Category: apologetics

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Plantinga

August 31, 2016 • 8:48 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo, a strip called “son,” is pretty clever, as the barmaid doesn’t mean what Jesus and Mo think she does!
2016-08-31

I have to say that one of the most compelling arguments against a religionists’ belief is that, to defend it, they must explicitly argue, and give reasons why, everybody else’s belief is wrong. This is no simple matter since, as Jesus and Mo state above, the claims of different religions are often flatly contradictory. The example of Jesus is perhaps the best one.

Just ask a Christian this: “How do you know that your religion is right—that Jesus is the route to salvation—and Islam is wrong in saying that accepting Jesus as God’s son sends you to hell?”

One theologian who’s attempted an answer is Alvin Plantinga, whose apologetics are always good for a few laughs. His answer is that the reasonableness of one’s faith comes from a sensus divinitatis—a “divine sense”—vouchsafed us by God.  And his sensus divinitatis tells him that Christianity is right.

But, you’ll be asking yourself, everyone has that sensus, so how come it’s gone awry in some people? As I note on pp. 180-181 of Faith Versus Fact (available in fine bookstores everywhere), Plantinga’s answer is laughable:

Of course Plantinga has an answer for why there are so many atheists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and pre-Christian believers, like the Aztecs and ancient Egyptians, who were somehow unable to form true belief in the Christian God. The answer is that in those individuals the sensus divinitatis is or was “broken,” dismantled by the effects of sin. Curiously, Plantinga argues that your broken sensus need not stem from your own sin:

[Plantinga, from Warranted Christian Belief]“Were it not for sin and its effects, God’s presence and glory would be as obvious and uncontroversial to us all as the presence of other minds, physical objects and the past. Like any cognitive process, however, the sensus divinitatis can malfunction; as a result of sin, it has been damaged. . . . It is no part of the model to say that damage to the sensus divinitatis on the part of a person is due to sin on the part of the same person. Such damage is like other disease and handicaps: due ultimately to the ravages of sin, but not necessarily sin on the part of the person with the disease.”

Here we have an untestable explanation for an insupportable thesis.

Isn’t Plantinga’s answer funny? Yet this was the guy chosen to be head of the Western division of the American Philosophical Association.  According to Wikipedia (the original reference is behind a paywall), Time magazine described him as being “widely regarded as the world’s most important living Christian philosopher.“

I’d be delighted if readers could report other answers they’ve received to the question, “What makes you so sure that your religion is right and all the others are wrong?”

 

Heather Hastie on Reza Aslan’s apologetics and Islamic terrorism

August 24, 2016 • 11:13 am

I call your attention to a new post on Heather’s site, one that deals partly with Reza Aslan’s pathetic apologetics for Islamic violence. In her post, “Reza Aslan is still excusing Islam,” Heather points out Aslan’s curious assertion of a disconnect between religious beliefs and behavior—something that Maarten Boudry and I have also written about (paper available on request).

I’ll avoid excerpting Heather’s post, as it deserves to be read on her site, but she deals with one comment that Aslan made when asked about regressive Islamic beliefs like killing gays and apostates. This is what he said:

I mean, we may be appalled by certain regressive beliefs, but they are just beliefs. The issue is people’s actions.

I needn’t say more; it’s a ludicrous and dangerous claim Aslan’s making here. Heather goes on to show an absorbing 40-minute video from CNN, “Why they hate us,” narrated by writer Fareed Zakaria. I watched it in its entirety, and recommend that you do, too.  It’s in that video that Aslan appears, and, mirabile dictu, Heather actually agrees with something that he says.

Do Muslim inventions and innovations validate or exculpate Islam?

July 28, 2016 • 9:00 am

I’ve noticed that all the clickbait sites are starting to converge on HuffPo, with headlines like “Ten genius hacks for discarded corncobs,” “KimK throws shade on TSwift,” “Amy Schumer has an important message for haters,” and so on. Looking at a piece on BuzzFeed (about cats, of course), I noticed that it was barely distinguishable from HuffPo. And, of course, all these sites are Authoritarian Left, which I find depressing. Better to read Quillette, which has substance, serious, non-kneejerk thought, and no fluff.

A reader called my attention to a similar piece on the website Good: “Islamophobe on Tumblr gets completely owned“, which is in the Authoritarian Left genre (viz., “owned”, meaning “demolished”), but also factually dubious. It begins with a provocative picture of the pre-9/11 World Trade Center, which would indeed be standing without Islamist terrorism. But it’s an image that I wouldn’t use because it does promote bigotry:

Imagine

In that sense the meme is “Muslimophobic.” But to refute it, the author, Todd Perry, reproduced a list, posted by Tumblr user “whatpathall”, of the innovations in our world that wouldn’t exist without Muslims. That’s a decent tactic in principle, but oy, the things he lists! To wit:

Yes, lets imagine a world WITHOUT MUSLIMS, shall we?

Without Muslims you wouldn’t have:

Coffee
Cameras
Experimental Physics
Chess
Soap
Shampoo
Perfume/spirits
Irrigation
Crank-shaft, internal combustion engine, valves, pistons
Combination locks
Architectural innovation (pointed arch -European Gothic cathedrals adopted this technique as it made the building much stronger, rose windows, dome buildings, round towers, etc.)
Surgical instruments
Anesthesia
Windmill
Treatment of Cowpox
Fountain pen
Numbering system
Algebra/Trigonometry
Modern Cryptology
3 course meal (soup, meat/fish, fruit/nuts)
Crystal glasses
Carpets
Checks
Gardens used for beauty and meditation instead of for herbs and kitchen.
University
Optics
Music
Toothbrush
Hospitals
Bathing
Quilting
Mariner’s Compass
Soft drinks
Pendulum
Braille
Cosmetics
Plastic surgery
Calligraphy
Manufacturing of paper and cloth

I’m not going to examine every one of these claims, but there are three things wrong with such a list in principle. The two most important are these. First, Islamic doctrine had absolutely nothing to do with any such inventions or discoveries, and that’s the doctrine that the invidious meme above is directed at. Second, even if all these things did come from Muslims (they didn’t), that does nothing to buttress or validate the tenets of Islam, which are based on the fictitious story of a dictation by an angel (prompted by Allah) to an illiterate merchant.  So one can criticize Islamic doctrine, especially the hateful and xenophobic bits, and still recognize that Muslims made contributions to society. After all, many of us criticize Christianity and its subspecies Catholicism, but of course Christians have made tons of contributions to the world, few of which had anything to do with Christianity itself. And those contributions don’t do anything to establish the truth of Scripture.

Finally, of course, even if Muslims hadn’t invented some of this stuff, other people would have invented it anyway. Rarely are inventions one-off things that wouldn’t exist if their inventors hadn’t lived. That’s one of the points that Matt Ridley made in his new book The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge. (I criticized that book in the Times Literary Supplement, but some of Ridley’s claims, like the parallelism of inventions like the light bulb, were correct.) It’s just wrong to say that “If Muslims hadn’t existed, we wouldn’t have inventions X, Y, or Z.”

The list above is impressive, and indeed, lots of the stuff mentioned was either devised by Muslims (fountain pens) or promulgated by them after discovery by non-Muslims (coffee). But I was dubious about many of these claims, for we have to remember that Islam didn’t exist till the late sixth and early seventh centuries A.D. A few minutes on the Internet showed that the following items were almost certainly not devised by Muslims (I didn’t check everything, of course): numbering systems (devised by Greeks Romans, Egyptians, and, in our modern form, Hindus); toothbrushes (Chinese, Romans, Greeks); bathing (Greece, ancient India); Braille (invented by Louis Braille in the 19th century, though a blind 14th-century Muslim, Ali Ibn Ahmed Al Amidi, had a personal system for organizing his books); calligraphy (early Christians, ancient Chinese and Indians); manufacture of paper (Chinese), vaccination against cowpox (China and India, roughly 11th century), and so on. Readers are welcome to check other claims themselves. I’m pretty sure you’ll find many dubious ones.

But remember, even the true claims don’t do anything to validate the tenets of Islam or render them immune from criticism. What my rudimentary fact-checking shows is that the author didn’t do a very good job, and this article should never have been published.

But wait! There’s more! The Tumblr user added these:

It was a Muslim who realized that light ENTERS our eyes, unlike the Greeks who thought we EMITTED rays, and so invented a camera from this discovery.

It was a Muslim who first tried to FLY in 852, even though it is the Wright Brothers who have taken the credit.

It was a Muslim by the name of Jabir ibn Hayyan who was known as the founder of modern Chemistry. He transformed alchemy into chemistry. He invented: distillation, purification, oxidation, evaporation, and filtration. He also discovered sulfuric and nitric acid.

It is a Muslim, by the name of Al-Jazari who is known as the father of robotics.

It was a Muslim who was the architect for Henry V’s castle.

It was a Muslim who invented hollow needles to suck cataracts from eyes, a technique still used today.

It was a Muslim who actually discovered inoculation, not Jenner and Pasteur to treat cowpox. The West just brought it over from Turkey

It was Muslims who contributed much to mathematics like Algebra and Trigonometry, which was imported over to Europe 300 years later to Fibonnaci and the rest.

It was Muslims who discovered that the Earth was round 500 years before Galileo did.

The list goes on…

Okay, I’m not going to check all of these. In fact I looked at just two that stood out: flying and the idea of a round earth. The claim that both came from Muslims is dead wrong.

Flight. “whatpath” is probably referring to Abba ibn Firnas, a Moorish Muslim about whom Wikipedia says this:

Some seven centuries after the death of Firnas, the Moroccan historian Ahmed Mohammed al-Maqqari (d. 1632) wrote a description of Firnas that included the following:

Among other very curious experiments which he made, one is his trying to fly. He covered himself with feathers for the purpose, attached a couple of wings to his body, and, getting on an eminence, flung himself down into the air, when according to the testimony of several trustworthy writers who witnessed the performance, he flew a considerable distance, as if he had been a bird, but, in alighting again on the place whence he had started, his back was very much hurt, for not knowing that birds when they alight come down upon their tails, he forgot to provide himself with one.

Al-Maqqari is said to have used in his history works “many early sources no longer extant”, but in the case of Firnas, he does not cite his sources for the details of the reputed flight, though he does claim that one verse in a 9th-century Arab poem is actually an allusion to Firnas’s flight. The poem was written by Mu’min ibn Said, a court poet of Córdoba under Muhammad I (d. 886), who was acquainted with and usually critical of Ibn Firnas. The pertinent verse runs: “He flew faster than the phoenix in his flight when he dressed his body in the feathers of a vulture.” No other surviving sources refer to the event.

It has been suggested that Ibn Firnas’s attempt at glider flight might have inspired the attempt by Eilmer of Malmesbury between 1000 and 1010 in England, but there is no evidence supporting this hypothesis.

If you want to take that as an antecedent to the Wright Brothers, be my guest!

Round earth: the roundness of the earth was in fact known to the ancient Greeks in the third century B.C., with the classic (and remarkably accurate) measurement of the Earth’s circumference made by Eratosthenes in Egypt. Islam did not exist then.

Again, readers are welcome to check the other claims for themselves. This is not, as I said, to denigrate the contributions made by ancient Islamic scholars, but to criticize the idea that those somehow validate Islamic beliefs or refute the claim that modern terrorism has been largely inspired by extremist Islam.

“But never religion!”: an astute analysis of terrorism

July 15, 2016 • 12:15 pm

Oy, it didn’t take long before apologetics started appearing on the PuffHo site, and we don’t even know much about the Nice murderer. To go to the hastily produced, trite, and misguided opinion piece (if you must), click on the screenshot:

Screen Shot 2016-07-15 at 11.53.53 AM

Well, who could argue with that? Certainly we don’t want to confront terrorism with unreason and stupidity! It turns out, though, that Zniber’s approach is to “understand” terrorism, but leave out one irrelevant factor. To wit:

Screen Shot 2016-07-15 at 11.58.12 AM

I can’t stand it any more. The cognitive dissonance produced in people like Zniber by the notion that ideology and religion might motivate some bad actions, makes them issue really stupid statements. We don’t know what motivated the Nice murderer. Indeed, it appears as if Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel may not have been particularly religious. But Zniber is making a general statement here, and in so doing displays his biases—his Ostrich Leftism—in the most obvious way. “But never religion!” He goes on to blame it all on colonialism, as if Bouhlel were a brainless puppet manipulated by the West.

Zniber is an apologist mushbrain. And of course his message is snapped up and broadcast by all the other mushbrains who run PuffHo.

 

The World Turned Upside Down: HuffPo publishes article blaming Islam for terrorism!

July 5, 2016 • 12:30 pm

Zubin Madon is identified as a mechanical engineer from Mumbai, India—and an atheist. Just yesterday, in the pages of PuffHo, he published one of the best indictments of the Regressive Left I’ve seen: “Terror has no religion.” It pretty much dismantles the multifarious argument that Islam and its dictates have nothing to do with promoting terrorism. Of course Regressive Leftists will pay no attention, for theirs is a faith not subject to disconfirmation, and they’ve already decided that when Enlightenment values clash with religious doctrines, the latter win—but only when those doctrines are held by Muslims.

First, the title of the piece is clearly a play on two previous articles published at PuffHo. The first,  “Terror has no religion, ” was written by by Harun Yahya in 2013. Many of you will know that Harun Yahya is the pseudonym for Adnan Oktar, a sleazy Turkish creationist who produced the infamous Atlas of Creation. I doubt that PuffHo knew who he was. At any rate, Oktar’s piece is basically a “No true Muslim/Religion of Peace” article, claiming that no genuine Qur’an-following Muslim would commit terrorism. An excerpt:

Simply because various terrorists call themselves Muslims, who execute people by shooting them when they cannot get an answer after asking them about the “pillars of faith”, who resort to their guns when they hear the answer “Yes” to the question of “Are you a Christian?” and who ruthlessly murder innocents, does not make these persecutors Muslim.

. . . The essence of Islam is love, compassion and friendship. Muslims are obliged to defend and protect the freedom of thought and faith

. . . One of the reasons which lead some Muslims who embrace terror and violence as the “right path” — despite these explicit commands of the Koran — is that they drift away from the essence of Islam. When the bigoted mentality that embraces false hadiths (sayings of Prophet Mohammad) that conflict with the Koran is combined with ignorance, a structure of hate and anger emerges.

The only way to avoid this is to spread the true spirit and morality of the Koran, which is love and peace.

The second article, published in December of last year by “political pundit” Leslie Marshall, had the same name: “Terrorism has no religion.” It’s a combination of blatant stupidity and America-blaming, holding us accountable for all the terrorism committed by Muslims. The first two lines below are classic facepalmers:

The first time a radicalized Islamist committed an act of terrorism on U.S. soil was in 1993. Yet Muslims have been coming to this country since the 17th century.

Also, if ISIS members are Muslim, then why are their victims mostly Muslims?  [JAC: I guess ISIS isn’t Muslim, then!]

. . . The West also has some responsibilities to end the violence; it can be honest and take the first step by recognizing the pains caused by the policies they have followed since the beginning of the 20th century. When this is done, the West can also see that it is an irrational method to attempt to shape the Muslim world in line with their own interests. No doubt, every state first thinks about the welfare of its citizens and country; however, they must know that when they do this in a manner that ignores the rights of others and treats them callously, it will generate a backlash as surely as night follows day.

But enough. Madon’s piece is great—a worthy palliative for the No True Islam-ists and Neo-Chomskyites. I’d reproduce the whole thing, but that wouldn’t be fair: you should read it on his site. It’s garnered a mere 12 comments, and I can’t understand why. So tw**t it around. I love the way Madon describes the different camps of apologists.

Madon debunks six arguments against the religion-as-terrorist-inspiration trope: it’s due to a misreading of scripture, the “terrorist” verses from the Qur’an are taken out of context, it’s not religion but oppression, and so on. One point he makes is that if we give credit to Muslims for following the beneficent dictates of the Qur’an, like giving to charity, why don’t we criticize them for following the violence-promoting verses? That’s just hypocritical.

Here are two excerpts, but since this is a Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) recommendation, go over and read the whole thing.

The verses are misinterpreted!
So 20-plus translations of the Quran that are endorsed by the Ulemas, and the many dozen spine chilling verses in them are all misinterpreted? Reputed Islamic scholars such as Pickthall & Maulana Wahiduddin Khan got their arabic wrong, but secular Leftists whose knowledge of the text is restricted to sharing memes of verse 5:32 on Facebook have got it right? This is an argument from ignorance and incredulity, and is normally propounded by folks who have never bothered to read scripture.

and

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.

It’s refreshing to see someone speak the truth without squirming, as one senses the Regressive Left often does. The conclusion?

By shutting down genuine criticism of Islamist ideology using the non-word ‘Islamophobia’, Leftists have failed the very people they claim to protect. The Left has actively shielded a totalitarian ideology (Islamism) by conflating it’s [sic] criticism with bigotry against a largely peaceful and diverse people (Muslims). By refusing to address the elephant in the living room, Leftists have unwittingly created a vacuum which is now filled by xenophobes like Trump and Farage. We only need to look at Brexit to understand how disconnected and vacuous the Left’s narrative has become, and how it has driven the masses towards the anti-refugee, anti-Muslim lobby on the far-right.

ud-front

Julia Ioffe’s dreadful journalism: All religions are equally violent

June 17, 2016 • 11:15 am

Julia Ioffe is a Russian-born American journalist who’s had a good career for someone so young (she’s only 34). She was a Russian correspondent for both The New Yorker and Foreign Policy, and then moved on to The New Republic where she became a senior editor. Because I also wrote for TNR, I read some of her stuff, which I found pretty good. She resigned when the magazine changed owners, and is now a writer for The New York Times Magazine as well as Politico.

And she still writes for Foreign Policy as well, though I was appalled to see her latest piece at that site, “If Islam is a religion of violence, so is Christianity.” The title pretty much gives the thesis: that although many religious scriptures are violent, including the Bible and Qur’an, no religion is inherently violent. In fact, they all promote roughly equal amounts of violence, which is due not to the religion itself but how its scriptures are misused by those who have other grievances. And so we shouldn’t demonize Islam more than any other faith—and among those she includes Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and, I suppose, Jainism, Quakerism, and every other one of the thousands of religions on this planet. And so we have her last paragraph, which, if I didn’t know better, I would have attributed to the Great Apologist, Reza Aslan:

No religion is inherently violent. No religion is inherently peaceful. Religion, any religion, is a matter of interpretation, and it is often in that interpretation that we see either beauty or ugliness — or, more often, if we are mature enough to think nuanced thoughts, something in between.

But Ioffe’s journalism is dreadful and her argument is weak. First, the argument.

All religions inspired violence sometime during their history, ergo all are violent. Christians had the Crusades and the Inquisition, as well as wars between Protestants and Catholics and a vicious history of violent anti-Semitism. And much homophobia today is inspired by Christianity.

Even the Jews, which Ioffe calls her “co-religionists” (implying she’s a believer) practice violence. She refers to Hanukah as a celebration of violence, although the holiday isn’t a celebration of violence per se but of the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem after a struggle between two sects of Jews. But let’s grant her that thesis, and and admit that, according to the Old Testament, the Jews engaged in a frenzy of genocide on Yahweh’s orders.

To further prove that Judaism promotes violence, she mentions Yishai Schlissel, who stabbed six people at a gay pride parade in Jerusalem in 2005, serving ten years for his crime. Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Palestinian worshipers and wounded more than 125 in 1994, and was beaten to death on the spot, is also an exemplar of Jewish violence. These are indeed examples of religiously inspired murders.

Finally, Ioffe indicts Buddhists, too, citing the persecution of the Rohingyas in Myanmar.

There’s no doubt that, with very few exceptions, you can find members of any faith who have done bad deeds, and done them in the name of their religion. But does that mean that they’re all equally violent, as Ioffe claims?

You’d have to be blind to think that. We don’t see mass Buddhist, Jewish, or even Christian terrorism inflicted on the scale of what radical Islam is doing. We don’t see members of these religions blowing up airplanes or flying planes into buildings. Has a Quaker stabbed anybody lately in the name of Quakerism, or a Yazidi attacked innocent civilians in the name of their faith? Where are the Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist suicide bombers attacking cafes and nightclubs, citing the Bible or the teachings of the Buddha?

What Iofee is doing is using cherry-picked anecdotes to support a general thesis about the world today. This is not good journalism. Nor does she note that most of the anecdotes, at least about Christianity, are from the distant past, while what we’re concerned with is what’s happening in the world today. While Christian homophobes and anti-abortionists exist, there is no Christian church I know of, or any Jewish synagogue, for that matter, that dictates explicitly to its followers to kill nonbelievers, apostates, gays, and adulterers—as sharia law dictates in several Muslim countries.

By and large, the non-Islamic Abrahamic religions have been defanged by the Enlightenment. But that process is only beginning with Islam, and mostly among Muslims who have moved to the West. We can indeed make the argument that both the Qur’an and the the Bible are violent scriptures (though, on a word-for-word basis, the Qur’an is twice as violent), but what matters is how the scriptures are interpreted today, and how they inspire people to do bad things.  Ioffe more or less admits this, but won’t go so far as to say that Qur’anic scripture is more often used to justify bad deeds than is the Bible or the teachings of Buddhism. In fact, she claims that even scripture itself isn’t to blame: that’s just a convenient excuse people use to justify their inherent violence—which brings us to her second argument:

People simply use religion as an excuse to act on their inherently violent tendencies. As she writes:

No religion is inherently peaceful or violent, nor is it inherently anything other than what its followers make it out to be. People are violent, and people can dress their violence up in any number of justifying causes that seek to relieve people of their personal responsibility because the cause or religion, be it Communism or Catholicism or Islam, is simply bigger than themselves. It’s very convenient for both the perpetrator of violence and his accuser, and yet totally useless: Something can be done with a person who has transgressed, but what can you do with an amorphous concept?

“Dress up their violence in justifying causes”? Doesn’t she believe what terrorists say about their motivations? Perhaps not, for she knows better. And does she not realize that what Muslims make of their doctrine leads to more violence in today’s world than what Christians make of their doctrine? Why is that, if people are all equally violent for other reasons, and use their faith to justify what they do? As for “what can be done with an amorpous concept” (religion), is Ioffe not aware of antitheism and secularism, which argue explicitly against “amorphous concepts”. Is she ignorant of how for years people have called out Christianity and Judaism for their misogyny, homophobia, and, in the case of Catholicism, for enabling child rape? The statement “what can you do with an amorphous concept” is simply silly for a political journalist to make. Christianity and Islam are no more amorphous than Communism or the Republican party.

And yet when discussing specific cases, Iofee seems to accept that religion can indeed inspire violence. To make that point, she dwells at length on Dylann Roof, who killed 9 African-Americans at a church in South Carolina exactly a year ago today. Everything I’ve ever read about that case implicates racial bigotry as Roof’s motivation rather than religion (he was brought up Christian). But Ioffe tries to get around that:

Friday will mark the one-year anniversary of Dylann Roof killing nine people in the middle of a Bible study in Charleston, S.C. Before his rampage, he wrote a manifesto declaring his allegiance to the white supremacist cause and pointing to the Council of Conservative Citizens, which claims to adhere to “Christian beliefs and values,” as a major source of information and inspiration. By some accounts, Roof came from a church-going family and attended Christian summer camp. Did Roof kill his fellow Christians because he was deranged or because Christianity is violent?”

The answer is neither. They are not exceptions, nor do they speak to a violence inherent in Christianity. Because my point is not that Christianity is evil. It isn’t. But neither is it inherently peaceful and loving. And neither is Islam. Nor Judaism nor Hinduism nor Buddhism.

Yes, Roof came from a churchgoing family, but there’s simply no indication that religion sparked his killing spree, nor did he say so, for he wrote a manifesto. As the Christian Post noted (my emphasis):

There was no mention of religion in Roof’s alleged 2,400-word screed explaining why he had “no choice” but to take action after finding “pages upon pages of these brutal black on white murders” on the Council of Conservative Citizens’ website.

The Council of Conservative Citizens, which calls for the U.S. to adhere to “Christian beliefs and values,” explains in its “Statement of Principles” that it “oppose(s) all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called ‘affirmative action’ and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.”

By pointing to the Counsel of Conservative Citizens as having some connection to Christianity, Ioffe is simply grasping at straws, trying desperately to find some connection between Roof’s killings and his faith, even though she refuses to blame his faith.  But there is no evidence for that connection. On the other hand, it’s not hard to name the mass killings by Muslims, including the latest one in Orlando, where the killers explicitly mention their faith as a reason.

Ioffe does the same guilt-by-association tactic when she drags Laura Ingraham, a conservative talk-show host, into her argument about why Islam isn’t any more violent than other faiths. Ioffe:

I am tired of hearing, from Bill Maher and from Donald Trump, that Islam is inherently violent. I am even more tired of hearing that Christianity is inherently peaceful. I have witnessed this debate play out many times over, including at one dinner party when Laura Ingraham turned to the other guests and took a poll: Raise your hands if you think Islam is a death cult. Most of the (politically conservative) guests raised their hands and then took pains to explain to me how, unlike Islam, Christianity is inherently a religion of love.

With all due respect to my many Christian friends, I seriously beg to differ.

I am not sure what point she is trying to make here, other than that some Conservative Christians, as polled by Laura Ingraham, think that their Christianity is more tolerant and loving than is Islam. In fact, I doubt that many of those present even know what the notion of Islam as a “death cult” really means. The term, by the way, may have been coined by Sam Harris (I found a reference to it from 2006).

In the end, this is abysmal journalism fueled by the author’s prejudice, which she tries to justify by stringing together anecdotes, including mentions of Christian violence from hundreds of years ago. She gives no figures nor displays any knowledge of the Qur’an or of Islam itself, but simply declares that it’s no more violent than any other faith. Above all, she doesn’t seem to recognize that when we argue that Islam is the most dangerous religion on the planet, we aren’t saying that it’s scriptures are inherently more odious than other scriptures, but that the religion is interpreted in such a way that makes it more dangerous. This is not rocket science. It’s the height ot inanity to make the claim that, in terms of how their scriptures are promulgated and interpreted, all religions are equally malicious, down to the fifth decimal point.

I am not sure why Ioffe, who has a history of good journalism behind her, wrote such a shoddy piece. One can speculate that this is an extended example of virtue-signaling, or of Regressive Leftism. Or maybe she’s trying to distance herself from the outrageous anti-Muslim statements of Donald Trump. But I’m not a psychologist, and so will leave her piece as an dangerous example of fuzzy, Aslan-ian style apologetics, and hope that Ioffe will get off this horse and resume her usual good reportage.

An anthropologist justifies female genital mutilation

May 23, 2016 • 10:06 am

The concept of “choice” in a community that has long traditions about the subject of that choice, particularly ones connected with religion, is problematic. How many women “choose” the hijab or burqa in countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan, where such clothing is not only connected with religion, but mandated by the government? The fact that places like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan have morality police to enforce covering, as well as the absence of covering before those countries became theocracies, suggest that many women would not cover themselves without the legal requirements and threat of beating. And even where covering is optional, as in Egypt, many women must cover themselves for fear of looking “non-Muslim,” of disobeying their husbands, or of defying community standards and being ostracized.

So when I read a new piece in The Atlantic, “Why some women choose to get circumcised?” I was wary. How do we know that without religious and social pressure, female genital mutilation (FGM) is a “choice” in the sense of something that would be elected without that pressure?  While FGM has been around for a long time, and is practiced by non-Muslims, it’s been institutionalized (as has veiling) by many branches of Islam. If you think that FGM has nothing to do religion, read Heather Hastie’s column on the Islamic connection.

Khazan is an associate editor of The Atlantic, covering health and gender issues, and she interviews Sheila Shell-Duncan, a professor of anthropology at The University of Washington. The curious thing about the interview is that while Shell-Duncan is part of an initiative to reduce FGM by 30% in ten countries over the next five years, she proceeds to more or less excuse the practice in her interview. And I do mean “excuse”, not just “understand”.

First, an introduction by interviewer Khazan:

For starters, Bettina Shell-Duncan, an anthropology professor at the University of Washington who has been studying the practice in many countries for years, suggests using the term “cutting” rather than “mutilation,” which sounds derogatory and can complicate conversations with those who practice FGC.

She also challenges some common misconceptions around FGC, like the belief that it is forced on women by men. [Not so, though; see below.] In fact, elderly women often do the most to perpetuate the custom. I thought African girls were held down and butchered against their will, but some of them voluntarily and joyfully partake in the ritual. I thought communities would surely abandon the practice once they learned of its negative health consequences. And yet, in Shell-Duncan’s experience, most people who practice FGC recognize its costs—they just think the benefits outweigh them.

Actually, I don’t care who perpetuates the custom, whether it be women or men; I care that society forces the practice on young girls, and that religion not only allows it but in some cases urges it. And changing the word to “cutting” rather than “mutilation” is just semantics. Yes, those trying to eliminate it should just call it “cutting the genitals” to those they’re trying to persuade, but we should realize that it’s still mutilation. It’s as if we tried to sanitize the throwing of gays off rooftops by extremist Muslims as “involuntary defenestration of homosexuals” rather than “homophobic murder.”

And of course if doing something inculcates and integrates you into the culture, you may do it “joyfully”—after all, you’re joining the pack—but do you do it  “voluntarily”? In a culture where it’s the norm, and rejecting it leads to ostracism, what does “voluntarily” even mean?

If that barbaric cultural practice didn’t exist, as it doesn’t in the West (which outlaws FGM), women wouldn’t elect it. Now you’ll say, “Well, of course: if there’s no FGM culture, why would any girl want to do it?” But that’s precisely the point. FGM is a reprehensible practice that is not only medically dangerous, resulting in both short- and long-term health problems, but also, by excising the inner labia and clitoris, severely reduces the possibility of sexual pleasure for women—which is of course its point. (This is the form of FGM that Khazan and Shell-Duncan are discussing.)  A misguided cultural relativism has tended to overlook these issues (and this article shows it), but that kind of relativism isn’t acceptable—not when there are health and sex issues as well as harm to women.

Here’s some of the statements that Shell-Duncan makes in celebrating, or at least excusing, FGM:

The bride came out and joined the dancing. I almost died. I thought she must be on codeine, but she wasn’t. She was joyful. I didn’t understand the joy about this.

But later I remembered that when I gave birth to my first son, I had a very difficult delivery. After my son was born, everyone in the delivery room popped a bottle of champagne. I felt like I had been hit by a Mack truck and they were toasting champagne. But it was a good pain, and that’s what this was. This girl had become a woman.

When I went back two years later, the girl came to me and gave the [pain] pills back. She said, “You don’t understand, this is not our way. And if I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be a woman now.”

I understood why. And I respected her.

Well, Shell-Duncan’s pain didn’t presage a life without sexual pleasure, either! And as for “respect”, well, that’s a double-edged sword. Admiring someone for withstanding a painful and barbaric practice doesn’t do anything to eliminate the practice. No, you don’t have to shame the girl—that would be counterproductive—but do you “respect” those hyper-Orthodox Jewish women who shave their heads and purify themselves in ritual baths after menstruating? Or those Muslim women who put themselves in cloth sacks, and won’t go out without a male guardian? I’m not sure “respect” is the right word here.

And here’s the rationale:

Khazan: Yeah. So, wow. I guess the biggest question for me is what do they see as the benefit? Are there any benefits?

Shell-Duncan: This is not true everywhere, but there, there it’s not about virginity. It’s not about modesty. And it is in some other cultures. The Rendille are sexually active before they’re married, both men and women. And it’s completely culturally acceptable.

The woman is going to go live with her husband’s family, and it’s part of inclusion among other women whose identity is as a circumcised woman. She’s reliant on her mother-in-law and her husband’s kin. So it’s part of becoming inducted into this female network that’s really important.

Also, for us, we believe that bodies are natural and perfect. Not everybody believes that. Some people in Africa believe that bodies are androgynous and that all male and female bodies contain male and female parts.

So a man’s foreskin is a female part. And for a female, the covering of the clitoris is a male part. The idea of becoming a wholly formed female includes being cut—having any part that is somewhat male-like removed from the body.

Khazan: That actually makes logical sense to me. We have shaving your legs, or wearing makeup. We have weird things that we do that are less painful. But the pain in their case is kind of the “proving yourself” aspect.

Shell-Duncan: Right.

“Sexually active” doesn’t mean, “getting pleasurable sex,” of course. And really, getting inducted into a network via means that are harmful, painful, and dangerous, while understandable, is not necessarily admirable. In some cultures men need to kill an enemy before they’re fully accepted. Is that okay? Further, comparing FGM with shaving one’s legs or wearing makeup is seriously misguided. While those practices may be culturally enforced (I grew up in an era when many women didn’t shave their legs, and I don’t care about that), they aren’t nearly as harmful to the practitioners as is FGM.

Here’s Shell-Duncan’s critique of the feminist argument against FGM:

Khazan: And where is the support for this practice coming from?

Shell-Duncan: The sort of feminist argument about this is that it’s about the control of women but also of their sexuality and sexual pleasure. But when you talk to people on the ground, you also hear people talking about the idea that it’s women’s business. As in, it’s for women to decide this. If we look at the data across Africa, the support for the practice is stronger among women than among men.

So, the patriarchy argument is just not a simple one. Female circumcision is part of demarcating insider and outsider status. Are you part of this group of elder women who have power in their society?

Yes, it’s part of insider versus outsider status, but many barbaric religious practices are. Many see circumcision of Jews as another one of them, as well as putting women in burqas or, in some Mormon sects, marrying young girls and taking multiple wives. And, of course, the religious dictates in favor of FGM come from men, even if women are the “enforcers.” In fact, later in the piece Shell-Duncan admits that men are involved:

Shell-Duncan: If I decide I don’t want to circumcise my daughter, that’s not an individual behavior. I would have to answer to my husband, to my mother-in-law, my mother-in-law would have to answer to her friends throughout the community, my father-in-law would have to answer to people in the community, so there’s societal pressure. So understanding what is a collective decision versus individual is really important. You can go and tell an individual mother what the health risks are and she can believe you, but it doesn’t mean, first of all, that she has the power to make that decision, or even that she has the authority to impart that information to her mother-in-law and other senior people in the society who are the decision-makers. Who wants to be the first one to change? Who wants to be the odd man out?

And there’s this, where Shell-Duncan admits that trying to get women to stop cutting their daughters is a tactic that doesn’t work:

Shell-Duncan: What we’re coming to realize is that programs that target individual mothers are completely ineffective. Mothers are not solely in charge of the decisions for their daughters. We need to be targeting people who are in the extended family, and we know that we need to figure out who are the figures of authority in these families, and who are the influences on them in the community. We need to do male elders, but also female elders.

So why on Earth does Khazan call her piece “Why some women choose to get circumcised?” And why does she have an introduction saying that “elderly women often do the most to perpetuate the custom”?  Shell-Duncan admitted it’s not a “choice” in the conventional sense of the word. There are serious repercussions to not getting cut. Why, then, do both women maintain that it’s older women who are really in charge of FGM? Shell-Duncan seems deeply confused, and her arguments are conflicting.

And here’s her bogus arguments against the medical dangers:

Khazan: What, medically, are the harms? Why are people trying to stop this?

Shell-Duncan: The WHO was able to show a statistically significant association between FGC and certain risks from obstetrical outcomes. Things like infant death, hemorrhage.

There was a study that was done in Gambia—they were looking at the chances of having sexually transmitted infections and pelvic inflammatory disease, and it was positive, but of course, you can’t prove that being circumcised is causal.

Khazan: Do these communities know about the medical consequences?

Shell-Duncan: One of the things that is important to understand about it is that people see the costs and benefits. It is certainly a cost, but the benefits are immediate. For a Rendille woman, are you going to be able to give legitimate birth? Or elsewhere, are you going to be a proper Muslim? Are you going to have your sexual desire attenuated and be a virgin until marriage? These are huge considerations, and so when you tip the balance and think about that, the benefits outweigh the costs.

Let’s not forget the loss of sexual pleasure, which of course these girls won’t know about because they never learn what they’re missing. But do review the World Health Organization’s list of medical harms caused by FGM. When you get a chronic infection or painful scar tissue (and possible obstetric fistulas) from cutting, is Shell-Duncan going to say, “Well, that’s just a correlation; you can’t prove it’s causal.” That is an invidious and willfully ignorant way to excuse FGM. What does it take for her to accept that an infection in the genitals after cutting, which won’t occur in those that don’t have FGM, is caused by FGM?

After all this, Shell-Duncan admits why she’s trying to reduce the incidence of FGM:

Khazan: Do you think it’s a global-health imperative that we work to stop this?

Shell-Duncan: There’s no question this is a global-health issue. In the U.S., adult women are capable of giving consent for surgical procedures. But what would it take to get a woman in an African country to the same position of being able to give consent? Social pressures [in the nations that practice FGC] are so strong that no woman could ever opt out. Everybody would come down on her. That’s the problem. Why can we give consent and they can’t?

There’s more, but you get the ambivalence. We have a conflicted feminist who sees that FGM is harmful, and is trying to stop it, but at the same time is trying to justify the practice, as well as distort its origins and how it’s enforced. Interviewer Khazan, of course, plays right into this, and doesn’t ask Shell-Duncan the hard questions. I applaud Shell-Duncan’s initiative to reduce FGM, but one can see her being drawn into a form of cultural relativism that has the danger of diluting her opprobrium of FGM. At least she’s doing something about it.