Category: Islam

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ a rock in a box

April 15, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “rock2“, comes with a note that says this: “An oldie from 2006 today. Next week’s will also be a resurrection.” The artist must be on hols.

Is Mo right about the black silk and the meteorite?  Well, at least half right. The Kaaba is indeed covered with a cloth made of silk, but the meteorite is questionable. Here’s what Wikipedia says, along with a picture. (The stone is called Ajar al-Aswad.)

The Black Stone (Arabic: الحجر الأسود, romanized: al-Ḥajar al-Aswad) is a rock set into the eastern corner of the Kaaba, the ancient building in the center of the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It is revered by most Muslims as an Islamic relic which, according to tradition, dates back to the time of Adam and Eve.

The stone was venerated at the Kaaba in pre-Islamic Arabia. It is sometimes considered a baetyl. According to tradition, it was set intact into the Kaaba’s wall by Muhammad in 605, five years before his first revelation. Since then, it has been broken into fragments and is now encased in a silver frame on the side of the Kaaba. Its physical appearance is that of a fragmented, dark rock, polished smooth by the hands of pilgrims. It has often been described as a meteorite,  but it has never been analysed with modern techniques, so its scientific origins remain the subject of speculation.

Muslim pilgrims circle the Kaaba as a part of the tawaf ritual during the Hajj and many try to stop to kiss the Black Stone, emulating the kiss that Islamic tradition records that it received from Muhammad.While the Black Stone is revered, theologians emphasize that it has no divine significance and that its importance is historical in nature.

Saudi Press Agency (SPA), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

FFRF rebukes NYC mayor Mamdani for mixing city business with Islam

March 18, 2026 • 10:15 am

Since I was in an upsetting kerfuffle with the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF, and I call the squabble “The KerFFRFle”), over which I resigned from its Honorary Board along with Steve Pinker and Richard Dawkins, I haven’t paid much attention to the organization. I do get their alerts, for they’re still doing good work in upholding the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, reinforcing the wall between church and state. Their condemnations, like the one I highlight here, don’t usually accomplish much, but their lawsuits or amicus briefs have been effective, and the FFRF does raise awareness about Constitutional violations.  Yes, they are overly woke, which is why I resigned (see the first link), but that doesn’t mean that their overall effect is bad. It isn’t!

I noticed the other day that they’ve gone after New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who I see as both an antisemite and an Islamist. And by “Islamist” I mean a Muslim who is active in trying to make countries adopt Islam as part of their system of governance.  In this case, Mamdani is mixing Islamic religious celebrations with city business: a violation of the First Amendment. I have little doubt that he would like the U.S. to become the Islamic Republic of America.

Click the screenshot below to read:

An excerpt:

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is again warning New York City’s mayor that the Constitution prohibits government officials from using the machinery of public office.

FFRF has sent its second letter in a couple of months to Mayor Zohran Mamdani after receiving a complaint from a New York City employee regarding a recent religious event organized through official city channels. The national state/church watchdog previously contacted Mamdani in February after he posted on the official New York City Mayor’s X account about participating in a suhoor meal and praying with Department of Sanitation workers during Ramadan. [JAC: he appears to have deleted the tweet, and if that’s the FFRF’s doing, good for them],

Despite that warning, FFRF has now learned that the mayor’s office held a “City Workers Iftar” on March 12 to “celebrate workers who keep New York City running while fasting.” The event notice was emailed to city employees by Interim Commissioner Melissa Hester and it noted that the event included a call to prayer.

A city employee who contacted FFRF observed that it is “completely inappropriate for a government agency to have a religious celebration.” The employee expressed concern that events like this may create the perception that the mayor’s office favors one religion and that employees attending city-sponsored events may be expected to participate in religious activities.

“While you are entitled to observe your faith in your personal capacity, the Constitution prohibits government officials from organizing, promoting or participating in religious exercises in their official roles,” FFRF Legal Counsel Chris Line writes to Mamdani. “Hosting a religious observance for city employees of one religion and facilitating a call to prayer through official government communications and personnel crosses the line between private religious expression and government-sponsored religious worship.”

FFRF emphasizes that city employees work under the authority of elected leadership, creating a dynamic where even “voluntary” religious events can carry implicit pressure. “Public employees should not be placed in a position where they may feel compelled to attend a religious event or appear supportive of a particular faith tradition to maintain favor with their employer,” the letter states.

I oppose Mamdani not only because of his Islamism and apparent antisemitism, but because he’s a faux Democrat, promising much but likely to deliver little. (See his latest gaffe on St. Patrick’s day!) And I worry that because the Democrats are so befuddled and besotted by “oppressor/victim” ideology (Mamdani, being a Muslim, is seen as “oppressed”), he will have a future in politics beyond being mayor. He could become a Congressman, though fortunately not President, as he wasn’t born in the U.S.

Anyway, be aware of what’s going on in NYC, and kudos to the FFRF.

The Free Press touts faith again

October 13, 2025 • 11:35 am

On October 9 I highlighted a Free Press piece called “How intellectuals found God,” which I now see is part of a series of pieces on that site touting the benefits of religion.  One of the intellectuals highlighted was Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer who found the “right” religion—Romanian Orthodox Christianity—after going through a long search to fill the God-shaped hole in his being. He had previously investigated Zen Buddhism and even Wicca before he was baptized as a Christian. He’s quoted in the Free Press explaining his conversion to Peter Savodnik:

When I asked Kingsnorth why he embraced Christianity after having steered clear of it for his entire life, he said it wasn’t a “rational choice.”

“If you ever meet a holy person, you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that,” he said. “How does that happen?”

“The culture,” by contrast, “doesn’t have any spiritual heart at all. It’s as if we think we can just junk thousands of years of religious culture, religious art, religious music, chuck it all out the window, and we’re just building and creating junk.”

He said the story we’ve been telling ourselves for the last 100 years or so, of endless progress and secularism and the triumph of reason, is now “at some kind of tipping point.” Our great “religious reawakening” is just people “finding their way back to something that they never expected to find their way back to.”

Now, in this new piece (Sept. 13), also in The Free Press, Kingsnorth himself dilates on his choice, excoriating the West for embracing materialism and for filling the “God-shaped hole” (henceforth GSH) with dollars (capitalism) rather than the divine. He sees a decline in our internal well being and morality since 1500, leading one to believe that he’s an opponent of progress.

I’m not going to take this apart as I suspect somebody else will; I want only to give some quotes from the article itself showing the recent trend to embrace Christianity (why not Judaism?) as a personal palliative.

As the Free Press notes, this is a book excerpt:

From AGAINST THE MACHINE: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth, published by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Paul Kingsnorth.

 

 

Headers are mine, while Kingsnorth’s words are indented:

We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.  Clearly for Kingsnorth, Genesis is a very serious metaphor for the downfall of humanity:

So we eat the fruit, and we see that we are naked, and we become ashamed. Our mind is filled with questions; the gears inside it begin to whir and turn and suddenly now here is us and them, here is humanity and nature, here is people and God. We can never go home again. We fall into disintegration and out of the garden forever. Armed angels are set at the gates. The state of questless ease that was our birthright is gone. We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility.

The earth is our home now.This earth is a broken version of the garden, of our original integration with creator and creation. On Earth we must toil to break the soil, to plant seeds, to fight off predators. We will sicken and die. Everything is eating everything else. There is war and dominion and misery.

There is beauty and love and friendship too, but all of it ends in death. These are the consequences of our pursuit of knowledge and power, but we keep pursuing them because we know no other means to escape from our exile. We keep building towers and cities and forgetting where we came from. We forget the creator and worship ourselves.

. . .The path back to the garden can only be found by giving up the vainglory, the search for power and the unearned knowledge which got us exiled in the first place. The path is the path of renunciation, of love, and of sacrifice. To get back to the garden, we have to go through the cross.

This raises two questions.  How does Kingsnorth know there’s a god? Presumably he’d say, as he did in the earlier piece, that he gets God vibes:

And how does he know that Christianity is the right religion—the true faith that must be embraced to earn everlasting life( “we have to go through the cross)?  I don’t know the answer, but if you have to go through the cross, most of the people on earth are doomed to hell.

Our civilization has gone downhill for the last 500 years.  In this Kingsnorth is truly anti-Whiggish, and presumably a bitter enemy of Pinker, who maintains that in nearly all ways—well-being, health, morality, reduced violence, etc.—we are better off now than in 1500. Or would Kingsnorth prefer to live in, say, 1350. I’d seriously like to know the answer:

Now imagine that a whole culture is built around this story. Imagine that this culture survives for over a thousand years, building layer upon layer of meaning, tradition, innovation, and creation, however imperfectly, on these foundations.

Then imagine that this culture dies, leaving only ruins.

If you live in the West, you do not have to imagine any of this. You are living among those ruins, and you have been all your life. Many of them are still beautiful—intact cathedrals, Bach concertos—but they are ruins nonetheless. They are the remains of something called “Christendom,” a 1,500-year civilization into which this particular sacred story seeped, informing every aspect of life, bending and changing and transforming everything in its image.

This clearly implies that the “good” Christian culture disappeared about 500 years ago.

But wait! There’s more!:

Post-Enlightenment “morality” was no substitute for a higher purpose. If the correct path for society or the individual is based on nothing more than that individual’s personal judgement, then who or what is to be the final arbiter? Ultimately, without that higher purpose to bind it—without, in other words, a sacred order—society will fall into emotivism, relativism, and ultimately disintegration. This was MacIntyre’s prediction. It’s starting to look like he was spot-on.

Every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. This does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu, or Taoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.

This is a puffball; although atheistic societies, like those in northern Europe, don’t seem to be bereft of meaning and purpose, Kingsnorth can always say that, well, those societies are behaving using the legacy of Christianity. But given that there is substantial overlap between humanism and Christianity, that is not convincing. Plus, how, exactly, does Kingsnorth (or we, for that matter) decide what God’s “instructions” are?

There is no social unity or morality in the West without Christianity.

In his book Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after World War II, the medieval historian Christopher Dawson explained it like this:

There has never been any unitary organization of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church, which provided an effective principle of social unity. . . . Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.

Your personal attitude to that “living faith” is beside the point here. So, come to that, is the entirely legitimate question of whether “Christendom” was even Christian much of the time. The point to focus on is this: that when a culture built around such a sacred order dies then there will be upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics right down to the level of the soul. The very notion of an individual life will shift dramatically. The family structure, the meaning of work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to kin to responsibility to duty: Everything will be up for grabs.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued in his classic work, After Virtue, that the very notion of virtue itself would eventually become inconceivable once the source it sprung from was removed. If human life is regarded as having no telos, or higher meaning, he said, it will ultimately be impossible to agree on what “virtue” means, or why it should mean anything. MacIntyre’s favored teacher was Aristotle, not Jesus, but his critique of the Enlightenment and his prediction of its ultimate failure were based on a clear-sighted understanding of the mythic vision of medieval Christendom, and of the partial, empty, and over-rational humanism with which Enlightenment philosophers attempted to replace it.

If you think that there is no source of virtue or morality without religion, you’re wrong.  You don’t have to rely on God’s dictates (the absolute WORST way to determine what’s good), but on reason and humanism. After all, the Islamic or Hindu notions of virtue are very different from those of Christianity.  And all of them differ from secular humanistic morality.  We haven’t abandoned the notion of virtue; we’ve simply abandoned the dumb notion  (whose dumbness was first realized by Plato), that virtue comes from obeying what we think God wants. Islam generally regards the murder of apostates, atheists, or nonbelievers as a sin worthy of death. Is that the kind of religious “virtue” we want? I won’t go into the numerous dictates in the Bible that we now see as immoral (God ordering the murder of entire non-Israelite tribes, for example), but I’d like to see Kingsnorth discuss them. But I am sorry to say that I won’t be reading his book; this critique is based solely on the Free Press article.

Materialism, money, and capitalism have brought society so low that we’re doomed. We have no source of morality and everything is permissible. Shades of Dostoevsky!:

In the West, the final taboos are falling like ninepins, and from all across the cultural spectrum the effects are being felt.

If you’re broadly socially conservative, the questions are coming at you in a rolling barrage. Why should a man not marry a man? Why should a man not become a woman? Why should a child not have three fathers, or be born from a uterus transplanted into a man’s body? Why should the state not assist people to commit suicide?

Things are not much better, though, for those on the left who are concerned about the destructive inequalities created by the modern economy. “Woe to you who are rich,” said Jesus, in one of many blasts against wealth and power in the Gospels. “Greed is a sin against God,” wrote Thomas Aquinas. Not anymore. Now our economy runs on greed, and it laughs in the face of any foolish and unrealistic romantic who rejects it. The shaky binding straps with which medieval Christendom kept the traders, the merchants, and the urban bourgeoisie tied down have long since broken, leaving us with no better argument against rampant greed and inequality than against total sexual license or the remaking of the human body itself.

If you knock out the pillars of a sacred order, the universe itself will change shape. At the primal level, such a change is experienced by people as a deep and lasting trauma, whether they know it or not. No culture can just shrug off, or rationalize away, the metaphysics which underpin it and expect to remain a culture in anything but name—if that.

When such an order is broken, what replaces it? The end of the taboos doesn’t bring about some abstract “freedom”; it strips a culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but once the formal architecture is gone too, there is an empty space waiting to be filled—and nature abhors a vacuum.

. . . This has been the terrible irony of the age of reason, and of the liberal and leftist theories and revolutions which resulted from it. From 1789 to 1968, every one of them ultimately failed, but in destroying the old world and its sacred order, they cleared a space for money culture to move in and commodify the ruins.

. . . We have become slaves to the power of money, and worshippers of the self.

From this we can discern that Kingsnorth thinks that gay marriage and assisted suicide are wrong, and perhaps transgenderism as well.  As for a child having three fathers, well, that’s not yet possible; we’ll deal with that issue when it becomes a possibility. The man is not only an Orthodox Christian, but akin to a fundamentalist Southern Baptist.

Kingsnorth winds up harping again on the GSH, which apparently used to be filled until about 1500, but now is stuffed with only money, and we lack all meaning and purpose since we abandoned Jesus:

What if we are in that passage now? It would explain the strange, tense, shattering, and frustrating tenor of the times. It would start, too, to get to the heart of what we are lacking, for we modern creatures are people with everything and nothing all at once. We—at least if we are among the lucky ones—have every gadget and recipe and website and storefront and exotic holiday in the world available to us, but we are lacking two things that we seem to need, but grasp at nonetheless: meaning, and roots.

You may remember that in 2018 I asked readers what gave their lives meaning and purpose, and although we have a biased sample of nonbelievers here, people confected meaning and purpose post facto: they did what they found gratifying, and then said that was their meaning and purpose. Presumably Kingsnorth would hate that because it doesn’t involve Jesus.

But the big question here is why did the Free Press once again publish a piece saying that the West has lost its way, and we need to reclaim religion to get back on the tracks?  This may be part of a greater phenomenon connected with social discord in the last few decades, but whatever is happening, it seems to be a trend.

 

Guest post: “Burning my Koran”

June 12, 2025 • 9:30 am

Based on the Jesus and Mo post yesterday, which commented on a British man fined for burning a Qur’an, a reader sent me a commentary that he/she wrote fifteen years ago about burning a Koran, and revised yesterday.  Given the ideological climate, the reader of course wishes to remain anonymous, so I’ve changed the name. It’s published below with permission.

Burning My Koran

by Jean Smith (name changed to protect the writer)

September 24, 2010, revised June 11, 2025

The short version:

The sooner everybody in the world burns a Koran, the sooner we can get back to things that really matter.

The longer version:

I’m here in the back yard of my house. I am holding a copy of the Koran which I purchased with money I earned — I have the receipt. This is not a rare edition — it is a cheap paperback copy, one among millions in the world today. I’m about to douse it with charcoal lighting fluid and set it on fire.

If you’re the kind of person who takes violent exception to this sort of activity, please note that I am alone. There is no one here who is either encouraging or trying to stop me, so if you are thinking about taking bloody vengeance, be sure that it is directed only at me.

If this were a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, or a biography of Einstein, or a telephone directory, burning it might seem like an odd thing to do, but it would have no great importance to anyone. Since I am an atheist, and therefore I don’t believe in the god described in this book, or in any other god, then as far as I am concerned this book is like any other – nothing but a mass-produced assembly of paper with ink on it. So one less Koran in the world is inconsequential to me.

I am not burning this book for the purpose of offending any person or group of persons, so if you do take offense, you are missing my point. I am doing this because I can, in response to a recent news item: the police in a town in England arrested six people for burning a Koran and posting a video about it on YouTube. Their so-called “crime” was not that they violated a fire code, nor that they destroyed a book which they didn’t own — but “inciting racial hatred”.

From the news reports, it appears that these Koran burners are crude racists. In other words, ignorant, fearful people. These are not people I admire or feel much sympathy for. But if anyone feels “racial hatred” towards me, as a white atheist Westerner burning my own paper with ink on it, then that person is every bit as much a crude racist.

I have my own reason for burning this book — not to express racism (which I do not feel), nor contempt for the ideas set forth in the book (which I do feel), but to demonstrate that no one’s personal choice of religious rules and beliefs is in any way binding on me or anyone else. If you have a book that you hold to be sacred, then you probably won’t burn it. That’s easy. But that’s all you get.

This book is not a sacred account of the words of God. After all, there is no god. And what would a god need with a book anyway? Books are made by people, for people. Books are paper with ink on it, this particular one belongs to me, and I am going to burn it.

I take the matches from my pocket. Are you starting to feel a bit uneasy? But what if you knew that a whole shipping container of Korans was about to be washed overboard in the middle of the ocean — would the harm be thousands of times greater? Would that diminish Islam in any way? Would the world even notice? Of course not. It would merely be a monetary loss to the publisher, and a trivial amount of pollution. And if the loss of a shipping container full of Korans wouldn’t diminish the faith, how can the loss of a single copy?

Do you call me intolerant of others’ beliefs, a racist, a bigot? Now it is you who are offending me (Because I am tolerant. Just not respectful) – should you therefore be forbidden to say that I am intolerant? Of course not. In this society, you have a right to express yourself, just as I do. But if you have a right to say things that I find offensive, it necessarily follows that you can’t invent a right not to be offended yourself.

Time to strike the match.

One other thing. Those guys in England who burned a Koran were idiots. From the news reports, they even managed to set their gas can on fire in the process, so they’re lucky they didn’t hurt themselves. But despite their ineptitude, they managed to pull it off. If there really were a god, an omnipotent creator and destroyer of worlds, a timeless master of every atom of the universe, and if this god had the slightest concern about the book, couldn’t he have sent a thunderbolt, or a rain shower, or at least caused these guys to forget to bring matches? What does a supreme being have to worry about anyway? And if all you want is what He wants, what do you have to worry about?

Whoosh!

 

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ the Twelvers

April 9, 2025 • 9:00 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “well2”, is a reboot, and came with this note: “A resurrection today from 2007. Poor Twelfth Imam! Let’s hope he’s got plenty of reading material.

Yep, there has been a long wait. As Wikipedia says of Muhammad al-Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam:

Muhammad al-Mahdi (Arabic: محمد بن الحسن المهدي, romanized: Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Mahdī) is believed by the Twelver Shia to be the last of the Twelve Imams and the eschatological Mahdi, who will emerge in the end of time to establish peace and justice and redeem Islam.

Hasan al-Askari, the eleventh Imam, died in 260 AH (873–874), possibly poisoned by the Abbasids. Immediately after his death, his main representative, Uthman ibn Sa’id al-Asadi, claimed that the eleventh Imam had an infant son named Muhammad, who was kept hidden from the public out of fear of Abbasid persecution. Uthman also claimed to represent Muhammad, who had entered a state of occultation. Other local representatives of al-Askari largely supported these assertions, while the Shia community fragmented into several sects over al-Askari’s succession. All these sects, however, are said to have disappeared after a few decades except the Twelvers, who accept the son of al-Askari as the twelfth and final Imam in occultation.

“Occulatation” is like religious hibernation, and according to Wikipedia the Twelvers constitute “about 90% of all Shi’a Muslims”, or number between 140 million and 180 million people. And, like Christians, they’ve waited a long time for their Messiah to appear. And they’ll wait forever.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Whoa

April 17, 2024 • 8:15 am

In the new Jesus and Mo strip, called “Whoa,” the barmaid compares modern-day versions of Christianity and Islam, and judges Islam as palpably worse for humanity. In that she agrees with Richard Dawkins, though not with those sophists who simply cannot admit that one religion can have more pernicious effects on the modern world than another.

The artists’s comment in the post: “It is worse.”

x

Another misguided attack on Richard Dawkins, calling him a bigot for considering modern Christianity as a “more decent religion” than modern Islam

April 7, 2024 • 10:45 am

It’s very strange that there are some people who claim that there is no real difference in the harmfulness of different religions as practiced during our day. As nearly all the Four Horsemen maintained (and Sam Harris continues to do so eloquently), Islam is the faith that, as practiced now, causes more harm than any other faith, and certainly more harm than does Christianity. And yes, I freely admit that between the 12th to the 18th centuries—the period of the Inquisition—Christianity was the world’s most harmful faith. But we mustn’t forget the Aztecs, who routinely engaged in mass and gruesome murders of both their own people and prisoners.

But now the most pernicious faith seems to be Islam. Certainly many Muslims (and I know some) practice their faith benignly and even charitably. But many others don’t, and they enable harms throughout the world—harms that were never produced by Christianity or that have been largely abandoned by them. Here are some practices promoted or exacerbated by Islamic doctrine:

  • Islamism: the desire to dominate the world with Islamic doctrine, including sharia law
  • The codified oppression of women. In many places women must be veiled, put into cloth sacks, can’t go out without a male guardian, can’t go to school or get many jobs, must walk behind their husbands, can be beaten (or divorced) by their husbands without sanction, can be stoned to death for adultery (a practice just resumed by the Taliban in Afghanistan), and so on.
  • Honor culture: killing of family members who supposedly sully a family’s “honor”
  • Female genital mutilation, which is encouraged in many places by Islam
  • Sharia law, which is also oppressive. For example, the testimony of women under sharia law counts only half as much as a man’s
  • The oppression of gays, including outright murder in places like Gaza and legal execution in places like Iran.
  • Blasphemy laws, under which you can be killed for insulting Islam or burning the Qur’an
  • The demonization and sometimes the killing of apostates or atheists
  • The issuing of fatwas when Westerners insult Islam, sometimes calling for killing those perceived to insult the religion (Charlie Hebdo, Salman Rushdie, etc.). This is connected with the blasphemy laws mentioned above
  • Divisiveness within the religion that leads to war and death: Sunnis kill Shiites and vice versa, so there are internecine killings as well as cross-cultural killing
  • The propagation of hatred of Jews and propagandizing of the young
  • Favoring religious teaching in madrassas above secular teaching
  • The suppression of freedom of speech in general, particularly that which criticizes the government, often an explicitly Islamic government.  Masih Alinejad, for instance, fears for her life in America because she criticizes Iran, which has tried to both kill and kidnap her in separate incidents. Why? Because she’s against mandatory wearing of the headscarf (hijab) for women.

I could go on, but I’ll stop here so I can finish this post.

While I suppose you can find instances of some of these practices among Christians (e.g. honor killings, Orthodox Jews inhibiting secular learning, the demonization of gays), you would be a fool to say that the harm caused by Islam, as instantiated by the acts above, is as serious as that caused by Christianity in our era. There’s simply no argument to be made for it.

Except, of course, by P. Z. Myers, because Richard Dawkins has just defended Christianity against Islam in the way I have above, and we all know that P. Z. Myers is obsessed with criticizing Dawkins. And so Myers does, in a deeply misguided and logically confused piece on Pharyngula called “Banality and bigotry“.  The point Myers wants to make is that Dawkins, as a “cultural Christian” who also sees modern Christianity as morally superior to modern Islam, is thus bigot against Islam—an “Islamophobe”, if you will. (I prefer to think of “Islamophobia” as “fear of the consequences of Islam, which isn’t bigotry.) I won’t psychologize Myers, as I just want to rebut his argument, but I’d suggest that he reflect on his obsessive animus against Dawkins.  In this case, the animus has forced Myers to twist the facts to imply that Christianity is precisely as bad for the world as is Islam.

Myers’s jihad comes from the video below, in which Dawkins conveys an “Easter message” of the moral superiority of Christian behavior over Muslim behavior—comparing behaviors based on religious dictates. The interlocutor is journalist Rachel Johnson, and the venue is LBC, originally the London Broadcasting Company. It’s an interesting discussion, for Richard also queries Johnson about her own beliefs, sometimes making her squirm.

But the main error of both her queries as well as Myers’s article is to claim that because there are bad behaviors inspired by both Christianity and Islam, they must be equally bad. And if you say that, you’re a bigot. The error, of course, is the neglect of the real issue: how often do bad behavior promoted by the two faiths occur?  Further, says Myers, both the Bible and Qur’an promote some bad behaviors, so the two faiths again must be pretty much equally bad. Here I’d disagree, maintaining that the Qu’ran is full of more hatred, animus, and oppressive dictates than is the Bible. (Yes, I’ve read both.) But that’s really irrelevant to the question at hand, as most modern Christians don’t follow the bad parts of the Bible, while the Qur’an hasn’t been equally defanged.

Click to listen:

Dawkins mentions some of the bad behaviors inspired by Islam that I’ve listed above, including hostility to women and gays. He adds that “If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time. It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion in the way Islam is not.”  It seems clear that he’s referring to behaviors emanating from the religions today, which is further clarified when Dawkins says that, if given a choice, he’d prefer to to live in a culturally Christian than in a Muslim country—though he “doesn’t believe a word of Christian faith”.

I’d agree, and I’m betting that, given a choice of living in the U.S. or U.K. on the one hand or Iran or Afghanistan on the other, Myers would choose the Christian countries. You don’t have to believe the tenets of Christianity to make that no-brainer choice, nor do you have to believe that liberal democracies are the inevitable result of Christianity. It’s simply a matter of the average well-being in a country taken across all of its inhabitants.

Here, however, is how Myers deals with Dawkins’s claim that he’s a “cultural Christian” because he likes church music and cathedrals, even though he entirely rejects Christian doctrine:

 It’s meaningless and trivial to say that we have all been shaped by our environment…although, of course, many Christian believers think that this is a huge deal and are acting as if Dawkins has renounced his unbelief.

He has not. What he then goes on to do, though, is to declare his bigotry, and that is what I find disturbing.

He likes hymns and cathedrals and parish churches — fine, uncontroversial, kind of boring, actually. But then he resents the idea that people would celebrate Ramadan instead of Christmas. Why? They both seem like nice holidays, that some people follow a different set of customs shouldn’t be a problem. Then he goes on to say that Christianity is “a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that Islam is not.”

How so? Because Islam is hostile to women and gays. He goes on to talk about how the Koran has a low regard for women.

Jesus. It’s true, but has this “cultural Christian” read the Bible? I don’t see any difference. The interviewer tries to bring up the record of actual practicing Christians, and he dismisses that as only those weird American protestants, as if jolly old England has no gay baiting, no murders of young women, and as if JK Rowling were just an open-minded, beneficent patron of the arts. Many American Christians are virulent homophobes who treat women as chattel, but his equally nasty culturally English Christianity has people and organizations that are just as awful.

70% of women teachers in the UK face misogyny. The British empire left a legacy of homophobia. The UK is so transphobic that some people are fleeing. Cultural Christianity does not seem to have made Great Britain a kinder, gentler place, but Dawkins must have some particularly rosy glasses that he wears at home, and takes off when he looks at any other country.

Dawkins has come out as sympathetic to Christianity, but only because it justifies his bigotry. At least he’s being open and honest about both biases.

Here Myers makes the two mistakes I mentioned above. First, he sees no difference between the proportion of bad stuff in the Bible and the bad stuff in the Qur’an. I do see a difference (I presume Myers has read both, as I have), but, as I said this is really irrelevant.

The main question is where one wants to live: in a Christian or a Muslim country, and whether Islam has more pernicious effects on the modern world than does Christianity. Which religion promotes behaviors that lead to a better, more desirable society?  To me the answer is clear, but apparently isn’t to either Myers or his faithful acolytes.  For crying out loud, America doesn’t systematically execute gays (yes, very rarely one gets killed). And yes, some Christians are “virulent homophobes”, but it’s insane to argue that, across all Americans (or American Christians), homophobia or oppression of women are just as bad as they are in Muslim societies. Perhaps 70% of women teachers in the UK have faced sexual harassment, a figure that is 70% too high, but in Muslim countries women can’t even become teachers, nor can women and girls become students. If you followed John Rawls and, behind the curtain of ignorance, had to choose whether you’d grow up as a women in a Muslim or Christian country, knowing nothing else about your circumstances, I think the choice would be clear.

The British empire left a legacy of homophobia? Well, I don’t know much whether that was a ubiquitous result of colonialism, but for the sake of argument I’ll agree. The point, however, is that homosexuality is a capital crime in many Muslim countries.  That’s why the notion of “gays for Palestine”, seen on some banners and placards, is so ridiculous. Below is a map showing where homosexuality is legal versus illegal.  Notice anything?

From Statista and Equaldex

Myers ends by accusing Richard of bigotry, presumably because Dawkins thinks that Christianity breeds better societies than does Islam. One can look up the data on various indices of social well being, happiness, and so on (the situation for gays is in the map above), and I’ll let the readers investigate, but the bullet points I’ve given already show that there are very great harms in some Muslim countries that one doesn’t find in majority Christian countries.

To conclude that Dawkins is a bigot, then, you have to not only cherry-pick the data and add confirmation bias, but also decide that making a rational argument supported by data is an instance of “bigotry”. This is the same error as concluding that it’s “Islamophobia”, a form of bigotry, to argue that Muslim societies are more dysfunctional than Christian (or atheist) ones.  In reality, you can hold the argument I’ve made above without being bigoted towards individual Muslims. “Islamophobia” should be a term for “fear of what Islam does”, rather than a form of bigotry.