’s what you were doing.

        2. @2 (Colin):
          I’m with Heather on this.
          Pat Condell may be an atheist, and he may be anti-the excesses of Islam, and he may be a popular speaker, and he rightly condemns Sharia “courts” in England; but the criticism of feminism per se is unjustified.
          The “perfect” (however you or Mr. Condell define it) is indeed the enemy of the good.
          Each person, and each group, fights the battle that they see as most important when and where they are – it is not for Pat Condell, nor indeed anyone else, me included, to say which battle they should choose to fight.
          It’s all very well to say “condemn the misognyny of Saudi Arabia”, and indeed many people do, but the likelihood of changing it is small; but condemn local problems in your community or country and you may well be able to change them. It may not be the end that many of us seek, but it’s a start, and that’s better than railing against fate.

          3. But that’s what I’m getting at; you paint it as a conscious, collective, strategic decision on feminists part. I suggest that that assertion is erroneous.

        3. I remember whenever my father said something nasty and tendentious, and people reacted angrily, he’d say he’d ‘obviously struck a nerve’.
          Perhaps Heather reacted angrily because Condell is a cold, nasty bloke who skirts around the edges of open bigotry whilst couching his arguments in the language of the Enlightenment. No struck nerves, no amateur psychoanalysis necessary.

      2. I just think Condell is a nasty piece of work and avoid him on that basis.

  3. Some centuries ago we had Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. (Mencken)

    Now we have its modern corrolary: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be offended.

  4. To those who defended Columbia University’s “this-is-a-safe-space-where-we-shall-offend-no-one” signs, read that second paragraph again. And remember that a room containing a devout Muslim and a female Columbia student with visible ankles or uncovered hair, is not a “safe space” for that Muslim. Nor is a room in which a hyper-Orthodox Jew must sit next to a woman.

    +1

    The word “invertebrate” comes, I suspect, from Mencken via Hitchens, and it’s exactly appropriate

    Well, I don’t think this particular variation on the epithet ‘spineless’ needed to be borrowed from any particular speaker. Its the sort of thing we might naturally expect multiple speakers to independently reproduce.

    1. I’ve sometimes fantasised circumstances in which I might be described – approvingly – as a ‘vertebrate biologist’.

    2. Concur wholeheartedly. Thanksh for highlighting these articles by Tayler; they are like a breath of fresh air. I still miss Hitch, but it’s clear his baton has not been dropped.

    4. I was a bit disappointed to come across Tayler on Russia Today’s ironically-named Crosstalk programme, in which four shills agree with one another about the west’s grotesque hypocrisy and mistreatment of Russia. He was a bit more restrained than the others(and I like to think he looked a bit embarrassed) but it was a surprise nevertheless.

  6. What a remarkably frank and well-worded piece; Mr. Tayler definitely earned – and repaid! – my click!

    In between the poles – one one end atheists who recognize as abusive the inculcation of innocent children, and on the other “true” believers who recognize reason and science as the threat they are to faith – is a majority of modern believers who assume the lines between church and state will always hold, and that “everyone” is able to maintain the accommodation between the non-overlapping truths of science and mainstream religion.

    I don’t think the average, mainstream-believing person appreciates the energy and momentum of anti-Enlightenment force, any more than they appreciate how rare faith really is among scientists – and the reason I think that is that I was among them until ten or twelve years ago. To wake me up, it took the perfect storm of losses to the religious assault on reproductive choice, same-sex marriage and science education – and I was pushed off the agnostic-to-atheist cliff by two particularly effective lectures by Richard Dawkins at universities, one each in the US and the UK.

    My hope is that the tide is turning, and that the Millenials will mark a tipping point – but as I often note, almost-irreparable damage is being done in the West in the meantime. More horsemen-like articles like Mr. Tayler’s, please. I’m grateful to have been awakened, looking forward to more “souls” being “saved.”

      1. ‘My hope is that the tide is turning, and that the Millenials will mark a tipping point…’

        I always hold out hope for the Millenials when it comes to tolerance, liberalism and environmental awareness, but when it comes to atheism, not so sure. I don’t think the majority are religious per se, but I don’t know if they really care about religion or atheism. I’m pretty sure they think religion is stupid, but I don’t think many have gone so far as to think it is dangerous. This is why we need strident atheists to publish, speak and motivate. Either way, I do hope you’re right.

        1. For sure. Indifference would be a step forward, though! Maybe even a step toward rejection and danger-recognition. Calling faith irrelevant might be the worst insult to believers, if you think about it.

          1. All true, and if a majority of people eventually feel indifferent, that would be positive indeed.

          2. Even though they don’t care about it now, I think it’s likely it will develop into atheism when they are older. Many will still have the at least partly religious upbringing most of us had, and their brains are still growing and their opinions still forming.

          3. Indifference would be a huge step forward in places like America and other extremely religious societies. In western Europe we seem to be very, very slowly getting there. But an influx of unprecedentedly religious immigrants has rather crept up on an essentially secular society, and they really don’t know how to respond.
            I’ve banged on about this before – the general population’s disinterest with, and disconnect from, truly religious believers has contributed to an inability on the part of liberal secularists to accept that religion plays a part in what religious people do. My mother, who is extremely pragmatic and not in the slightest bit religious, finds it literally incredible that any of the Muslim terrorists believe in what they say they do. Plenty of other people feel the same way. This indifference, this disconnect, leads to a kind of a priori ruling out of religion as a possible motivating factor. I look at the pundits in the liberal media and I don’t think they’re being dishonest – they just cannot put themselves in the shoes of someone who’d believe scriptural verse about 72 virgins or Noah’s ark. I myself have difficulty accepting that people believe this stuff, but as soon as you actually take what religious extremists say at face value most of the befuddled and specious amateur psychologising is rendered unnecessary. So indifference is a step forward, but it has its dangers too. We need to take religion seriously so that we don’t have to take religion seriously. Otherwise society drifts into collectively underestimating its power to make people do bad things.

  7. I for one am offended by the slur aimed at invertebrate-Americans, who I may remind you far outnumber vertebrate-Americans alike in number of individuals, total body mass, and number of species. Shouldn’t WEIT be a safe space where unwarranted prejudice against the non-camera-eyed is anathema, and where even those who lack iodine-binding cells in their pharynxes will be free to develop to their full potentials?

  8. I believe what you may have discovered here in Jeffrey Tayler, is the modern day equivalent to Thomas Paine. He was certainly a smash hit back in 1776 and this may be the talent for the event today. Maybe you should ask Harris or Dawkins on this?

    1. But let us not forget Tom Paine’s ugly fate late in his life. An emigrant from England to the Colonies, and already a political radical in 1775, his propaganda materially helped win the ‘hearts and minds’ of colonists for the American Revolution. But after the publication of ‘The Age of Reason’ (1894)–one of the greatest acts of intellectual demolition of Christianity ever written– he was widely reviled by the evangelical Protestant church as an ‘infidel’ and could no longer get any political traction in the very nation he aided aborning. Paine died in pain and penury. We’re so fortunate that his works are still around and still. . . work.

  10. In having to encounter news day after day of the atrocities committed by ISIS, I’ve found myself getting angrier with Christians. (This is probably not for the better). I don’t mean angry with any particular Christian personally. But rather, we are seeing vividly before our eyes the
    primitive, insane ethos out of which much scripture arose.

    To the Christian who recoil in horror at ISIS’s works and theology, and who then blithely attend church, I want to shout “HAVE YOU NOT READ YOUR OWN DAMNED SCRIPTURES!!???? Your holy book depicts God asking people to act JUST LIKE ISIS!
    When will you wake up to the idea that maybe….just maybe!….that book might not be the font of moral wisdom you take it to be?”

    This double-standard stuff played by even liberal Christian in taking holy scripture seriously as divine in any way just pisses me off all the more when it’s liabilities are made so explicit, and they STILL won’t get the message.

    1. ISIS is a mirror to all religions, but in America, it is the embodiment of complacency.

      Anyone who remains religious and stands for a faith, any faith, while digesting the outcomes of ISIS driven events, should be epistemologically ashamed of what they believe and want to be true: an everlasting life.

      When I see ISIS I see countless Americans unwilling to calculate the moral equivalent of 0+0=0, that is, my religion is their religion and this has got to stop.

  11. I didn’t realize that sharia councils were still going things in the UK. I’d heard about them, of course, but thought that they’d been abolished.

    Can someone from the UK enlighten us about what they specifically do and what legal power they have?

    Originally I had thought they were similar to US (private) arbitrators, which have some power to resolve conttract disputes but which do not take the place of the courts. I.e., they can’t create an agreement that would otherwise be illegal, and if you don’t like their decision, you always have the option of hiring a lawyer and suing. However JT and JAC talk about them as if they had stronger legal standing. Do they? What sort of decisions do these councils make?

      1. The link for the facebook page on the “one law for all” goes to a page not found page. Is this page taken down by facebook or what has happened to it?

    2. The Sharia courts have no legal standing in the UK.

      The problem is that people (i.e. Women) from Islamic backgrounds might submit to them because (1) they know no better, or (2) they think they should for religious reasons, or (3) they are under pressure from their community to do so.

    3. Your original understanding is correct: they’re a form of arbitration, with no greater understanding. JT is wrong so far as he implies otherwise. Like he is about the AB of C’s role.

      1. However, women often can’t go to secular courts because of the community they’re in. Some don’t even realize they can go to a secular court. They have no choice in the matter and are trapped by their culture to obeying sharia courts.

        1. Coel and Heather,
          I hate to say it but that frankly doesn’t sound like a legal system problem. There are lots of good reasons to allow people to use non-judicial arbitrator. I could see the UK government deciding to regulate arbitrators or require some sort of license, but unless they are willing to require a ‘religious test for office’ they aren’t going to be able to prevent conservative muslims from being arbitrators, or prevent people from using them if they choose. Ideally you’d like every resident to be educated as to their rights and legal opportunities, but it just wouldn’t be feasible to enforce that, unless you want the government going in to homes. Trying to think of some other possible solutions here…if these are ‘formal courts,’ maybe you can have a government legal representative present?

          1. eric:
            It’s a problem because women in both orthodox Judaism and Islam are, for lack of a better term, second-class citizens. A truly secular judicial system should not permit arbitration where the arbitrator is biased, especially one where the arbitrator is religiously biased to take the word of one sex over the other (guess which). Think of the Jewish “get” (“gett” – I’ve seen both spellings) – the document that, signed by the former husband, will allow an orthodox Jewish woman to be truly divorced and marry again within her religion; the equivalent of the Catholic Declaration of Nullity/Invalidity. The very requirement of the “get” still grants a former husband power over his former wife.
            Arbitration is fine if the arbitrator is truly neutral, not otherwise.

          2. I should have said “a fair judicial system” rather than “a truly secular judicial system”, but I hope the original meaning was clear.

          3. Yes I very much understand the problem. The issue is that, AIUI, these adults choose to use an arbitrator biased against them due to a combination of honest faith, social pressure, and ignorance. It is difficult to come up with a fair, religiously neutral system where the state comes in and says “no, you can’t make that choice.” On what criteria do you take that choice away from an adult? When the person is a woman? When she’s muslim (or jewish)? When she’s conservative? When she doesn’t have a college degree? I think you will agree that all of those criteria have severe problems, both in terms of fair treatment under law and in terms of feasibility.

            The best thing we can probably do is try to make sure a fair and impartial expert or source of good information is available to anyone entering arbitration, so that we can at least fight against an insular sub-culture’s attempts to keep their populations ignorant. Make lawyers available, in a sharia court. We can try and ensure the decision is always an informed choice. We can also ensure that any resultant contract is legal. But I’m not sure its the law’s role to do more than that. We aren’t talking about medical treatment for children here; its not the state’s job to force adults to make smart contract decisions rather than dumb ones, or force adults to ignore social and family pressure they probably ought to ignore.

  14. “Ideologies merit no a priori respect; people do.”

    Or, the bumper sticker version: “I respect you too much to respect your religion.”

  15. I’m not a lawyer, and open to correction. But AFAIAA Shariah courts in the UK are quietly encouraged as means of settling civil issues within Muslim communities. In theory, those who resort to Shariah courts have recourse to standard UK civil law if dissatisfied with the outcome; but of course the social pressure not to do so is immense. Shariah courts have no role whatsoever in the criminal law system.

    There has been some recent controversy over guidance issued by the Law Society (representing solicitors) that encouraged lawyers to provide positive advice on so-called Shariah-compliant wills (eg treating women as worth less than men as heirs). Lawyers can’t stop clients doing what they want with their estate; but advising inequitable treatment should not be acceptable. That advice has now been withdrawn – a small but welcome straw in the wind, maybe.

    1. I should add that AFAIAA, the comments of the former AB(Cant) (as one of my history teachers told me to record it – seems appropriate somehow) has had almost no effect in practice.

      This man was at Oxford the same time I was. Sheesh.

      1. I haven’t looked for British inheritance laws that pertain to women, but would expect that there are some and that they would take precedence over sharia law if women knew enough and were brave enough to stand up for themselves.

        In the U.S., inheritance laws are created and enforced at the state level, so vary a great deal. There is at least one state in which property owned by a woman when she marries becomes the property of her husband. When the husband dies, the wife inherits a portion equivalent to that of each of the children. On the other end of the spectrum are community property states. Most of us don’t investigate inheritance laws soon enough to protect ourselves. Luckily, I have a husband who ensures that we own all property equally and that I inherit all of it legally.

        1. There aren’t any gender specific laws about inheritance in force any more. Generally speaking, a dead person’s estate is parcelled out in accordance with their will. If they didn’t have a will then there intestacy laws dividing the estate among any surviving spouse or civil partner (the pre gay marriage form of gay marriage), and surviving children, or if there aren’t any of those, between other close relatives. But those laws treat the genders equally – so two sons would share equally just as a son and a daughter would.

          The only exceptions are in relation to royalty (which remains an exception generally in the UK). A Princes still takes precedence over a Princess, even if she’s older (e.g., Princess Anne is behind Prince Andrew and Prince Edward in the order of succession). However, even that no longer applies to people born after 28 October 2011.

    2. I wanted to say the exact same thing until I saw your comment. The problem is not that there are Sharia courts (there are Jewish arbitration councils in the UK too), but that people actually refer to these courts and follow their advice even when it is clearly discriminatory. But what can you say to a woman who is willing to sacrifice her and her children’s well-being in order to gain an eternal life in the afterlife beside the Prophet and his esteemed Ashab (friends an followers).

      I don’t know much about the proceedings of these arbitrary bodies. But I know about Islam and the middle-eastern culture so I am nearly sure that they have a very closed system and one can not easily understand them by tools most familiar to our modern minds: statistics, population studies, or journalistic truth digging. Now that is the real issue that has to be addressed. Where are the TV shows that ridicule these courts and mock the stupidity of those deluded souls who refer to them? Where are personal stories of hurt and loss at the hands of those courts? Where are the scandal stories of the “judges” of these courts receiving bribes or bending the “flexible Sharia of Islam”‘s rules out of sheer stupidity or for personal gain?

      There is no need for sophistication (a word Reza Aslan seems to love!) here. Just ridicule Islam like its fellow religions and in time this so-called threat will fall apart (hopefully without need for billion-dollar-regime-toppling operations in middle east!)

  16. Here in the UK there are enough ‘religious’ voters concentrated in marginal parliamentary seats to make it worthwhile for the various parties to pander to them.
    How much this will change after the next general election will depend not only on how they vote but on whether the majority of the population are still willing to tolerate religion interfering when our lawmakers vote in Parliament.

  17. Reading about the status of Shariah courts in the UK is a disturbing reminder of the artificial nature with which religion is perpetuated – ie, force. Instead of government intervening to promote equality and rights for all, especially women, it intervenes to perpetuate and remove the protection that an otherwise secular state should offer to its entire citizenry. In an open market of ideas, the ridiculousness of religion stands no chance, so it’s easy to see why there’s a push for such institutions by believers. And the same goes for tax credits for religious institutions in the USA, where a rabbi or pastor can live tax-free if his (her?) house is legally property of the church/synagogue. If religion is so great, why can’t it just pay its own way instead of being subsidized by the rest of society?

    And that’s just when dealing with adults – the problems with imposing religion from a young age was just covered well in the recent comments by Dawkins in Time.

  18. I am on board with making this our motto:
    “Ideologies merit no a priori respect; people do.”

    Best two sentences in Tayler’s piece (amidst an embarrassment of riches):

    “The Abrahamic faiths have never been simply matters of conscience; they have always served as weapons to impose control, especially over women and their bodies, sexual minorities and education. Weapons need to be kept under lock and key, or better yet, eliminated.”

  19. The good Rowan Williams supporting Sharia, the pope defending the Charle Hebdo killers, makes me think the priests and Imams of the cloth stick together like gang members taking “the fifth”.

  21. As a nation known for its’ diversity, we have our own problems with religious extremism primarily the one we have the most trouble seeing: Dominionism and the ever increasing control of government at all levels by evangelical christians. For the last forty years or so, extremist christians have been organizing groups and donating many millions of dollars to turn our country into a theocracy. For all those of us who want freedom of or from religion, research Dominionism and the political pressure being exerted by evangelical christians to enforce their moral standards on all the rest of us.

  22. It seems counterintuitive to admit that insults, ridicule, humiliation, bad taste antics, the odd rasberry, taking the p@ss, bad mouthing.. heh heh, and of course, satire and comedy are all good and legitimate ways for the progress of humanity. Long may it continue. Mr Tayler should have an online course so we can all sharpen our pencil.

  23. It’s not entirely refreshing. I agree wholeheartedly with freedom of speech even where this causes offence. But that doesn’t mean that causing offence is a good in itself. Media outlets who choose not to cause religious offence should not automatically be seen as apologists or cowards. I see no good in creating even more of a climate of hostility towards Muslims in Europe.

    Also, whilst I agree that people have the right to criticize the Islamic faith, and the culture of people of that faith, it is disingenuous to pretend that lot of so called criticism of Islam is not actually hostility directed at Muslims as individuals, who are regularly treated as a monolithic group, all bearing some responsibility for the evil done in the name of radical Islam.

    1. “Media outlets who choose not to cause religious offence should not automatically be seen as apologists or cowards.”

      Well, of course not.

      Only when they’re being apologetic or cowardly.

      /@

    2. I believe it is GOOD to offend religion. Just as it is good to offend the Nazis. It’s as simple as that to me.

      But I agree with the second paragraph. For a PEGIDA hardliner or a member of “Hooligans Against Islam” (whatever that means!), there is probably no difference between a middle eastern atheist like myself and Al-Baghdadi himself. It is Xenophobia, group-think, and racism, and it must be stopped.

      That’s why I believe it’s a liberal responsibility to mock, ridicule and strongly criticize religion in order to prevent other extremist groups from making themselves champions of battling against religion and acquire publicity and votes in the process. Liberals in the thirties tolerated fascists and saw them as necessary evils to counter the menace of the reds. Never again!

      That brings me again to these so-called Sharia courts. The government must not ban them in their current form (unless their decision affects well-being of children), but it is the responsibility of the liberals, the free press, and all proponents of enlightenment to try and enlighten people about the long-term dangers of referring to those courts. In essence, it is not different than dealing with the likes of Deepak Chopra.

        1. No, I think the usage is fair in precisely the same legal sense as ‘squash’ and ‘tennis’ courts.

  24. Thanks to the good professor for bringing me to the attention Jeffrey Tayler and his piece in the Atlantic, I looked further into his writings and concluded he is a welcome voice against religious hegemony. He has a clear voice, like Hitch, who understands the totalitarian nature of the Abrahamic faiths. I just finished one of his books, Angry Wind, about a trip through the Sahel and Muslim black Africa where he provides a fascinating look into the lives of the peoples of that region and how they view the West through the prism of a totally embracing ideology of Islam.

  25. Blasphemy laws are used as a political weapon in some countries.

    That is why it is important to show that blasphemy laws can be resisted.

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