Category: apologetics

The unctuous and dangerous Karen Armstrong

January 23, 2015 • 9:00 am

Karen Armstrong is a dangerous woman.

I say that because while she projects the image of amiability and compassion, her modus operandi is to repeatedly deny that any violence in the world comes from “true” religion, which she tautologically defines as “that form of religion which does not inspire violence.” Any brand of terrorism or seemingly faith-based malevolence, she argues, is really based on something other than true faith—perhaps politics, disaffected and angry youth, or (her favorite cause of terrorism) the colonialism of the West and the oppression of Palestinians.

This is dangerous because Armstrong, who has spent her life osculating the rump of faith and whitewashing the evils of faith, would have us ignore the fact that religion—”true” religion, for, after all, are there any “false religions”?—is a real contributor to harm in this world.  Yes, there are other causes for terrorism, but really, if there were no religion in the world, and no Islam in the Middle East, would there really be a nucleus around which terrorism could coalesce? As Steve Weinberg said:

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

He’s not quite right here, for there are other things that make “good people do evil things,” including extreme ideology, a form of faith-based political belief instantiated in Maoist China. But in general he’s right: without faith, would Sunnis and Shiites be at each other’s throats, and would ISIL and Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia be oppressing women, swathing them in sacks, mutilating their genitals, and killing and torturing people for homosexuality, adultery, apostasy, blasphemy and even blogging? Absent religion, what would cause people to do such things? And don’t forget that most Muslim violence is against other Muslims.

Even the New York Times‘s Thomas Friedman, hardly known for his strident criticism of religion, has had enough dancing around the real problem. In his latest column, “Say it like it is,” Friedman excoriates the Obama administration for tiptoeing around Islam as the cause of terrorism:

When you don’t call things by their real name, you always get in trouble. And this administration, so fearful of being accused of Islamophobia, is refusing to make any link to radical Islam from the recent explosions of violence against civilians (most of them Muslims) by Boko Haram in Nigeria, by the Taliban in Pakistan, by Al Qaeda in Paris and by jihadists in Yemen and Iraq. We’ve entered the theater of the absurd.

And this is why Armstrong is dangerous: she importunes us to ignore an important cause—perhaps the most important cause—of terrorism. How can we address that problem without a full appreciation of the factors that induce it?

The theme of all her books can be summarized in six words: Religion’s been given a bad rap.  And people lap up that trope like Hili with a bowl of cream. With the release of Armstrong’s new book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, the media’s been all over her like white on rice, fawning over her, feeding her softball questions, and generally trumpeting how wonderful and scholarly she is (for three examples, see here, here, and here).

Except she’s not. Her “scholarship” is tendentious and one-sided, and I see her as profoundly intellectually dishonest. The fact is that Armstrong is dining out—for a lifetime—by telling people what they want to hear, not what is true. It’s infuriating to see not only her gross distortions, but the way the media accept them uncritically. (There’s one recent exception—a book review that nails the problem with her “scholarship,” but I’ll write about that later today.) Such is the privilege that religion enjoys in the West.

For one really blatant example of Armstrong’s dishonesty, have a look at the interview she gave to a Dutch website, “There is nothing in the Islam that is more violent than Christianity.” It’s long, so I’ll show you just two bits (the misspellings are probably due to the interviewer’s having English as a second language; bolding—except for the question—is mine):

Are terrorists primarily traumatized?
“Some of them are, and some of them are plain wicked. Osama bin Laden was a plain criminal. But there is also great fear and despair among them. There have been surveys done by forensic psychiaters who interviewed people convicted of terrorism since 9/11. They interviewed hundreds of people in Guantanamo and other prisons. And one forensic psychiater who is also an officer of the CIA – so he is no softie like me! – concluded that Islam had nothing to do with it. The problem was rather ignorance of the Islam. Had they had a proper Muslim education they wouldn’t be doing this. Only 20% of them has had a regular Muslim upbringing. The rest are either new converts – like the gunmen who recently attacked the Canadian Parliament; or non-observant, which means they don’t go to the mosque – like the bombers in the Boston marathon; or self-taught. Two young men who left Britain to join the Jihad in Syria ordered from Amazon a book called Islam for Dummies. That says it, you see. . . “

Note her claim that a “proper Muslim education” does not produce terrorism. That’s Armstrong’s schtick, of course, for she claims to be the arbiter of what “proper” Islam is, as well as of all “proper” religions. That’s a dumb and tautological argument. Why is extremist Islam “improper”? After all, it’s taught in the madrasas and promulgated by many imams.

Further, she mentions only a single “forensic psychiatrist” who says that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism.  Well, there are others who conclude the opposite. I’ll cite just one: Nicolai Sennels, who just published a piece called “Why Islam creates monsters.” Sennels is no tyro: he’s a Danish psychologist who works with Muslim youth who have committed crimes, and has written a book called Among Criminal Muslims. A Psychologist’s Experience from the Copenhagen Municipality. What kind of scholarship is it to cite only a single source to buttress your claim when other sources say the opposite? At the very least, a good scholar would acknowledge and cite multiple points of view.

But this is even worse:

So you are saying that religion is a scapegoat?
“We’re piling all the violence of the 21st Century on the back of religion, sending it away, saying we have nothing to do with religion. While we still have to deal with the political situation. The supermarket attack in Paris was about Palestine, about Isis. It had nothing to do with antisemitism; many of them are Semites themselves. But they attempt to conquer Palestine and we’re not talking about that. We’re too implicated and we don’t know what to do with it. . .

How much intellectual dishonesty can you pack into four lines? First of all, where on earth does she get the idea that the supermarket attack in Paris was about Palestine? As far as I know, the attackers didn’t even mention Palestine, although I may be wrong. And her explicit attempt to explain the attacks as the results of Israel’s “oppression” of Palestinians is invidious. Is any attack on a Jew, anywhere in the world, a result of Israel’s policy toward Palestine? Does anybody think that such attacks would stop if there were a two-state solution? Given that Hamas and many Middle Eastern Muslims simply want Israel destroyed, that anti-Semitism is rife in the Arab media, and that many Islamic extremists want to abolish Western values and replace them with a caliphate, I doubt it. Armstrong simply cannot credibly play the Israel card to explain attacks on Jews throughout the world.

And look how she says this has “nothing to do with antisemitism.” Her reason: because both Jews and Arabs are Semites! Does she think that anybody will buy this argument? Armstrong knows full well that anti-Semitism is not hatred of anyone of Semitic extraction, but hatred of Jews. Given the cartoons and propaganda emanating from Arab state media, it’s a safe bet to conclude that there is tons of genuine anti-Semitism involved in terrorism. Does she really want people to believe that Arab hatred of Jews has nothing to do with attacks on Jews because, after all, “they’re both Semites.”  This statement alone should be highlighted by all the media that suck up to Armstrong and her books.

I won’t give any other excerpts, but you might want to read the interview for its other tidbits, like Armstrong’s approbation for sharia law at the end of her interview.

Finally, and I won’t dwell on this one, the New York Times also published an interview with Armstrong on the day after Christmas. It’s called “The Blame Game: Karen Armstrong talks about ‘Fields of Blood'”, so you know where it’s going. A few of her statements (indented):

Ever since 9/11, I have been asked to comment on the religiously motivated atrocities that regularly punctuate our news. Time and again, I have been informed categorically that religion is chronically prone to violence and has even been the cause of all the major wars in history — an odd remark, since the two World Wars were clearly fought for secular nationalism rather than religion.

Who are all these people who tell her that religion has been the cause of every major war in history? Could this scholar kindly name one person who makes such a claim?

If we speak in order to wound, we will make matters worse: in my research I have found that when a fundamentalist group is attacked, it invariably becomes more extreme. My problem with some current critics of Islam is that their criticism is neither accurate, fair, nor well-informed. I am sure they do not intend this, but in the 1930s and ’40s in Europe, we learned how dangerous and ultimately destructive this kind of discourse could be.

Yes, because criticizing Islam is not only likely to cause more terrorism, but is totally equivalent to how the Nazis “criticized” the Jews. What kind of scholarship is that?

And here’s her spiel on “authentic” religion:

Q: You also write that the Crusades were influenced by “a distorted Christian mythology.” What would you say to critics who might argue that it’s stacking the deck in an argument like this to decide when a religion’s beliefs are being “distorted” and when they’re not?

A.True, there are multiple forms of any tradition, be it secular or religious: it is never possible to speak of an “essential” Christianity or Islam. Yet some interpretations are more authentic than others: the Crusaders conveniently forgot that Jesus told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. Such failures do not invalidate an entire tradition, however. The theory of natural human rights was a triumphant achievement, despite the fact that its early advocates — Thomas More, Alberico Gentili and John Locke — refused to extend these rights to the indigenous peoples of the New World.

Yes, Jesus said some stuff about loving your enemies, but has she forgotten what God himself supposedly said and did in the Old Testament? (Remember, too, that Jesus didn’t repudiate that, but came to uphold it.) And has Armstrong read the Qur’an? Being a scholar, she must have, but how does she deal with all the calls for war and extinction of unbelievers in that scripture? Finally, note that while she excuses religious ideas as a cause of terrorism, she directly implicates secular ideas (“the theory of natural human rights”) as responsible for oppression of native people. In other words, she’s promulgating a double standard.

Either all religions are “true” (in the sense of being authentic forms of belief) or all are false (in the sense of being delusions). Armstrong’s obdurate refusal to admit this has made her popular and wealthy.

h/t: Barry

Haught comes to town!

January 12, 2015 • 4:14 pm

OMG, one of my colleagues just got the following invitation from the executive director of Chicago’s Lumen Christi Institute. I don’t know what that institute is, but it sounds Catholish*:

I am pleased to invite you to a lecture and dinner on Thursday, February 19 at the University of Chicago. The lecture, entitled “Theology and Evolutionary Naturalism: How Much Can Biology Explain?” will be given by John Haught (Georgetown University) and will take place in the Biological Sciences Learning Center Room 001 at 4:30pm. Immediately following the event, you are invited to dinner with Prof. Haught and faculty at Gavin House (1220 East 58th Street). You can find out more about the lecture HERE.
I hope you will be able to join us for the lecture and dinner on February 19. Please RSVP to [name redacted to prevent embarrassment to the parties involved]
Of course given my history with Haught (see the Great Debate here and the Q&A here), I wasn’t invited, but I TAUGHT IN THAT ROOM! How dare they despoil a temple of real learning with Haught’s obscurantism and nebulous musings about the “layers of reality”? This town doesn’t have room for the two of us.
Many scientists and philosophers claim that a Darwinian understanding of life has rendered the idea of God unnecessary. Descent, diversity, design, death, suffering, sex, intelligence, morality, and religion—features of life that had previously been understood theologically—now seem open to a purely natural explanation. This lecture will consider whether the claims of evolutionary naturalists are coherent and whether a theological understanding of life can still be reconciled with biological accounts.

Any guesses about whether Haught will show that theology and biology can be reconciled? I’ll bet anyone $100 versus $1 that he will!

Haught is also lecturing the day before at the University Club downtown on “Science, Faith, and the New Atheism“:

The bestselling books by the “New Atheists” Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens provide colorful portraits of the evils of religions, especially those that profess belief in a personal God. In their passionate denunciation of faith in God the New Atheists appeal not only to morality but also to reason to convince readers of the absolute wrongness of belief in God. This lecture will summarize the main claims of the New Atheists and examine whether these claims are themselves reasonable.

And what do you think the chances are that Haught will consider the claims of New Atheists to be reasonable?

I note from the Lumen Christi description that Haught got a “Friend of Darwin” award in 2008 from the National Center for Science Education. I don’t think that if Darwin were alive, he’d consider Haught a friend, and the NCSE should reserve those awards for people who espouse naturalistic evolution not (as does Haught) spooky God-directed evolution.

 ________________
*I looked it up the Lumen Christi Institute, and it turns out to be what I thought:

The Lumen Christi Institute advocates, supports and nurtures intellectual work done in intimate relation to the Light of Christ, the Catholic Christian tradition, and the teaching authority of the Church.

The Lumen Christi Institute exists to strengthen and nourish contemporary intellectual culture by deepening knowledge of the Catholic tradition, and to build up the Catholic presence in higher education by fostering the cultural formation of the university.

 

Reza Aslan blames Charlie Hebdo massacre on France’s “inability to tolerate multiculturalism”

January 11, 2015 • 2:45 pm

If your blood pressure is sufficiently low and you’re sitting down, you might want to go to Real Clear Politics and see the video interview of Reza Aslan on the Charlie Hebdo killings. The critical parts are also transcribed on the site. And you can get idea of his theme right out of the gate, for when asked about the causes of the murders, Aslan begins by saying this:

REZA ASLAN: Europe is facing nothing short of an identity crisis. Look, the fact of the matter is there have been these seismic changes on the continent, culturally, racially, religiously, politically. And that’s resulted in this intense anti-immigrant and more specifically anti-Muslim backlash. In France, one of the largest parties, the party of Marine Le Pen, The National Front is a virulently anti-Muslim party and very well may win the next elections.You have the UKIP party in the UK, the Pegida party in Germany. This is a party whose sole platform seems to be let’s get rid of all Muslims. They have had for the last few months every week thousands and thousands of supporters marching in Germany in this notion that Muslims are some internal enemy. In Sweden we’ve had three mosque attacks over the last week. So this has created this sort of, intense, tension among the Muslim population in Europe and non-Muslim population.

It goes on and on in this vein, with Aslan seeing parity between European suspicion of Muslim immigrants and the Muslim killings of the Charlie Hebdo journalists (as well as two police, one a Muslim). The former, he implies, gave rise to the latter. Here’s Aslan’s “thoughtful” explanation of the violence:

ASLAN: Well, it’s not a justification by any means at all, but what Charlie Hebdorepresents for a lot of people in Europe is precisely this clash of civilizations. Look, the editors of Charlie Hebdo would unapologetically say they make fun of everybody, every religion, and they make fun of Muslims for a very specific reason to sort of show, or maybe demonstrate, that look if you maybe want to be in this country, if you want to be in France, then you have to deal with the French values, you have to rid yourself of your own values, ideals, norms, and you have to take on French values. And there have been a number of laws passed not only in France, with regard to prohibitions on Islamic dress, but throughout Europe about whether you can build mosques, about whether build minarets, et cetera. And this tension, this polarization I’m afraid has led to a lot of acts of violence. Not just the tragedy yesterday…

. . . And I think Charlie Hebdo was representative of this distinctly French value and an argument that unless you agree with that value well then you are not really French. That is an argument that a lot of young Muslims, and particularly young immigrants who come from different cultures, they just don’t buy into it and enough of them feel angry, perhaps, threatened, enough to actually take up violence.

. . . And particularly in France, an aggressively secularizing country that has never really tolerated multiculturalism or the kind of cultural religious diversity that is the hallmark of the United States, you can see how that would create the kinds of tensions that would bubble up occasionally into acts of violence on both sides.

As you might expect, Aslan does everything possible to avoid indicting the murderers of the French journalists. The farthest he goes in decrying the brutality of the killers is the statement above (and a call at the end of the interview for Muslim countries to condemn acts of violence).

ASLAN: Well, it’s not a justification by any means at all, but what Charlie Hebdo represents for a lot of people in Europe is precisely this clash of civilizations. . .

The “but” is telling. Aslan is more concerned with giving us a reason why the murders happened. Unfortunately, I don’t agree with his reasoning.

But first, let’s admit that there is in fact a grain of truth in what Aslan says: there is an unacceptable bias against Muslims, and immigrants in general, among the French and other Europeans as well. Mosques have been torched, Muslims attacked for being Muslim. That, in fact, was decried by Charlie Hebo, as Matthew pointed out in the previous post. That xenophobia and its attendant violence is odious, bigoted, and reprehensible.

But does it have anything to do with the Charlie Hebdo killings? Very little, I think. What the terrorists appeared to be taking their revenge on was not the bias faced by Muslims in France. Rather, it was a combination of the magazine’s publication of images of Muhammad (proscribed by many interpretations of the Qur’an), a perception that the journal was a beacon of Islamophobia (it wasn’t; it shone its light on Islamic perfidy), and, most important, a general hatred of the West and its democratic (and perceived “anti-Islamic”) values.

What is wrong with “multiculturalism”? That depends on how you define it. If you mean “tolerating or celebrating the customs of people from another land,” it’s fine—and desirable. The U.S. would be bland and uniform without its many immigrants, their celebrations and holidays, their food, their politics, their philosophies, and so on. But when multiculturalism involves importing antidemocratic ideas into a democratic culture, then it becomes problematic.  The kind of “multiculturalism” that Charlie Hebdo opposed, and wished to be dissolved by “French” values, was Islam’s veneration of sharia law, its institutionalization of the subjugation of women, its calls for the death of apostates, gays, and adulterers, its belief in corporal punishment for criminals, and the Muslim habit, in some places, of patrolling the streets, looking to find and admonish young Muslims partying, drinking, listening to music, dancing, and associating with members of the other sex. Fun is a no-no.

In other words, the more “enlightened” French are uncomfortable with those tenets of Islam that conflict with the values of the Enlightenment; and it’s just too bad if asking Muslims to conform to those values makes them uncomfortable. By all means keep your Ramadan, your delicious food, your clothing (except, perhaps, the veil), your prayers, your mosques, and so on. But don’t you dare try to quash freedom of speech, beat your wives, kill your daughters, or try to practice sharia law in France.

It surprises me that Aslan can’t fathom that multiculturalism can be seen in several different ways, some of which are commendable and others odious. Actually, I’m sure he can, but he’s so committed to Islamic apologetics that he won’t admit that anything about Muslim “culture” is inimical to democracy.

I’m pretty sure that even if all the unconscionable French bias against immigrants were to cease, it wouldn’t for a moment stop the drive of Islamic terrorism to wreck that society. The deep animus of extremist Muslims against Western values per se is just too strong. If you think otherwise, read the Pulitzer-Prize-winning book I constantly recommended: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright. You will find the animus right at the foundation of extemist Islam in the 1940s.

And even if you think (wrongly) that Charlie Hebdo was racist, sexist, and homophobic, it’s salubrious to listen once again to Christopher Hitchens’s most eloquent defense of free speech, whatever that speech contains:

Reza Aslan promotes himself, demonizes atheists, and exaggerates his credentials

November 25, 2014 • 10:40 am

Once again Heather Hastie, at her website Heather’s Homilies, has saved me from the wearisome task of writing about Reza Aslan.  Her latest post takes apart Aslan’s recent article in Salon, “Reza Aslan: Sam Harris and ‘New Atheists’ aren’t new, aren’t even atheists.” Read Aslan’s post if you can stand it, and then Heather’s, as Heather went to a lot of trouble dismantling Aslans’s claim that new atheists, unlike old ones, are “anti-theists,” bent on ridding society of religion (tell that to Ingersoll and Mencken!), and his argument that people like Harris and Dawkins want to remove religion from society, using violence if necessary.

Aslan’s article differed from his usual screeds in that he tried to summarize the history of atheism in a semi-scholarly way, even though it’s tendentious and, argues Heather, misleading. I suspect Aslan’s new “scholarly” tone comes from his being caught out trying to claim that he’s a religious scholar with a Ph.D. in religious studies.  He has in fact repeatedly distorted his credentials, obscuring the fact that he’s an associate professor in creative writing at the University of California Riverside, and that his doctorate is in sociology (granted, it’s on the idea of jihad). He even appears to have lied, claiming that he’s affiliated with a department of religion at Riverside.

One critique of his credentials, “The lies and misrepresentations of Reza Aslan,” written by by Majid Rafizadeh, was published in August of last year in the right-wing magazine Front Page. A quote or two:

First of all, Reza Aslan has continuously presented himself as a professor of religion. This is done in an attempt to sell his few books, which lack academic and credible references. In one of his recent interviews, Aslan claims, “I am a scholar of religions with four degrees including one in the New Testament . . . I am an expert with a Ph.D. in the history of religions . . . I am a professor of religions, including the New Testament – that’s what I do for a living, actually . . . To be clear, I want to emphasize one more time, I am a historian, I am a Ph.D. in the history of religions.” Aslan also recently said on Twitter, “I have a BA, MA and PhD in the history of Western Religions so yes, again, I am an ACTUAL expert in Judaism.”

. . . although Reza Aslan calls himself a “historian,” he has never attainted a degree or had professional training in history, and has never even taken an elementary course in historiography for that matter. His dissertation focuses on the events and movements of the twentieth century and does not apply any historical methods or archival research. In addition, his dissertation is also an abnormally short one – approximately 130 pages double-spaced – which seems to have been written for publicity purposes for his book, Beyond Fundamentalism. Reza Aslan has been exploiting the situation in the United States after 9/11 to self-promote and make profits through these exaggerations and fabrications.

Well, you can dismiss that if you want because it’s a passionate piece in a right-leaning journal. (I don’t think it’s kosher, though, to ignore arguments simply because they’re published in such places.) But you can’t so easily dismiss a piece by Manuel Roig-Franzia in The Washington Post, also published in August of 2013 (this was right after Aslan’s book on Jesus, Zealot, was published). An excerpt from that:

Aslan, who has an undergraduate degree in religious studies and a master’s in theological studies, is not currently a professor of religion or history. He is an associate professor in the creative writing department of the University of California at Riverside. He has asserted a present-day toehold in the field of religion by saying he is “a cooperative faculty member” in Riverside’s Department of Religious Studies.

Yet this is not so, according to Vivian-Lee Nyitray, the just-retired chair of the department. Nyitray says she discussed the possibility last year with Aslan but that he has not been invited to become a cooperative faculty member, a status that would allow him to chair dissertations in her former department.

The Post piece lauds Aslan’s absorbing narrative (with neither Aslan nor Roig-Ranzia ever questioning whether Jesus really existed), but does question his scholarship:

Dale Martin, a Yale University religious studies professor who reviewed Aslan’s “Zealot” for the New York Times, sees Aslan’s characterization of his credentials in a different light. “I think he overplayed his hand,” Martin says of Aslan in an interview. “He’s just overselling.” Martin, who has praise for Aslan’s writing skills, was critical of his seeming reliance on the work of previous scholars to formulate one of the central theories of his book: that Jesus was a revolutionary executed because he posed a political threat to the Roman Empire.

“The record needs to be corrected,” Martin says. “Both about his credentials and his thesis.”

Of course what Aslan claims about Jesus or Islam should be judged independently of his credentials, and I’m not a big fan of assessing someone’s competence in academia from simply looking at their degrees. But Aslan’s repeated distortions of his credentials is worrisome, and should make us wonder about his motivations. Yet even leaving that aside, I am aware of the distortions about Islam in Aslan’s first book, and I’m not convinced of the historicity of Jesus in his second.

Aslan is an apologist for faith, and in his own way is just as dangerous as Karen Armstrong. If he had his way, we’d write off the misdeeds of jihadists as “distorted faith,” and simply accept religion in general, and Islam in particular, as a good thing.  That would be a mistake.

And who needs ipecac if you can listen to Krista Tippett interviewing Aslan at her National Public Radio (NPR, also know as “Numinous Public Relations”) show “On Being.” (Hit “play episode” at the upper right.) Here we have the most unctuous promoter of faith on public radio osculating the most unctuous promoter of faith in popular books. They really need to get a room, as Tippett just lobs hearts and softball questions at Aslan.  Truly, I wonder why she has a gig on NPR. (Don’t answer that; I know they’re soft on faith.)

Note that Aslan claims that the “Islamic Reformation” is already under way, something that seems to contradict his first book on Islam, which implicitly argued that it was reformed at the beginning (and hence some sects have degenerated). In Aslan’s view, the violence of Muslims is simply an inevitable byproduct of its reformation, and we should be “excited” about it all.

At 29:20, they both discuss New Atheism, with Tippett complaining that although atheism has moved on, the New Atheists still get all the attention. Tippett and Aslan then agree that New Atheists give atheism a bad name (something she’d never say about faith), and Aslan longs for the “good old atheists” like Schopenhauer, people who, Tippett says, were “constructive,” as opposed to the New Atheists, who “tear things down.” (What?) Aslan also argues that New Atheists say that believers are “stupid” and that religion must be “forcibly removed from society.” That’s just wrong. In this segment, more than I’ve ever heard before, we see how deeply Tippett believes in belief, and it’s not pretty.

When I hear this kind of stuff, and get disheartened about it, I remind myself that the whole religious enterprise is based on fiction, and, in the end, will largely disappear from our world. We just won’t be around when that happens.

 

 

Art imitates life: Babylon 5 and Karen Armstrong

November 24, 2014 • 12:43 pm

Reader Grania sent me a clip from the television show Babylon 5 (I didn’t know of that show, of course) as well as an explanation of the similarities between the clip (below) and the logorrhea of Karen Armstrong. Her explanation:

It reminds me of Babylon 5 again.
I’ve mentioned this scene before. A terrorist-rebel turned peace-maker tries to explain the complexities of faith and self-deceit. But his followers don’t want to think, and are not happy until he mouths meaningless deepities. They don’t want to think; they just want little slogans.
 Here you go:

She commented further:

A bit of context for those who have not seen the show:

The character is G’Kar, a disgraced former ambassador who becomes part of an “underground resistance” when his world is conquered. His hatred for the conquering race sends him spiraling into a path of hatred and violence until an encounter with another alien, this time an ancient and rather enigmatic one that makes him change and choose to use peaceful means to challenge the occupation of his world. This is what elevates him to the status of “spiritual leader” of his people, a position he does not enjoy or embrace.

It was a unique show among TV shows (to say nothing of the sci-fi genre) for tackling some quite complicated topics. The show’s creator was an atheist, although one who was fairly respectful of religion, but as a result a great many characters have no religion, and a great many religious mythologies turn out to be ancient encounters with alien races who were not above manipulating primitives for their own ends (although that’s not especially relevant to this particular scene).

The show’s creator, J. Michael Straczynski, seemed to greatly admire one form of Buddhism when writing this series, and some of his philosophizing is occasionally a little tendentious; but this scene is a wonderful example of why deepities and people peddling easy answers in the form of slogans and sound bites are so often successful.

Reza Aslan and Karen Armstrong are everywhere, and it’s not pretty

November 23, 2014 • 2:02 pm

I can’t get enthused about discussing Karen Armstrong and Reza Aslan any longer. They’re both in the media spotlight because they coddle religion in an age when it’s eroding but some people desperately cling to faith; they’re both religious apologists, refusing to pin any malfeasance on faith; and they both say the same thing in interview after interview. So just let me drop a few quotes from Armstrong and move on. I’ll deal with Aslan tomorrow—if I feel up to it.

Karen Armstrong was interviewed in Salon (also known as “The Journal of Religious Osculation”), and, surprisingly, was handed a few tough questions, which she ducked.

She begins by saying that the distinction between religion and politics is a modern innovation, and continues by claiming that nothing, including suicide bombing, is solely or even largely motivated by religion (she cites discredited statistics by Robert Pape, misspelled in the article as “Robert Tate”). She argues further that humans need mythologies (i.e., religion) to give purpose and meaning to our lives:

Let’s try a different analogy: Perhaps our search for narrative and meaning is a bit like a fire. It can go out of control and burn people pretty badly. Seeing this destruction, some people say we should just put out the fire whenever we can. There are others who argue that the fire will always be there, that it has benefits, and that we need to work with it to the best of our abilities. And you’re sort of in the latter camp, yes?

I would say so … If we lack meaning, if we fail to find meaning in our lives, we could fall very easily into despair. One of the forensic psychiatrists who have interviewed about 500 people involved in the 9/11 atrocity, and those lone-wolves like the Boston Marathon people, has found that one of the principal causes for their turning to these actions was a sense of lack of meaning; a sense of meaningless and purposelessness and hopelessness in their lives. I think lack of meaning is a dangerous thing in society.

Armstrong apparently feels that religion is an essential source of meaning for modern people. And a lack of meaning, says Armstrong, plays a huge role in terrorism, for terrorists aren’t really motivated by religion, but by nihilism (WHAT?):

There’s been a very strong void in modern culture, despite our magnificent achievements. We’ve seen the nihilism of the suicide bomber, for example. A sense of going into a void.

The void clearly represents a failure to appreciate Armstrong’s notion of God as Love, Meaning, and the Ineffable Ground of Being, whereof we cannot speak.

But it seems to me that many of these terrorists clearly do embrace the “mythologies” that Armstrong sees as necessary for our world. They aren’t nihilists in any conventional sense of the word. She grudgingly admits that religion may be in the mix of terrorists’ motives, but, in the end, it’s really other stuff:

In fact, all our motivation is always mixed. As a young nun, I spent years trying to do everything purely for God, and it’s just not possible. Our self-interest and other motivations constantly flood our most idealistic efforts. So, yes, terrorism is always about power — wanting to get power, or destroy the current power-holders, or pull down the edifices of power which they feel to be oppressive or corruptive in some way.

Of course, she doesn’t consider that “power” might be “the power to impose your faith on others,” as in ISIS’s Caliphate and the actions of other Islamic extremists. She then goes on to blame Muslim terrorism completely on the West, though she neglects to discuss Muslim-on-Muslim terrorism, by far the most common form.  Somehow, I suppose, she’d also pin that on colonialism. But the worst thing she says is this:

When you hear, for example, Sam Harris and Bill Maher recently arguing that there’s something inherently violent about Islam — Sam Harris said something like “Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas” — when you hear something like that, how do you respond?

It fills me with despair, because this is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps in Europe. This is the kind of thing people were saying about Jews in the 1930s and ’40s in Europe.

This is how I got into this, not because I’m dying to apologize, as you say, for religion, or because I’m filled with love and sympathy and kindness for all beings including Muslims — no. I’m filled with a sense of dread. We pride ourselves so much on our fairness and our toleration, and yet we’ve been guilty of great wrongs. Germany was one of the most cultivated countries in Europe; it was one of the leading players in the Enlightenment, and yet we discovered that a concentration camp can exist within the same vicinity as a university.

There has always been this hard edge in modernity. John Locke, apostle of toleration, said the liberal state could under no circumstances tolerate the presence of either Catholics or Muslims. Locke also said that a master had absolute and despotical power over a slave, which included the right to kill him at any time.

That was the attitude that we British and French colonists took to the colonies, that these people didn’t have the same rights as us. I hear that same disdain in Sam Harris, and it fills me with a sense of dread and despair.

This shows two things. First, Armstrong doesn’t want any criticism of religion, for religion is inherently good as a concept, and what bad things seem to spring from it come simply from misinterpreting true religion. Criticize it at your peril, for you’re being a Nazi when you do. (How lovely of Armstrong to play the Hitler card against critics of Islam!)

Second, she can’t distinguish between criticism of religious tenets and racism or bigotry. The Nazis were manifestly not saying that Jews should be killed because their beliefs were unsupported (though their supposed role as Christ-killers was certainly in the mix), but because they were Jews, and Jews were rats who deserved extermination. Further, the Nazis weren’t saying “Judaism is the motherlode of bad ideas.” They were saying “Jews are bad and should be killed.” You don’t hear Sam Harris or Bill Maher saying that Muslims should be exterminated.  They’re saying that bad ideas should be attacked. Perhaps Armstrong thinks that there are no bad ideas in religion, but then she’d be blinkered—as she is.

And here’s a lovely exchange:

. . . (Armstrong:) Fundamentalism represents a rebellion against modernity, and one of the hallmarks of modernity has been the liberation of women. There’s nothing in the Quran to justify either the veiling or the seclusion of women. The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce, legal rights we didn’t have in the West until the 19th century.

That’s what I feel about the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia. It’s iniquitous, and it’s certainly not Quranic.

She should have a look at the hadith as well, for that’s part of Muslim tradition, and adds some iniquity. But at least she decries the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia. By Gad, she’d better! However, she emphasizes that this misogyny is not based on authentic Islam. That leads the interviewer to ask a good question:

Where do you, as someone outside of a tradition, get the authority to say what is or isn’t Quranic?

I talk to imams and Muslims who are in the traditions.

What? Doesn’t she know that there is more than one tradition in Islam, and some of them are iniquitous? There is, for example the Quranic tradition that apostates deserve death. Doesn’t she know, too, that there’s more to religion than “tradition”—there is what the imams say now, how it’s based on the Qur’an, and how people follow their dictates? Her assumption that tradition is everything in determining religious dogma (which is wrong), and that any Islamic perfidy isn’t “traditional,” are just cheap ways of ignoring the bad religious dogma.

In the end, she simply admits that she’s cherry-picking scripture:

I think it’s easy to say, “Well the text isn’t binding” when you see something in there that you don’t like. But when you see something in the text that you do want to uphold, it’s tempting to go, “Oh, look, it’s in the text.”

Oh, it is. We do it with all our foundation texts — you’re always arguing about the Constitution, for example. It’s what we do. Previously, before the modern period, the Quran was never read in isolation. It was always read from the viewpoint of a long tradition of complicated, medieval exegesis which actually reined in simplistic interpretation. That doesn’t apply to these freelancers who read “Islam for Dummies”.

“It’s what we do.” That is, we can ignore the bad parts of scripture and pretend that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are based on just the good parts. And I doubt that many members of ISIS or Hamas have read “Islam for Dummies”. They have, however, read or heard the Qur’an.

Despite her constant self-promotion as an arbiter of compassion, Karen Armstrong is dangerous. She’s dangerous because her blanket of tedious verbiage hides the truth that she wants us to completely ignore the dangers of religious dogma. She thereby enables it. And it appears that for her, there is no harmful dogma that can be pinned on religion itself: it’s all about politics, oppression, or nihilism.

Well, tell that to the Catholics who prevent women from getting abortions, couples from getting divorces, and who demonize gays and inform Africans that condoms won’t prevent AIDS.  Tell that to the Muslims who kill other Muslims because they think the heads of the faith should be genetic descendants of Muhammad, and who mutilate the genitals of their daughters because the imams insist it’s a sign of purity. Tell that to the Hindus and Muslims who butchered each other by the millions in 1947 even though they lived cheek by jowl and were similar in most ways except for their faith.

It’s a curious fact that people like Armstrong, Aslan, and Pape can so easily see how politics can motivate people to do bad things, but yet insist that religion cannot. I wonder what observations would really convince them that people’s religious (as well as political) beliefs can make them do harm. Can they tell us?  The jihadis’ repeated insistence on religious motivation is apparently misleading, for they don’t know their own minds. Armstrong and Aslan know better.