Category: apologetics

Zubin Madon has the perfect response to the Islamophilic truth haters

June 9, 2017 • 10:00 am

I’ve written this headline exactly as PuffHo would have written it—if they had any rationality. In fact, by some twist of fate the subject of my post, an article by Zubin Madon, an engineer and humanist living in Bombay, India, did appear in the April 2016 PuffHo, and undercuts everything they have written denying the nasty bits of Islamic doctrine and the influence of that faith on terrorism. (PuffHo’s religion editor, Carol Kuruvilla, writes post after post telling us how wonderful Islam is and that we should ignore the man with the bomb behind the curtain).

Now Kuruvilla was editor in April of last year when Madon (who has a website on Atheist Republic, and probably would be dead if he lived in Bangladesh rather than Bombay) published this piece, and I’m surprised it got by, as it tells the truth about not just Islam, but the Regressive Left’s hypocritical coddling of that faith. Madon, who seems to know his Qur’an, is mad as hell about that coddling, and isn’t going to take it any more: viz., the title of his piece, “Terror has no religion—debunking the Regressive Left’s cliches.”

Madon debunks a number of Regressive Leftist talking points about Islamist terrorism, and it’s worth saving this piece for future arguments. I’ll list the points and give Madon’s rebuttal for two of them (indented):

  • Terrorism has no religion. 

It must be a strange coincidence then, that attacks on abortion clinics in the United States are carried out by far-right Christian conservatives, and not Star Wars cultists; that Potterheads don’t lynch people for eating beef, but Hindutva extremists who consider the life of a bovine to be more sacred than that of a human being do. Similarly, when a zealot opens fire in a cafe yelling ‘Allahu-Akbar’, we can be quite certain it’s not a disgruntled Game of Thrones fan who just saw his favourite character snuffed out by the writers.

Yes, the vast majority of religious folks do not go about murdering people. But that does not absolve religious texts of inspiring the few extremists who do.
When Muslims donate to charity, we attribute their altruism to the third pillar of Islam. Why is it that when another Muslim acts as per the dozens of Quranic edicts which — cast terror in the hearts of disbelievers (3:151), expose them to eternal hellfire (4:56), advocate crucifixion & chopping off extremities (5:33), denounce taking Jews & Christians for friends (5:51), smite their necks and fingers (8:12), slay & besiege idol worshippers (9:5)— his/her actions have “nothing to do with religion”? I am not singling out Islamic scripture here. They are no more violent and bigoted than the Old Testament or the Manusmriti. However, we acknowledge that the inquisition was a product of medieval Christian dogma, and caste atrocities are a product of Hindu texts. Why then, do we excuse Islamic scripture of inspiring Islamists?

  • The verses are misinterpreted!
  • The verses have been taken out of context.
  • But the Quran has some very beautiful verses as well. 
  • It’s not religion, it’s lack of education, disparity. (a.k.a. Malala’s Fallacy). 
  • It’s American Imperialism, western foreign policy & the Iraq Wars that are responsible; not religion. (The Chomsky defence a.k.a.  Mehdi Hassan’s fallacy).

Apart from 12-16 million Christians, there are thousands of Bahai, Zoroastrians, Yazidis and Jews living in Islamic nations. If terrorism were simply a reaction to American imperialism, shouldn’t these minorities also form a fraction of terror outfits? Or are they miraculously shielded from NATO bombs and American policies that affect the middle-east? Surely one disgruntled Zoroastrian would cross the Iranian border and join Hezbollah?

This favourite cliche of the Regressive Left fails to explain another phenomenon— the “everyday terrorism” faced by millions of Muslims in the Islamic world. Was the spontaneous and gruesome lynching of Farkhunda outside an Afghan mosque a product of colonialism? Was the stoning of Roxanneh, the killing of Noor Malleki, the murder of secular bloggers in Bangladesh a result of US foreign policy? What does the violence unleashed against homosexuals, apostates, ‘blasphemers’, against Ahmedi and Hazara Muslims of Pakistan & Afghanistan (who are murdered by Sunni supremacists for not being ‘Muslim enough’) and the systemic genocide of ethnic minorities throughout the Islamic world, have to do with George Bush’s Iraqi misadventure? At some point, Bronze Age belief systems must be held accountable for the atrocities inflicted on its followers.

He then has a section on “The Left’s soft bigotry of lower expectations” before concluding:

. .  the Regressive Left has also failed liberal progressive Muslims like Asra Nomani, Irshad Manji and Maajid Nawaz, who are fighting to bring about reform at great personal risk. It is time for true (classical) liberals to stand up and take the fort back from the Left. We must show that it is possible to call out religious ideologies that inspires terror, while at the same time condemn the anti-Muslim bigotry of the far-right. For without identifying the carcinogen i.e. religious extremism, it is impossible to stem the affliction.

That point is as relevant today as it was a year ago. It still amazes me that those Muslim reformers have been demonized by the regressives, and that Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali were branded as “anti-Muslim extremists” by the increasingly risible Southern Poverty Law Center.

By the way, read Madon’s satirical piece on PuffHo: “Muslim fencer wears a hijab—You won’t believe what happens next!” (That’s the perfect PuffHo title!) It includes this fake quote from Hillary Clinton:

“Liberal, secular Muslims like Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani have ruined everything,” Clinton complains. “By refusing to conform to the ‘hijabi stereotype’, these westernised Muslim women have made it impossible for Left-leaning white saviours to covertly milk this stereotype, in our heroic battle against stereotyping.”

 

Clueless ideologue of the week

May 25, 2017 • 12:00 pm

Click on the screenshot to go to the article, if you must. It’s from Curve,  a lesbian magazine, but the same sentiments have been expressed by non-gay people.

Even if the attack aimed at killing as many girls as possible, isn’t it conceivable that such a plan would come from Islam’s misogyny and dislike of Ariana Grande as a symbol of Western decadence? I’m not saying that’s the case, since we know nothing about why this concert was targeted, but to jump to the conclusion above, completely ignoring religion, bespeaks a profound and delusional ideology.

h/t: Melissa Chen

The Conversation kisses the rump of religion again

May 11, 2017 • 10:31 am

I thought that The Conversation was largely a news and scholarly opinion website, but every once in a while they slip in some religious nonsense that baffles and saddens me. (For one example, see this risible argument for religiously based brain/mind dualism, and this ridiculous slice of tripe explaining why morality requires God). And now we have a piece from yesterday brought to my attention by reader RJC: “Five rational arguments why G0d (very probably) exists“. The author, Robert H. Nelson, is a Professor of Public Policy at The University of Maryland, which proves once again that scholars outside the field of religion can still be seduced by the blandishments of faith. In Nelson’s case, he simply adduces a few phenomena that science hasn’t yet understood (but may someday), or things that he doesn’t understand (like evolution) and triumphantly concludes, “Therefore God.” As RJC wrote me, “My quick, superficial read tells me it’s 5 “god of the gaps” arguments, gussied up a bit.”

And indeed it is. I’ll be brief (I hope) since we’ve heard most of these arguments before. Here are the phenomena that, says Nelson, convinced him that “the existence of God is very probable.” (He doesn’t give a probability.) He says there are five ideas, but offers six. I’ll put two together. (I covered God-of-the-gaps arguments, including the first two below, in Faith Versus Fact, pp. 152-177.)

  • The “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”.  Nelson says this:

“In 1960, the Princeton physicist – and subsequent Nobel Prize winner – Eugene Wigner raised a fundamental question: Why did the natural world always – so far as we know – obey laws of mathematics?

“. . . How could two distant objects in the solar system be drawn toward one another, acting according to a precise mathematical law? Indeed, Newton made strenuous efforts over his lifetime to find a natural explanation but in the end he conceded failure. He could say only that it is the will of God.

“Despite the many other enormous advances of modern physics, little has changed in this regard. As Wigner wrote, “The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.”

“In other words, as something supernatural, it takes the existence of some kind of a God to make the mathematical underpinnings of the universe comprehensible.”

Did that convince you that there’s some kind of a God? I didn’t think so. The ability of math to describe physics simply means that there are physical “laws”: regularities in the universe. (In fact, as I said in FvF, if there weren’t such laws, we couldn’t exist!) As I also said in my book (p. 159):

But if there are such laws, then the usefulness of mathematics is automatically explained. For mathematics is simply a way to handle, describe, and encapsulate regularities. As you might expect, there is in fact no law of physics—no regularity of nature—that has defied mathematical description and analysis. In fact, physicists regularly invent new types of mathematics to handle physical problems, as Newton did with calculus and Heisenberg with matrix mechanics. It’s hard to conceive of any  regularity that couldn’t be handled by mathematics. So “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences,” as physicist Eugene Wigner titled one of his scientific papers, simply reflects the regularities embodied in physical law. The effectiveness of math is evidence not for God, but for regularities in physical law.

Of course then Nelson might say, “But there wouldn’t be physical laws without God! Where else would they come from?” If I were snarky, I’d say “Satan,” but the best answer, and it’s a good one, is simply “We don’t know. Maybe that’s just the way things are.”

  • “The mystery of human consciousness.” Nelson says this

 “How can physical atoms and molecules, for example, create something that exists in a separate domain that has no physical existence, human consciousness?

“It is a mystery that lies beyond science.

“. . . Yet, our nonphysical thoughts somehow mysteriously guide the actions of our physical human bodies. This is no more scientifically explicable than the mysterious ability of nonphysical mathematical constructions to determine the workings of a separate physical world.

“Until recently, the scientifically unfathomable quality of human consciousness inhibited the very scholarly discussion of the subject. Since the 1970s, however, it has become a leading area of inquiry among philosophers.

“. . . The supernatural character of the workings of human consciousness offers a second strong rational grounds for raising the probability of the existence of a supernatural God.”

What hubris to deny that there can never be a scientific explanation for consciousness! It’s clearly a physical phenomenon that relies on the brain and its activity; you can change it with drugs; and you can take it away with ketamine. Doesn’t that suggest that consciousness depends in some way on physicality? Granted, we can’t yet explain the evolutionary and neurological basis of “qualia” (subjective sensations like pain), but surely the thoughts of other animals guide their bodies as well. Does that mean that when a cat jumps in a lap to get warm, it’s evidence for God?

Better here to say, “we don’t yet know” rather than pull a god out of your fundament. For there is no independent evidence for a god, and Nelson is postulating an immensely complex being as a solution for less complex phenomena.

  • Aspects of evolution have eluded understanding, and it appears to be a teleological process. Since this is my field, I’ll quote everything Nelson says:

“Darwin’s theory of evolution in 1859 offered a theoretical explanation for a strictly physical mechanism by which the current plant and animal kingdoms might have come into existence, and assumed their current forms, without any necessary role for a God.

In recent years, however, traditional Darwinism – and later revised accounts of neo-Darwinism – have themselves come under increasingly strong scientific challenge. From the 1970s onwards, the Harvard evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould, for example, complained that little evidence could be found in the fossil record of the slow and gradual evolution of species as theorized by Darwin.

In 2011, the University of Chicago evolutionary biologist James Shapiro explained that, remarkably enough, many micro-evolutionary processes worked as though guided by a purposeful “sentience” of the evolving plant and animal organisms themselves – a concept far removed from the random selection processes of Darwinism.

With these developments bringing standard evolutionary understandings into growing question, the probability of a God existing has increased correspondingly.”

If the fossil record were jerky, and this reflected the true pace of evolution and not just uneven deposition of sediments, that still would cast no doubt on evolution; in fact, Darwin noted this possibility in The Origin. Gould’s “non-Darwinian” theory for the process behind such a pattern, however, was wrong. And even if it were right, it was still a materialistic process involving small populations, genetic drift, developmental constraints, and species selection. Nelson clearly has no understanding of what he’s talking about.

As for Shapiro, he’s hardly a mainstream biologist, and is not an evolutionist. His ideas about “self directed evolution” and “adaptive mutation” have found no purchase in the evolutionary community, and nobody is talking about a higher probability of God. Teleological theories of evolution, adduced by people like Tom Nagel and Jerry Fodor, simply aren’t convincing, as we have no data leading us to such processes.

  • Advances in human thought and technology were sometimes concurrent, and that’s a Big Miracle.  I kid you not; Nelson says this:

“For the past 10,000 years at a minimum, the most important changes in human existence have been driven by cultural developments occurring in the realm of human ideas.

In the Axial Age (commonly dated from 800 to 200 B.C.), world-transforming ideas such as Buddhism, Confucianism, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and the Hebrew Old Testament almost miraculously appeared at about the same time in India, China, ancient Greece and among the Jews in the Middle East – these peoples then having little interaction with one another.”

First of all, the Old Testament is not an advance in human thought. Further, Aristotle was Plato’s student; Buddhism and Confucianism aren’t all that similar to Greek philosophy; and there were interactions among people. Further, civilization had reached the point when there was enough leisure to ponder more abstract questions for all these people. It would be remarkable if there weren’t a transformation in thought prompted by changing human culture, and no surprise if some people, who are after all evolved animals with a shared evolutionary past and genome, happen to hit on the same abstract ideas or moral principles.

But what’s even weirder is what Nelson says about science:

“The development of the scientific method in the 17th century in Europe and its modern further advances have had at least as great a set of world-transforming consequences. There have been many historical theories, but none capable of explaining as fundamentally transformational a set of events as the rise of the modern world. It was a revolution in human thought, operating outside any explanations grounded in scientific materialism that drove the process.

That all these astonishing things, verging on miracles, happened within the conscious workings of human minds, functioning outside physical reality, offers further rational evidence in my view for the conclusion that human beings may well be made ‘in the image of [a] God.’”

Nelson, clearly desperate to find evidence for God (and which God? Zeus? Brahma? Allah?) ignores the social phenomena that gave rise to modern science, nor the fact that science and technology themselves are self-feeding processes, whose practitioners learned from each other. Steve Pinker has explained the rapid rise of Western science in several of his books, adducing phenomena like transportation and the printing press that spread ideas quickly. Here Nelson has produced the craziest evidence for God I’ve ever seen!

  • Humans have a need to worship, be it God or Marx. That itself is evidence for God. But wait. . . Christianity has persisted, and even Marxism is disguised Christianity! That itself proves God.  I kid you not—again. Have a gander:

“Even though Karl Marx, for example, condemned the illusion of religion, his followers, ironically, worshiped Marxism. The American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre thus wrote that for much of the 20th century Marxism was the “historical successor of Christianity,” claiming to show the faithful the one correct path to a new heaven on Earth.

In several of my books, I have explored how Marxism and other such “economic religions” were characteristic of much of the modern age. So Christianity, I would argue, did not disappear as much as it reappeared in many such disguised forms of “secular religion.”

That the Christian essence, as arose out of Judaism, showed such great staying power amidst the extraordinary political, economic, intellectual and other radical changes of the modern age is a fifth rational reason for thinking – combined with the other four – that the existence of a God is very probable.”

All this shows is that humans are credulous and have a need to follow leaders; they also are prone to adhering to superstition (as is Nelson!) when they don’t understand something. I bet Nelson would even claim that atheism itself is not only a form of worship, but Christianity in disguise!

Were I to have written Nelson’s article in, say, the 10th century, my five arguments for God would be Lightning, the Black Plague, Epilepsy, Magnetism, and Solar Eclipses. Now we see that as nonsense. But much of Nelson’s argument can already be seen as nonsense, and he should be well aware of claiming that our scientific ignorance of some phenomena constitutes evidence for God.  I suspect without knowing that Nelson is religious. And the evidence is increasing that The Conversation is soft on superstition.

The TLS on Plantinga and me

May 3, 2017 • 9:15 am

I recently published my take on the award of the Templeton Prize to Alvin Plantinga, a “religious philosopher” (read: “theologian”) whose work consists of untenable arguments couched in unreadable prose.  Rupert Shortt, religion editor of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), writes about it in a short piece, “Alvin Plantinga and the Templeton Prize“. Google adds that Shortt is “a former Visiting Fellow at Oxford University. His books include Benedict XVI (2005), Christianophobia: A Faith under Attack (2012) and Rowan’s Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop (2014)”. Reader Michael (see below) adds that Shortt studied under Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and Shortt’s writings (e.g., here) clearly show that he’s a believer and an apologist.

Although Shortt describes a bit of criticism I gave in Faith Versus Fact about Plantinga’s arguments , he’s clearly sympathetic to Plantinga’s claim that accepting God is a “properly basic belief” that needs no justification. Shortt doesn’t mention Plantinga’s belief that the “properly basic” God is the Christian god rather than Allah or Brahma, nor Plantinga’s idea (taken from Calvin) of the “sensus divinitatis” that God installed in us to enable us to sense him—and that that sensus is broken in atheists and Muslims. Finally, Shortt neglects Plantinga’s theodicy: that innocent people suffer because of Satan.

I’ll quote Shortt’s analysis, adding a few comments of my own.

Plantinga’s positive case for the existence of God is known as the evolutionary argument against naturalism. The basis of his case involves a distinction between adaptive behaviour and true beliefs. Evolution can explain the former, he thinks, but not the latter. His conclusion is that while no conflict exists between Christianity and science, there is a conflict between philosophical naturalism and science, because adherents of naturalism (including atheists) have no firm basis for believing that many of their statements genuinely map reality. The Darwinian view thus fatally undermines itself. If it is true, then the methods that support it are probably unreliable, meaning that we should not believe it . . .

In Faith Versus Fact (pp. 177-183), I argue that evolution can and would be expected to endow us with realistic beliefs about nature, but also that our senses and beliefs can be fooled by many features (indoctrination, optical illusions, “common sense”, and so on). Here’s what Shortt says about that:

In our conversation, I raised an objection expressed by some of Plantinga’s Christian critics, as well as by non-believers. The query centres on his assumption that the generation of reliable belief-producing mechanisms should not itself be part of evolutionary adaptation. This sort of reservation has also been voiced by Jerry Coyne in his recent book Faith Versus Fact: Why science and religion are incompatible. But whether or not one is fully convinced by Plantinga, he nevertheless succeeds in highlighting something disquieting about the naturalistic picture of our human predicament. Various scholars have noted that there is no systematic connection on a naturalistic world view between our possession of equipment that has turned out to be efficacious in the battle for survival, and our putative ability to track the truth in relation to our intellectual intuitions. The underlying point, as the philosopher John Cottingham urges, “is that it seems impossible for any philosopher to characterise our human situation with respect to the truth – the ways in which we have fallen short, the ways in which we are able to correct our mistakes – without implicitly assuming that we are indeed equipped to undertake the search for truth. And it is not clear that this assumption can be underwritten via the resources of evolutionary naturalism”.

If you know anything about evolution, the “evolutionary argument against naturalism” is a nonstarter. As I’ve said repeatedly, one cannot produce an a priori philosophical argument for why empirical observation, consensus, and reason—what I call “science construed broadly”—give us “true beliefs” (I prefer to call them “truths”). But we don’t need to. The reason we use such science is because it works. The theological method of revelation, dogma, scripture, and authority doesn’t work, as it’s provided no consensus on matters even as basic as the existence of God. This can be demonstrated by the difference in the efficacy of faith healing versus science-based medicine. We can make predictions based on science, but not on religious feelings. We can correct our mistakes using science, for that is what science is about, but we cannot correct our mistakes using religious belief. We cannot even approach truth using religious belief.

Shortt goes on:

In rejecting Plantinga’s arguments, Coyne stresses the many abilities that emerge as a by-product of evolution. Yes, he concedes, doing mathematics would not have enhanced the fitness of our pre-literate ancestors. But once the human brain had reached a certain level of complexity, it was already performing many tasks unconnected with evolution. Nor is this a mark of special pleading, Coyne adds. Crows can solve complex puzzles; lyrebirds can imitate chainsaws and car alarms. These will strike some as weak analogies, however, because Plantinga is talking about advanced abilities which float free from the world of contingency.

These are not weak analogies, for many animals can learn and some can reason—evolution, too, has bequeathed them with the ability to survive by forming what Plantinga calls “true beliefs” about the world. Certainly apes can do that very well, but they apparently lack the sensus divinitatis. Why? Yes, our reasoning is more complex, but is it not “true belief” when an antelope gets spooked when it sees or smells a lion? The canard of “advanced abilities” is irrelevant here.

Shortt continues:

It is important to be clear what Plantinga’s case does and doesn’t betoken in his eyes, let alone those of his opponents. As a Calvinist, he’d be the first to insist that reason alone cannot lead one to a living faith in God. Philosophers and theologians, however distinguished, can only take enquirers to the threshold of such faith. Getting beyond this point will involve living into a new way of thinking, not thinking into a new way of living. In other words, God is not be thought of primarily as an unmoved mover or first cause (despite being so, from a monotheistic standpoint), but rather as an intimate presence in the life of the believer responding to a gift from beyond his or her imagining.

What Shortt is saying here is that we must rely on our “internal feelings” to divine that there is indeed a god—the Christian god.  That is his “new way of thinking”, but it’s not new: it’s called “delusion” by some, “wish thinking” by others, and “confirmation bias” by still others. The plain truth is that “sensing an intimate presence in our lives” is no evidence that that presence exists at all, much less as the omnipotent, benevolent, and omniscient Abrahamic God.  All it shows is that you feel something.

And, by the way, what gives Shortt the authority to tell anyone how to conceive of God? The big advantage for him is to claim that, like Plantinga, believing in the existence of a divine being need not depend on evidence, but merely on our gut feelings. Well, isn’t that convenient? Sadly, what we feel inside has never been good evidence for the existence of what lies outside. That is what believers and religious philosophers obstinately refuse to see.

Reader Michael sent me his own take on the TLS piece, which I reproduce with his permission:

Bloody awful defence of Plantinga’s arguments by Rupert Shortt [Religion Editor at the TLS]. Shortt studied under Rowan Williams and advocates a ‘sophisticated’ and unfalsifiable view of a non-intervening God in his book God is No Thing: Coherent Christianity [a fluffy 96-page book I read in an hour for free in a Christian book shop last year].

An example of Shortt logic from the TLS article [apparently this is a common line among religious philosophers!]:

“…but Plantinga is bullish, pointing out, for example, that we take it wholly for granted that other minds exist apart from our own, even though this belief, while also “basic”, cannot be demonstrated beyond doubt. The same applies to belief in the past. We can play intellectual games suggesting that the world was created five minutes ago, along with all its ancient mountain ranges and so forth.”

What an absurd defence! If one wishes to take that line, then the endeavours of reasoning, philosophy, science or even getting up in the morning are futile! It is obvious that we must have something to stand on [first principles or axioms] that have to be taken on ‘faith’.

I think it is rank dishonesty to assign god the property of being ‘properly basic’, thus swerving around the need to show god is in the world/real.

Michael is absolutely right, except that we needn’t take things like reasoning on faith. We use reason because it works. And science isn’t really based on axioms: it’s not math. It’s based on a method that, refined over time, leads us to widely accepted facts about the universe: the facts that we can rely on to do things like establish the genealogy of species, cure disease, and land probes on comets. You can’t accomplish such things through prayer.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Alexander Van der Bellen can wear his own damn hijab

April 30, 2017 • 12:15 pm

by Grania Spingies

Alexander Van der Bellen

Racism and bigotry is an ugly thing, it’s inexcusable and any form of assault or attack ought to be vigorously prosecuted in the criminal courts, and the victim or target of the assault should also bring a civil suit for damages against the perpetrator.

It’s a serious problem and it requires serious attempts to resolve. Sometimes public gestures may be effective. In the Netherlands for example, recently Dutch politicians chose to hold hands in public to protest against homophobia.

Whether these sorts of demonstrations actually have the desired effect is unclear, but we can at least accept that these gestures and the participants are well-meaning and if nothing else deliver the message that bigotry is not going to be tolerated by society any more.

So when the Austrian president says he wishes to confront racism in his own country, that is to be commended. Although he says “It is every woman’s right to always dress how she wants” (gee, thanks) he then continues:

“…if this real and rampant Islamophobia continues, there will come a day where we must ask all women to wear a headscarf – all – out of solidarity to those who do it for religious reasons.”

How about no. You don’t combat bigotry by promoting a garment of paternalistic misogyny – or in this case by promoting its use by a group you neatly exempt yourself from: women. The hijab is in any case not actually a quintessential defining symbol of being Muslim. Millions of Muslim women around the world don’t wear the hijab. If it were essential to Muslim identity, then there would be no need or desire for groups like My Stealthy Freedom created by Muslim women who protest the hijab’s enforcement by people unnaturally obsessed with erasing the female body  – and the fetishisation of the garment by well-meaning but woefully ignorant Westerners.

Here’s a video from an Australian cleric telling us not only about the hijab but also what kind of hijab and clothing is more suitable and acceptable for women to wear (his own opinion, of course). The hijab is all about concealment of the female hair and body and displays of modesty for reasons of piety and purity as dictated by male leaders. Note the “we” in this video is men who get to tell their “sisters” what they want them to wear. Is this really the banner you want to march under?

https://twitter.com/LaloDagach/status/858423748558544897

If President Van der Bellen really wants to promote a right to dress how you want and combat racism against Muslims, then he can wear the hijab. After all, if the men of Iran can do it to protest the enforced hijab in their own country, then so can the president of a free, liberal European country where no-one faces criminal sanction for the clothes they wear.

 

An imam calls Reza Aslan “no true Muslim”

March 3, 2017 • 9:30 am

Well, I’ll be—get a load of this. Marc Manly is an American “imam at large” who seems to have considerable Islamic cred:

The last fifteen years has seen me involved in a number of ways in the Muslim community. In my early twenties, I was asked to teach Islamic studies along side Shaykh ‘Ali Sulaiman ‘Ali, of the ALIM Program, at Crescent Academy in Canton, Michigan. Since then, I have worked as a Muslim educator in subjects ranging from Arabic language, philosophy, and creed, to spirituality and self-purification. During my tenure at the University of Pennsylvania I teamed up with Adnan Zulficar, the Interfaith Fellow and Campus Minister to the Muslim Community at the University of Pennsylvania, to create and teach the Islamic Literacy Series. Notes and audio recordings can be found here.

In 2008, I completed an ijazah (license to teach/preach) with Imam Anwar Muhaimin of the Quba Institute, in Philadelphia, in the area of khutbah. Since then, I have been working as a khatib, delivering Friday sermons at a variety of locations in and around the greater Philadelphia area. In addition, I have spoken at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Hillel, Charter School, and Yale University just to name a few venues.

In August of 2011, it was my great pleasure to be appointed to the position of Muslim Chaplain at the University of Pennsylvania. Here, I worked alongside Revered Charles “Chaz” Howard in serving Muslims at Penn as well as the broader University community. 2012 also saw the pilot launch of a Muslim chaplain position at Drexel University. Both positions allowed me a wonderful learning opportunity and a chance to serve my faith community. I am grateful for the experience. In addition to my religious duties I concurrently worked full-time at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, in the IT and instruction technology fields.

So it’s particularly satisfying to see Manly pronounce the unctuous Reza Aslan, Grand Mufti of Muslim Apologetics, someone whose Islamic beliefs are not recognizable. To Manly, Aslan is “no true Muslim.” In that way Aslan is like the members of ISIS!

A few days ago, Aslan wrote a piece for CNN, “Why I am a Muslim,” It’s about as saccharine as you’d expect. Always the careerist, he touts his new CNN show “Believer“, but he also says stuff like this:

Can you have faith without religion? Of course! But as the Buddha said, if you want to strike water, you don’t dig six 1-foot wells; you dig one 6-foot well. In other words, if you want to have a deep and meaningful faith experience, it helps — though it is by no means necessary — to have a language with which to do so.

So then, pick a well.

My well is Islam, and in particular, the Sufi tradition. Let me be clear, I am Muslim not because I think Islam is “truer” than other religions (it isn’t), but because Islam provides me with the “language” I feel most comfortable with in expressing my faith. It provides me with certain symbols and metaphors for thinking about God that I find useful in making sense of the universe and my place in it.

In other words, he just likes the symbols and metaphors of Islam better than those of, say, Catholicism. Fine. But let Aslan recite that litany from the steps of the Masjid al Haram in Saudi Arabia. How long would he last before he was thrashed within an inch of his life? Metaphors, indeed! (And Sufis have long been persecuted by other Muslims.)

But he not only neglects to tell us why the symbols of Islam resonate with him the most, but then has the temerity to say that, at bottom, all religions are the same: “My goal — as a scholar, as a person of faith, and now as the host of Believer — is to be the linguist, to demonstrate that, while we may speak in different religions, we are, more often than not, often expressing the same faith.”

Well that might get Aslan not just beaten, but beheaded. No True Muslim would say that their faith is the same as that of Christians, Jews, or Hindus! How could it be? If you see Jesus as the savior, Islam damns you while Christianity lauds you. And, according to the Qur’an, you’re an infidel and should be killed. The whole story behind and the ethics undergirding different faiths—not just Islam and Christianity—diverge among religions. Whatever you can say of them, they are not the same. Of course different faiths recognize their differences, which explains the continuing violence between them: Sunni against Shia, Sunni against Ahmadi, Muslims against Sufis, Christians and Hindus, Hindus against Muslims—the list goes on forever.

And Manly recognizes these differences, saying this:

What’s most amusing about Aslan is that I can find nothing recognizable about his Islam. It’s not that it’s totally foreign, it’s more that it’s totally absent.

The first curiosity is his almost complete lack of discourse about the Prophet. More akin to a deist, Aslan talks at length about God but is awkwardly silent about the man that God revealed the codified form of Islam we know, as espoused in the Qur’an. Why is that? It seems Aslan, and those pundits like him, seem more comfortable endulging [sic] their flights of fancy about this or that abstract or esoteric theological point versus dealing with “the Walking Qur’an”: the man who was not only the recipient of Revelation, but who aslo [sic] clarified its meanings, etc. Instead, the Prophet seems to be — as far as Aslan is concerned — a mere envelope, as it were, in relation to revelation which Aslan does not, by his own account, believe the Qur’an to be true in its entirety (he rejects the story of Jesus in the Qur’an where he was not crucified let alone his outright rejection of all hadith as made up). So the question that begs answering is: By what standard is Reza Aslan Muslim? It seems rather that it’s an Islam which requires nothing of the believer other than what happens to stir his (or her) desires. Oddly enough this is the same metric by which the likes of Aslan will condone homosexuality as a lawful identity and pursuit but will in turn impugn a Muslim man for wanting to take another wife (polygyny), which is clearly outlined in the Qur’an as permissible, even if he wanted to do so only for passions or identity (heterosexual).

And indeed, you can make a far better case that Aslan espouses a perverted form of Islam than does ISIS. ISIS, after all, is following the literal words of the Qur’an, while Aslan, saying they’re mere metaphors, is almost completely abandoning the tenets of Islam—tenets that require literalism. He’s a man of all faiths, who just happens to find the label of Muslim the most expressive of his tastes. But Islam is not a taste to Muslims: it is the Final Faith, the Last Word of Allah. Most Muslims, I suspect, would see Aslan as an apostate or even an infidel.

It’s amusing to see Aslan outed in this way, the same way apologists like him go after ISIS for not adhering to “true Islam.” I wonder if Manly can formally declare him an infidel or apostate. (Aware of the possible consequences of such a fatwa, I hasten to add that I wish no harm to Aslan—just a nonviolent and titular declaration that he’s a nonbeliever.)

I have no use for Aslan, for he dissimulates in the service of his ambition, knowing full well that people want to see Islam as a religion of peace, and that liberals like nothing better than hearing that all religions are, at bottom, the same. (Well, in one sense they are: they all depend on faith—on the assertion of claims about reality with no evidence behind them.) No thinking person should admire Aslan, for he distorts reality to feed people’s confirmation bias—and to make himself famous. In fact, admiration of Aslan is a sign of soft-headedness.

screen-shot-2017-03-02-at-2-09-35-pm
I am blocked, and I burst with pride!

h/t: Orli

Accommodationist believer: Doing science is a Christian endeavor (?)

February 24, 2017 • 12:00 pm

By now we should be able to rebut all of the aruments of this short video sent to me by reader David. It features Andy Bannister,who describes himself like this:

Director of the Solas Centre for Public Christianity and an Adjunct Speaker for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, speaking and teaching regularly throughout the UK, Europe, Canada, the USA, and the wider world. From universities to churches, business forums to TV and radio, I regularly address audiences of both Christians and those of all faiths and none on issues relating to faith, culture, politics and society.

And YouTube describes the video like this:

Dr. Andy Bannister, Director of the Solas Centre for Public Christianity explores the question of whether or not science and Christianity are opposed to each other. For more “Short Answers” videos, visit http://www.solas-cpc.org/shortanswers/ or subscribe to our channel.

It’s accommodationist, of course—how could it be otherwise given that Bannister has already drunk the Kool-Aid. He argues these points to show why science is a thoroughly Christian endeavor, even in these days of atheistic scientists.

  •  Christianity is a “firm foundation from which you can do science”, because the founding fathers of science, who “first got the scientific method going” were all Christians. I don’t think so: what about the Arabs and the ancient Greeks? Now, it’s true that the modern protocols of science developed in the largely Christian West, but that’s because everyone was pretty much a Christian. That doesn’t say that science is founded on Christianity—any more than saying that printing is a Christian endeavor because the printing press arose in the Christian West.
  • Christianity explains “the stability of the universe” far better than does the “randomness of atheism.” But since when was “randomness” atheistic? If Bannister means, “How do we explain the laws of physics undergirding the Universe?”, well, then he has to explain the origin of God Him/Her/Xir/Itself, and give evidence for such a God.  His arguments don’t even make sense without evidence of such a God, and besides, there’s nothing wrong with saying “I don’t know” as an answer to why physical laws are what they are, any more than saying “I don’t know” if asked if God created those laws. And then there’s the multiverse explanation. ..
  • Christianity is the only viable answer to the question, “Why should we do science in the first place?”  Atheists can say only, “because it works”, or “because it’s interesting.”  But these arguments, say Bannister, come from the Christian notion that finding truth is good in its own right. That is of course bogus: we seek truth because it produces answers that not only satisfy us, but because only truth will tell us how to effect scientific and technological improvements. We never understood how to cure black plague so long as we thought it was an expression of God’s displeasure. Saying “we seek the truth because that is what works” is a purely secular argument, and a perfectly sound one. Since, argues Bannister, God is truth, seeking truth becomes the same thing as seeking God.  My answer to this is, “show me your God, and then we’ll talk.” Besides, what is the motivation of the many, many atheist scientists who still continue to seek the truth? Are they merely acting out the vestigial Christianity that’s really motivating them?
  • “Science sits on the foundation that telling the truth about your results is a good thing.” Bannister says that this is a moral claim that science cannot prove, while of course Christianity can invoke the Ten Commandments. This too is a crock. It’s wrong to lie about your results because lying screws up the system and makes it hard on everybody, as well as impossible to effect progress. In other words, we have a practical rather than a moral justification—one that can be buttressed by outcomes

Whenever I see someone like this argue that God explains everything better than no God, I immediately want to ask the person what the evidence is for their God, and why the Christian God is the right god rather than, say Brahma or Allah. All they can do at this point is babble, referring to ancient texts that they claim are better than other ancient texts. Or they rely on revelation, which is contradictory among people and has no objective verification.  Bannister’s claims won’t convince anyone who isn’t already a believer; his video is a model of confirmation bias.

David added this comment, “Sadly this video featured in the ‘Recommended: Science’ category via YouTube (the rest of the channel looks like standard apologetics – naturally, comments are disabled on the channel.”