Category: osculating the rump of faith

Open thread: When progress isn’t really progress at all

March 20, 2016 • 12:30 pm

by Grania Spingies

Jerry sent me this link a few days ago from the HuffPost Religion section: Afghanistan Women’s Soccer Team Unveils Jerseys With Hijabs. The article details a new uniform for the women players designed by Danish company Hummel which features a hijab that will ensure that women will remain covered in public while playing their sport.

Afghani national soccer team player Shabnam Mabarz, seen from behind, watches as Khalida Popal, the former Afghanistan national women's team captain, heads the ball in Copenhagen on Tuesday, March 8, 2016. The new Afghanistan national women's soccer team uniform was revealed on Tuesday, featuring an integrated hijab. (AP Photos/Jan M. Olsen)
Afghani national soccer team player Shabnam Mabarz, seen from behind, watches as Khalida Popal, the former Afghanistan national women’s team captain, heads the ball in Copenhagen on Tuesday, March 8, 2016. (AP Photos/Jan M. Olsen)

This sort of article simultaneously fills me with hope and frustration.

I’m very pleased that more women in Afghanistan will get an opportunity to participate in a sport they love and compete in matches with their sisters around the world. It makes me sad when I see this uniform described as “very best of the country’s traditions and heritage” or as “enabling players to maintain the modesty of their dress“.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s women in Afghanistan did not have to wear the hijab or cover their limbs in public places, not even if they had very high profile jobs.

This is Dr. Anahita Ratebezad, who was Afghanistan’s first female ambassador (1978).

Anahita_Ratebzad_First_of_May_Kabul

She graduated from Kabul University’s Medical School in 1962. She was elected to Afghan parliament in 1965.

No hijab, no talk of the modesty (or lack thereof) of her dress either it seems. In fact as has been documented all over the place,  Afghanistan was a very different place in the 20th century to what it has become since that century’s closing decade.

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Picture taken in 1962 at the Faculty of Medicine in Kabul of two Afghan medicine students listening to their professor. AFP/Getty Images

When Western media covers these sorts of news items I wish there was a little less polite fawning over how clever it is, and a little more honest reporting pointed out the glaring regression that Women’s Rights in certain parts of the world have undergone in the last 50 years. Progress should move things forward, it shouldn’t have to try to catch up with the past.

That’s what annoyed me this week. What annoyed you?

Kristof osculates all faiths, avers that they’re equally wonderful

December 14, 2015 • 9:34 am

The New York Times editorial staff continues its relentless campaign to osculate faith—all faiths in the case of Nicholas Kristof’s Sunday op-ed piece, “How well do you know religion?” In his tendentious essay, he first offers a quiz designed to show that the Bible is full of bad stuff while the Qur’an has some good stuff. His aim is to show that despite the sometimes scary contents of the Qur’an, it’s no worse than the Bible, and the violent content of scripture doesn’t matter anyway.

Kristof begins with 14 quotations from scripture or religious history, asking readers to identify the source. I’ll show five; make your guesses.

Screen Shot 2015-12-14 at 8.52.59 AMScreen Shot 2015-12-14 at 8.53.14 AM
Screen Shot 2015-12-14 at 8.53.28 AM

As you might expect, the source of nice scripture (5 and 11) is the Qur’an, while the rest of the Questions have answers from Christianity or the Old and New Testaments. Kristof admits cherry-picking, but that, he says, is precisely his point:

Some of you are probably angrily objecting right now that I am cherry-picking texts. Yes, I am. My point is that faith is complicated, and that we’re more likely to perceive peril and incitement in someone else’s scripture than in our own.

In fact, religion is invariably a tangle of contradictory teachings — in the Bible, the difference between the harshness of Deuteronomy and the warmth of Isaiah or Luke is striking — and it’s always easy to perceive something threatening in another tradition. Yet analysts who have tallied the number of violent or cruel passages in the Quran and the Bible count more than twice as many in the Bible.

Well, Kristof’s right in that Christians are more scared of the bad stuff in Muslim than in Christian scripture, but Christianity has largely divested itself of its bad scripture over the ages by ignoring it. Islam, however, hasn’t done the same de-fanging: while the vast bulk of Muslims aren’t inspired to violence by the malevolence of the Qur’an, the majority in all Muslim countries read the Qur’an as literal truth. The faithful haven’t yet found a way to ignore the bad bits of the Qur’an, though I hope that will come.

But Kristof’s statistics in the second paragraph are totally bogus. Yes, perhaps there are twice as many violent or cruel passages in the Bible as in the Qur’an, but anyone with two neurons to rub together will ask the question, “Yes, but what is the relative length of those scriptures?”

The answer:

Bible: About 800,000 words
Qur’an: About 77,000 words (3/4 as long as the New Testament)

So, given that the Qur’an is less than 10% as long as the Bible, the density of violent and cruel passages is over 5 times greater in the Qur’an than in the Bible.

But ignoring Kristof’s innumeracy, he then goes on to imply that scripture is irrelevant in judging a religion:

It’s true that terrorism in the 21st century is disproportionately rooted in the Islamic world. And it’s legitimate to criticize the violence, mistreatment of women or oppression of religious minorities that some Muslims justify by citing passages in the Quran. But let’s not stereotype 1.6 billion Muslims because of their faith. What counts most is not the content of holy books, but the content of our hearts.

I agree that we shouldn’t stereotype or demonize Muslims because of their faith, but what if the content of some Muslim hearts is determined by the content of their holy books? Shouldn’t we then hold the books up for criticism? That doesn’t demonize the faithful, except insofar as the book inspires them to do bad things. And except for denialists like Glenn Greenwald, that’s pretty much indisputable for the Qur’an. In fact, it’s the violent nature of that scripture that, according to reformers like Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, must somehow be tamed or ignored to solve the problem of Islamist terrorism.

In the rest of the piece, Kristof utters the usual liberal sentiments—most of which I agree with. Trump is a jerk for trying to ban Muslims, let’s not discriminate against Muslims simply because of their beliefs, and so on. But he ends this way:

Yes, the Islamic world today has a strain of dangerous intolerance. And for all of America’s strengths as a society, as Donald Trump shows, so does America.

Of course there’s some intolerance in America. But compare it to Iran, ISIS-controlled Iraq, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia. We don’t behead criminals, we don’t kill blasphemers, we don’t stone adulterers or throw gays off roofs, we don’t prohibit women from driving, we don’t have a religious system of law (one that gives women half the say of men), and we allow Muslims to be citizens (Saudi Arabia doesn’t grant that privilege to non-Muslims).

It’s undeniable that much of the biased and undemocratic behavior of these Islamic societies comes from Islam. It won’t do to pretend that “the Islamic world” is just as bad in its treatment of minorities, unbelievers, women, and gays as is, say, the United States. Kristof, in his fervent and admirable desire to prevent bigotry against Muslims, in the end must resort to distortions to do so. But you don’t need to do that: all you need to do is realize that you can criticize a creed without demonizing its adherents.

Greg Mayer called my attention to this piece, and I reproduce his comments below the line:
____________________________

My view is that Kristof wanted us to make the following syllogism:

Premise 1. Granted, there’s some pretty bad stuff in Islam.

Premise 2. But there’s also bad stuff in the Bible.

Premise 3. And, there’s good stuff in both Islam and the Bible.

Conclusion 1. Therefore, Islam is pretty much equivalent to Christianity/Judaism.

Premise 4. We know that Christianity and Judaism are good.

Conclusion 3. Therefore Islam is good.

He of course is counting on his readers to share his premise 4 uncritically.

The particular questions he chose for his “quiz” seemed designed for people to get them wrong, and thus feel uninformed about religion, and thus unqualified to have an opinion about religion. (I got 11 out of 14 right.) Kristof obviously thinks himself sufficiently informed to have an opinion. But the questions are almost all pointless scriptural exegesis or memorization– you don’t need to know any of that to have an informed opinion, because religions are what their practitioners do, not some nonbeliever’s interpretation of somebody else’s scripture.

 

The last year’s mushiest pro-faith article

December 12, 2015 • 10:00 am


It’s nearing the end of the year, but I’m confident that we won’t see an article more wooly-headed than this one before New Year’s Day. So I’m awarding the Most Odious Osculation of Faith (MOOF) Award to the big Atlantic article, “Why God will not die“, by Jack Miles. True, it was published in the December, 2014 issue, but eluded my attention till now, and deserves a quick look, as well as the award, for being worst piece in its genre over the last 12 months.

The subtitle (also the piece’s last sentence), “Science keeps revealing how much we don’t, perhaps can’t, know. Yet humans seek closure, which should make religious pluralists of us all,” tells the tale, and reveals its shaky thesis: we should make room for religion because a.) science doesn’t know everything; in fact, it makes us more ignorant, and b.) we want to know everything (i.e., find “closure”). Ergo: Make Room for God. Although Miles is an atheist, he seems to evince atheism’s worst facet: making bad arguments for osculating the rump of faith.

I’ll be brief, for wading through the piece—and in a venue as respected as The Atlantic—was truly a trial, equivalent to reading the part of the Bible where God tells the Jews, in minute and tedious detail, how to build the Ark of the Covenant. Just two points.

Miles does down science.  Here’s his beef: science raises more questions than it answers, so our ignorance increases:

Well, the scientists did demonstrate the existence of the Higgs boson. Peter Higgs won his belated Nobel Prize. And the success of CERN has indeed pointed the way to further research. At the same time, that success has increased our ignorance even more than I had imagined. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, concluded a 2013 article titled “Physics: What We Do and Don’t Know” with the following rather chastened sentences: “Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.” If science is the pinnacle of human knowing and physics the pinnacle of science, and if physics is deemed crucially limited even by the gifted few—Weinberg’s “we”—who know it best, where does that leave the rest of us?

I have begun to imagine human knowledge and ignorance as tracing a graph of asymptotic divergence, such that with every increase in knowledge, there occurs a greater increase in ignorance. The result is that our ignorance always exceeds our knowledge, and the gap between the two grows infinitely greater, not smaller, as infinite time passes.

While admitting in passing that science does tell us stuff, here Miles makes a specious argument: that science actually increases our ignorance. That’s bogus, as it’s based on a specious definition of increased ignorance as “realizing that something is out there that we don’t fully understand.” But ignorance, according to every definition I’ve seen (one follows), means something like this: “a lack of knowledge, understanding, or education : the state of being ignorant.” So, for example, discovering that there is dark matter and dark energy doesn’t increase our ignorance, as Miles implies, but decreases it, because we’ve discovered a phenomenon that we don’t fully understand. Ignorance simply means that that we lack knowledge, and, as science gives us more knowledge, and, indeed, raises more questions, our ignorance actually decreases.

The fact is that there is in principle a finite quantity of human ignorance, comprising every fact about the universe and about other universes, and that ignorance remains ignorance whether or not we realize there are new questions we can’t answer. Ergo, everything we find out actually decreases our ignorance. Miles last paragraph above is meant to denigrate science for actually increasing our ignorance, therefore providing an increasing gap that can be filled with—guess what?—faith and religion.

Miles makes room for religion. If you can fully understand the following, you’re a better person than I (I’m counting on our resident Faith Interpreter Sastra to help out here):

Yet if a faith of some sort is inevitable, why should the NSRN not devise something that suits it? Its language may teeter at times between assumptions of superiority and professions of humility, but so does conventionally religious language. Professionally, I judge that its work complements rather than undermines the work that my colleagues and I have done on our anthology. [The Norton Anthology of World Religions.]

Am I kidding myself? No doubt, but let’s be clear: there is a component of self-kidding—a suspension of disbelief—in even the most serious human enterprises. (Does anyone really believe that all men—and women—are created equal? But recognizing the delusional premise of American democracy needn’t undermine our faith in it.) The element of play is particularly, though by no means uniquely, prominent in religion.

I think Miles doesn’t quite understand that “equal” here means “equal in rights, opportunities and respect,” not “equal in behavior, strength, and other traits”. But putting that aside, this is a weak-minded justification of faith, further undermined by adding the postmodern notion of “play” (jouer), which in fact is NOT prominent in religion. If Catholicism is playful, it sure has fooled me!

And do you get this?:

Science is immortal, but you are not. History is immortal: Earth could be vaporized, and on some unimaginably distant planet on some unimaginably remote future date, another civilization’s historians could still choose to use the terrestrial year as a unit of time measurement. But where does that leave you? You have a life to live here and now. “Tell me,” the poet Mary Oliver asks, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” We never truly know how to reply to that challenge, do we, since more knowledge—the knowledge we do not have—could always justify holding current plans in abeyance just a little longer. But when life refuses to wait any longer and the great game begins whether you have suited up or not, then a demand arises that religion—or some expedient no more fully rational than religion—must meet. You’re going to go with something. Whatever it is, however rigorous it may claim to be as either science or religion, you’re going to know that you have no perfect warrant for it. Yet, whatever you call it, you’re going to go with it anyway, aren’t you? Pluralism at its deepest calls on you to allow others the closure that you yourself cannot avoid.

The tenets of faith might not be true, but you need something to get through life.  It may be irrational (and he implies in the next sentence that science is no more rational than religion), but it gives us closure. I’m not quite sure what it means, but I don’t turn to science out of fear of mortality. I turn to science because it makes my present life much richer.

And yes, I allow people the pluralism of being religious, but I don’t allow them freedom from criticism for embracing ridiculous and unsustainable propositions. “Just believe something” is pretty crappy advice, especially coming from a nonbeliever. Screen Shot 2015-12-12 at 8.33.43 AM

 

David Brooks discusses how ISIS makes radicals without mentioning religion once

December 9, 2015 • 11:00 am

While I’m bashing the New York Times today, let me add this beef.

It amazes me how people can discuss the origins of ISIS-like brutality, and even allude to the influence of the “potent doctrine” that fuels and channels it, without mentioning religion itself. It’s part of the same mentality that makes Obama shy away from mentioning Islam as an influence on terrorism, or grudgingly recognize it by saying that ISIS is a “perversion of Islam.” The whole object is to avoid saying anything bad about any religion. To that my response is this: “If you say that religion can inspire good acts, why are you so reluctant to say that it can inspire bad ones?”

David Brooks is one of the stable of New York Times op-ed writers who refuses to mention the I- and M-words when discussing ISIS. In his new column “How ISIS makes radicals” (curiously, the original title was “How radicals are made”), Brooks manages to discuss the origins of violent Islamism while alluding to religion as a contributing factor, but avoiding all mention of religion except for one sentence in his thesis:

But the crucial issue, it seems to me, is what you might call the technology of persuasion — how is it that the Islamic State is able to radicalize a couple living in Redlands, Calif.?

Yes, the only mention of religion is the name “Islamic State.”

Brooks’s analysis of its origins draws heavily on Eric Hoffer’s famous book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, which I read in college. Brooks’s response is in fact Hoffer’s thesis: that mass movements are often a response to a dysfunctional society that impels disaffected youth to turn to a greater cause. But at least Brooks recognizes that ISIS and similar movements aren’t just the result of Western oppression, and in general what he says is sensible. Here are some excerpts (my emphasis):

. . . The purpose of an organization like ISIS is to get people to negate themselves for a larger cause.

Mass movements, [Hoffer] argues, only arise in certain conditions, when a once sturdy social structure is in a state of decay or disintegration. This is a pretty good description of parts of the Arab world. To a lesser degree it is a good description of isolated pockets of our own segmenting, individualized society, where some people find themselves totally cut off. [JAC: note that, as I’ve discussed often, increased religiosity is recognized by sociologists as a ubiquitous response to social dysfunction.]

The people who serve mass movements are not revolting against oppression. They are driven primarily by frustration. Their personal ambitions are unfulfilled. They have lost faith in their own abilities to realize their dreams. They sometimes live with an unrelieved boredom. Freedom aggravates their sense of frustration because they have no one to blame but themselves for their perceived mediocrity. Fanatics, the French philosopher Ernest Renan argued, fear liberty more than they fear persecution.

And here’s where religion begins to creep in, at least as I see it:

The successful mass movement tells such people that the cause of their frustration is outside themselves, and that the only way to alter their personal situation is to transform the world in some radical way.

To nurture this self-sacrificing attitude, the successful mass movement first denigrates the present. Its doctrine celebrates a glorious past and describes a utopian future, but the present is just an uninspiring pit. The golden future begins to seem more vivid and real than the present, and in this way the true believer begins to dissociate herself from the everyday facts of her life. . .

. . . Next mass movements denigrate the individual self. Everything that is unique about an individual is either criticized, forbidden or diminished. The individual’s identity is defined by the collective group identity, and fortified by a cultivated hatred for other groups.

What better way to take advantage of these disaffected youth than to lure them with the golden promise of religion, perhaps even a Caliphate? That is a cause far beyond oneself.  And here Brooks ventures solidly onto religious ground, but still refuses to recognize the territory:

These movements generate a lot of hatred. But ultimately, Hoffer argues, they are driven by a wild hope. They believe an imminent perfect future can be realized if they proceed recklessly to destroy the present. The glorious end times are just around the corner.

Glorious end times? Could that possibly be the Final Showdown Against Unbelievers that, says ISIS, will occur in the Middle East when the expanding Caliphate provokes the West?

And then Brooks quotes Hoffer in service of this thesis:

Hoffer summarizes his thought this way, “For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.”

Well, what is that “potent doctrine” but Islam? Who is the “infallible leader “but Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi (channeling Muhammed)? What is the “prospect of the future” except the Caliphate?

At the end Brooks suggests the way to get rid of ISIS is to ameliorate the social dysfunction of its adherents, defeat them militarily, and “offer positive inspiring causes to replace the suicidal ones.” That sounds good, though it’s a long row to hoe. But how can we replace the “suicidal cause” unless we recognize what it is? Surely the prospect of Paradise is in there somewhere.

I’m not sure any of the NYT op-ed writers, including conservatives like Douthat, have ever explicitly mentioned that Islamic doctrine is a prime motivating force for ISIS. What a breath of fresh air it would be to see that said out loud!

Elaine Ecklund publishes more Templeton-funded accomodationism: “many scientists aren’t atheists”

December 6, 2015 • 10:30 am

The sociologist Elaine Ecklund is on a mission, one funded by Templeton: to show that scientists are more religious than most people think, and that the general perception of a conflict between science and religion is overblown. I don’t care so much about the perception of conflict (though according to a recent Pew poll, 59% of American adults see religion and science as conflicting), but I do care about how, using lots of Templeton money, Ecklund produces paper after paper claiming that scientists are basically religious. And that, she thinks, proves comity between science and faith.

I’ve written about Ecklund’s crusade several times on this site (for a compilation of posts, go here), and I and others have called her out for saying things that simply aren’t supported by her own data.

For example, in her book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think, Ecklund claimed that nearly 50% of “elite scientists” (those at the universities Ecklund deems “elite”) are “religious in the traditional sense.” But her data showed no such thing. As Jason Rosenhouse pointed out on EvolutionBlog, Ecklund’s data showed that 72% of scientists were nontheistic (compared to 16% of the general public), while only 23% of scientists said they had either no doubts about God’s existence or believed in God but sometimes had doubts. (Ecklund didn’t ask scientists about being “religious in the traditional sense,” so Jason did a generous estimate). Overall, the data in that book showed a stark difference in religious belief between scientists—particularly ones at “elite” universities—and “regular” Americans.

Ecklund has also claimed that “the majority of scientists at top research universities consider themselves ‘spiritual'”, but the real figure is not a majority but 26%! And if you look at her paper on this, you’ll see that even many of these “spiritual” scientists are nonreligious and see contemplating science itself as a spiritual experience.

Ecklund has twisted her data repeatedly, producing a message amiable to the public and much welcomed by Templeton. After all, who but a captious nonbeliever would actually look at the data?

Now, according to Rice University’s publicity website—a university where Ecklund’s osculation of faith has earned her a named professorship and directorship of a “Religion and Public Life” program—she and her colleagues are at it again, of course supported by Templeton.

Her New Big Finding: if you survey scientists all over the world, you get the surprising result that most of them are not atheists!  (Ecklund and her colleagues surveyed scientists in France, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Turkey, the US and the UK; I can’t find the paper on this survey on her c.v., either in press or submitted, so I’m not sure whether or where this has been published.) Well, in the US most scientists are nonbelievers, and I suspect they are in the UK, too, but this is what the Rice University blurb says:

While it is commonly assumed that most scientists are atheists, the global perspective resulting from the study shows that this is simply not the case.

“More than half of scientists in India, Italy, Taiwan and Turkey self-identify as religious,” Ecklund said. “And it’s striking that approximately twice as many ‘convinced atheists’ exist in the general population of Hong Kong, for example, (55 percent) compared with the scientific community in this region (26 percent).”

The researchers did find that scientists are generally less religious than a given general population. However, there were exceptions to this: 39 percent of scientists in Hong Kong identify as religious compared with 20 percent of the general population of Hong Kong, and 54 percent of scientists in Taiwan identify as religious compared with 44 percent of the general population of Taiwan. Ecklund noted that such patterns challenge longstanding assumptions about the irreligious character of scientists around the world.

I’m a bit curious about the Hong Kong/Taiwan result, and perhaps readers would have an explanation.

All I see in the data is a >50% claim for the religiosity of scientists in 4 of the 7 countries; and of course India, Turkey, and to a large extent Italy are religious countries. This is not a global generalization, though the puffery makes it seem like one.

And pardon me if, given Ecklund’s history of playing fast and loose with her categories, I take even these results with a grain of salt. I’d like to know what she means, for instance, by “identifying oneself as religious.”

Because Ecklund can’t show (with the possible exception of Taiwan and Hong Kong) that scientists are even close to being as religious as nonscientists, she has to sell her results as being surprising because, she claims, they overturn the impression is that most scientists are atheists. Well, in fact that’s probably true in most developed Western countries, so showing that most scientists aren’t mostly atheists in 4 countries (three of them religious) is hardly a stunning result. But this is the way you must sell your data to get Templeton dosh.

To make her results seem even more important, Ecklund claims that they have IMPORTANT IMPLICATIONS for the conduct of science and how we structure the relationship between science and religion. Here’s an “implication” for ethics:

In addition to the survey’s quantitative findings, the researchers found nuanced views in scientists’ responses during interviews. For example, numerous scientists expressed how religion can provide a “check” in ethically gray areas.

“(Religion provides a) check on those occasions where you might be tempted to shortcut because you want to get something published and you think, ‘Oh, that experiment wasn’t really good enough, but if I portray it in this way, that will do,’” said a biology professor from the U.K.

Well, besides the phrase “nuanced views” (always a red flag for a bad argument), this is pure nonsense. As if scientists have to rely on religion to keep them from distorting their data! (It hasn’t worked for Ecklund.) Since most scientists are honest, and most are atheists, at least in the U.S., there must be something else keeping them honest. Could it be . . . secular morality? And really, isn’t it better to rely on your own sense of the right thing to do rather than fear of retribution by a Celestial Dictator? It’s a sign of Ecklund’s desperation to soft-sell religion that she even uses quotes like this.

Oh, and there’s this:

Ecklund said that the study has many important implications that can be applied to university hiring processes, how classrooms and labs are structured and general public policy.

“Science is a global endeavor,” Ecklund said. “And as long as science is global, then we need to recognize that the borders between science and religion are more permeable than most people think.”

This is also bogus. She brings in the phrase “science is a global endeavor” because she wants to claim that although Anglophone scientists aren’t as religious as ones from, say, India and Turkey, we have to effect general changes in things like “university hiring processes, classroom and lab instructions, and public policy.” And what exactly is she recommending here: hire more religious scientists? Talk more about religion in the science classroom? The mind boggles.

As for “the borders between science and religion being more permeable than most people think”, what the data show—if she’s representing it correctly—is that in some countries most scientists are religious. But that doesn’t show that religion somehow oozes into science, or vice versa, although science has caused some of the faithful to abandon untenable dogma (e.g., creationism).

I’ll await the paper by Ecklund et al., if there is one, before commenting further. I wrote the Rice PR site to get a reference, but they haven’t answered me. Just let me show you the kind of money Ecklund’s raking in from Templeton for this stuff:

Ecklund’s current grant support from Templeton:

2012-2015 Ecklund, Elaine Howard, PI, “Religious Understandings of Science (RUS),” John Templeton Foundation ($1,087,000).

2012-2015 Ecklund, Elaine Howard, PI (Kirstin R.W. Matthews, Steven Lewis, Co-PIs), “Religion among Scientists in International Context (RASIC) – A Supplement Request for Including Scientists in India,” Templeton World Charity Foundation ($366,714).

2012-2015 Ecklund, Elaine Howard, PI, (Kirstin R.W. Matthews, Steven Lewis, Co-PIs), “Religion among Scientists in International Context (RASIC),” Templeton World Charity Foundation ($2,057,000).

Got that? It’s $3,510,714! Real scientists would kill for that kind of funding! Note that the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF) differs formally from the John Templeton foundation, with the TWCF being more philanthropic and religious.But all the dosh comes from Sir John’s legacy. Here’s part of the TWCF’s aims (my emphasis)

TWCF supports projects with a positive outlook, and does not fund projects with a substantially negative focus. For example, TWCF is interested in projects studying love, forgiveness, and generosity; it is not interested in the study of hatred, grudge-bearing, and cruelty, except where such study is done in order to bring added dimensions to the development of the positive qualities put forward by Sir John.

Showing that science and religion are in conflict is, of course, a “substantially negative result,” at least in the eyes of Templeton.

Note this, too:

TWCF typically does NOT fund:

  • advocacy of any particular religion or dogma;

  • proselytising activities that seek to curtail freedom of belief and open-minded inquiry;

  • projects that only involve the study of religious texts;

  • projects aimed at hostility towards religion, or that promote reductionist materialism

Sounds like a pluralistic version of the Discovery Institute.

HuffPo to students: Even if you’re not religious, go hang out with your college chaplain

August 29, 2015 • 11:30 am

Paul Brandeis Raushenbush is an ordained Baptist minister who also serves as the Huffington Post’s “Executive Editor Of Global Spirituality and Religion”. (He was previously Dean of Religious Life at Princeton University). In a new piece at PuffHo, “7 Reasons to hang out with your college chaplain (even if you’re not religious)“, he lays out his rationale for why all students, including nonbelievers, should, as he urges, “run not walk to your college chaplain’s office.” Here are his reasons (indented) and my off-the-cuff reactions:

1. Chaplains are interested in the big questions.

While college chaplains may at one point have been involved in the business of providing answers to the big questions, today most view it as their responsibility to provide provocative and open forums where students are able to grapple with the questions that are at the heart of a liberal arts education such as: Who am I? What kind of life do I want to live? What do I believe? How will I contribute to this world? These conversations are held in a non-graded space so it is ok, and expected not to know all the answers.

Well, you can also take a philosophy class (or talk to a philosophy professor) in which the Big Questions can be discussed without any reference to the unevidenced supernatural. Now I’m sure that some college chaplains have training in psychological counseling, and perhaps some also have training in philosophy or the history of philosophy. Further, I’m sure others aren’t the least bit interested in proselytizing or giving you answers that comport with their own faith. But I’d recommend discussing these issues instead with your fellow students, from whom you can learn much about life. And why not talk to the heads of (or members of) the local humanist and secular groups?

2. Chaplains have your back.

Spending time getting to know the chaplain, and letting the chaplain know you can be of immense help during the twists and turns of an education. There may be times when you just need someone with who you can talk to without fear that it will go beyond the two of you.

So can counselors and therapists, who are also required to maintain confidentiality. Virtually every American college has them on staff.

3. Chaplains go on fantastic trips.

This will depend from college to college but often the university chaplain has budget for trips for community service as well as spiritual exploration.

The “spiritual exploration” will no doubt involve trips to religious sites. As for “social justice work” and community service, see #7 below. But, if you just want a free trip to the Holy Land, well, go for it. . .

4. There is always food.

Yeah, pretty much always a place to get bagels, cookies, candy etc. It’s like a 7-Eleven in there.

Seriously?

5. It’s a place of peace.

Sometimes chaplains have inherited a beautiful chapel that they have opened up to be a special place on the hectic campus where you can go and sit, breath and reflect — and where nobody will bother you.

Indeed, but you don’t need to talk to the chaplain to go sit in a chapel. After I was brutally strip-searched in 1972 by the Guardia Civil in the Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona (they mistakenly took me for a thief), I was so shaken that I walked to the Gothic cathedral nearby and sat in a pew for an hour to compose myself. I didn’t need to speak to a priest.

6. Chaplains can help you understand your roommates.

There are three questions that I emphasized during my time as a college chaplain: What do you believe? What does your roommate believe? How will your beliefs influence your actions?

Why would they help you understand your roommates better than anyone else could?

7. Chaplain offices are often a locus for social justice work.

If you are looking for a way to make a positive difference in the world, your chaplain’s office is often one of the most active locations for service organizations and social justice groups.

Perhaps, but colleges usually have a panoply of secular groups dedicated to helping the poor, the marginalized, and the dispossessed.

In the end, nearly all the issues above apply not just to students, but to everyone. Why wouldn’t Rausenbush urge everyone to go to a minister, priest or rabbi, whether or not they’re in college?

Below is Raushenbush on HuffPo live explaining why chaplains can immensely enrich your college experience by being “challenging: intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually in the best way.” Click on the screenshot if you want to hear more.

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Now don’t get me wrong: insofar as they can serve as counselors or empathic figures, chaplains might sometimes be helpful. But since there are others who are actually trained to do that stuff, do you really need the religious overtones?

When I was in college I went to the chaplain exactly once: when I was trying to get conscientious objector status (CO) in the military draft. Had I not gotten that status, I had resolved to go to jail rather than fight in Vietnam or serve in the army.  (One of my friends, more of a purist than I, refused to even seek CO status and wound up in prison, where he had a rough time.)

At the time there was a religious-objection requirement for CO status, though the draft board could waive that on rare occasions when one’s objections to war were sufficiently philosophical to be seen as almost religious. But I was told that letters from credentialed religious people would help. So I went to the chaplain at William and Mary and laid out for him the reasons I was opposed to war—none of them religious. (I had already written a long paper for a philosophy class justifying my pacifism.)

The chaplain was sufficiently helpful to write me a letter. I also obtained letters from my father (an Army officer) and other military men who testified that they knew I had a sincere objection to killing. Those letters (and my term paper) were enough to get me my status without even having to be grilled by the Virginia draft board in Newport News. I then worked for 13 months as a hospital technician—my alternative service job.

A coda: Having realized that I and 2500 other COs were drafted into service illegally (I was a draft counselor and knew the law), I went to the ACLU and initiated a class-action suit against the government: Coyne et al. v. Nixon et al. What sweet words those were! The government had acted illegally by drafting conscientious objectors into alternative service but didn’t draft anyone into the army after 1972. We won in a half-hour hearing, and were all freed from service.

So yes, the chaplain was helpful, but only because the testimony of a religious figure was given special weight by the Selective Service.

At last it happens: a professor blames ISIS’s sex slavery on the West

August 23, 2015 • 1:45 pm

We’re used to leftist apologists blaming everything done by Islamic terrorists as the fault of the West and not the result of religious beliefs. This is of course a form of apologetics that simultaneously exculpates religion, satisfies the masochistic West-hating of many leftists, and patronizes Muslims: as underdogs, their behavior can’t lie within themselves, but in their stars—i.e., us.

Of course a problem with the “blame colonialism” thesis is that much Muslim violence is directed towards other Muslims (Sunni vs. Shia, for instance), or against groups like the Yazidis that aren’t responsible for “colonialism.” Further, if you read Lawrence Wright’s great book Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (a Pulitzer Prize winner), you’ll hear a persuasive case that the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood, and hence its successor terrorist organizations, lay not in colonialism but in pure hatred of the West’s immorality and modernity.

Nevertheless. the West-bashers and Muslim apologists persist. And now they’ve jumped the last shark, for we have, in the PuffHo, a piece that not only claims that the ubiquitous sex-slavery and rape by ISIS members has nothing to do with Islam, but that it’s actually the result of Western perfidy.

The author is Kecia Ali, an associate professor of religion at Boston University, and her piece is called “The truth about Islam and sex slavery history is more complicated than you think.” (When you see the words “more complicated than you think,” you know you’re in for some apologetics). Her piece was apparently motivated by a recent New York Times article on ISIS’s “theology of rape” by Rukimi Callimachi, a piece I wrote about recently. Callimachi’s piece is mandatory reading.

In brief, Ali’s arguments are these: yes, ISIS practices sex slavery, but that the practice is not inherent in Islam, as some Muslims don’t approve of it. Further, other societies had slaves, too, so human bondage is not uniquely Islamic. (Duh! Is any nefarious behavior limited to only one religion?). Further, ISIS’s sexual depredations are publicized by Western media only because they fit into our desired narrative of Islamic “barbarity.” Finally, the sexual abuse is all our fault: we invaded Iraq, and the U.S. Constitution permits slavery (!!!).

In short, Ali’s argument is so flawed that it is, as Wolfgang Pauli reportedly said about sloppy thinking in physics, “not even wrong.”

Her arguments:

1.  Many Muslims don’t sanction slavery and sex slavery, so ISIS’s position isn’t ubiquitous; ergo, it’s not religiously based. Ali’s quote:

Though ISIS soldiers attribute religious merit to enslavement of Yazidi girls and women, many other Muslims, like those ISIS criticizes in its propaganda, oppose its actions and categorically reject the possibility of contemporary slavery. Callimachi suggests that “Scholars of Islamic theology disagree … on the divisive question of whether Islam actually sanctions slavery.” She quotes me expressing the position that “sexual relationships with unfree women” were “widespread” in the seventh century, and not “a particular religious institution.” Princeton theology researcher Cole Bunzel, her opposing voice, disagrees. He points out, reasonably, that repeated scriptural and jurisprudential references to slaveholding (which include the permissibility of sex with “those your right hands possess”) exist. While he notes that “you can argue that it is no longer relevant and has fallen into abeyance, ISIS would argue that these institutions need to be revived.” This is a fair representation of ISIS’s position. Yet this does not mean, as critics of Islam would have it, that the Islamic State’s position on the legitimacy of owning — and having sex with — slaves is unquestionable. (For premodern Muslim jurists, as well as for those marginal figures who believe that the permission still holds, the category “rape” doesn’t apply: ownership makes sex lawful; consent is irrelevant.)

Yes, there’s disagreement among Muslims on this issue, but only because slavery is currently seen as immoral by some. But that isn’t the case in the Qur’an, nor is it in the Bible. As Ali admits, the prophet Muhammed himself owned slaves, including female ones whom he impregnated. Christians have retreated from the Old Testament’s approbation of slavery, but ISIS is not like modern Christianity. ISIS is a group that wants to return to the “fundamentals” of Islam, restoring the original caliphate—a caliphate that, of course, permitted sex slavery. Ali adds this:

Others scholars point out that just because the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it doesn’t mean Muslims must always do so; indeed, the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point. It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so. Anyone making that argument about biblical slavery would be ridiculed.

Indeed, but recall that the Qur’an is taken far more literally as “scripture” by Muslims of all stripes than is the Bible taken literally by Christians. Ali’s argument here is that because some Muslims don’t accept slavery, then sex slavery doesn’t come from religion and, in fact, that it’s wrong to take it from religion. That’s as fatuous as claiming that because Orthodox and Conservative Jews observe the Sabbath punctiliously, while most Reform Jews don’t, then observing the Sabbath doesn’t come from religion.

In truth, ISIS is perhaps the truest adherent to the original form of Islam, while Muslims who oppose sex slavery, moral as they are, are deviating from the roots of the faith.

2. Because other societies did it too, slavery wasn’t particularly Islamic. Ali:

Still, early Muslim slavery (like early Muslim marriage) wasn’t particularly a religious institution, and jurists’ ideas about the superiority of free over slave (and male over female) were widely shared across religious boundaries.

. . . In the thousand-plus years in which Muslims and non-Muslims, including Christians, actively engaged in slaving, they cooperated and competed, enslaving and being enslaved, buying, selling and setting free. This complex history, which has generated scores of publications on Muslims and slavery in European languages alone, cannot be reduced to a simplistic proclamation of religious doctrine.

And, finally, since other tyrants in the Middle East promote sexual abuse for ideological reasons, it can’t be religious:

By focusing on religious doctrine as an explanation for rape, Americans ignore the presence of sexual abuse and torture in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and in Assad’s Syria by the regime and other factions in its vicious ongoing war.

This is the argument that if some evil deeds are practiced by diverse societies, and for diverse reasons, then religion is exculpated. It’s like saying that because Jews cut off the foreskins of their male infants, and so do Muslims, then that’s not based on religion at all.  I’m distressed, but not surprised, that a scholar like Ali can make an argument like this—one that exculpates Islam as a motivation for any evils. But this is what we’ve learned to expect from left-wing academics; and I’m sad to say that my beloved Left is now practicing such intellectual sleight of hand.

3. The West is exaggerating the dimension of the problem. Get this:

None of this is to deny the horror of the systematic rapes Callimachi reports or the revolting nature of the theology she describes. It is to point out that there are reasons why the story of enslaved Yazidis is one that captures the front page of the New York Times: it fits into familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity.

Now there’s West-bashing raised to a high art! Although the New York Times may have a liberal slant, the Yazidi story (which was extremely powerful) is only one of a series on ISIS’s actions, and it’s there not because it demonizes Muslims, but because it alerts us to the horrors going on in the Middle East, horrors that we all must understand and ultimately address.

4. Finally, it’s all the West’s fault anyway. Ali’s last paragraph gives the game away:

In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime — deflect attention from partial U.S. responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq. Sanctions followed by military invasion and its brutal aftermath laid the groundwork for the situation Callimachi describes. Moral high ground is in short supply. The core idea animating enslavement is that some lives matter more than others. As any American who has been paying attention knows, this idea has not perished from the earth.

Please, Dr. Ali, could you tell us: given ISIS’s aim of restoring the Caliphate and its murder of other Muslims and non-colonial Yazidis, how our invasion of Iraq, dumb as it was, “laid the groundwork for the situation Callimachi describes”? Is our invasion of Iraq morally equivalent, as you imply, to the rape, torture, and enslavement of thousands of Yazidi women, and the murder of their husbands and sons? Are we to be held responsible for every act of torture and brutality committed by terrorists in the Middle East?

I reject that claim, and make the counterclaim that Ali is trying to exculpate not only Islam, but Muslims, from the acts they commit, blaming those acts on us instead. That’s false and patronizing, as well as unscholarly and disingenuous. Ali has a bill to sell, and is clearly not an objective scholar.

As for the US Constitution permitting enslavement, well, click on the link Ali provides, and it takes you to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, to wit:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

That eliminated slavery and peonage in the U.S., a decision buttressed by the Peonage Act of 1867, which prohibited holding people in involuntary servitude until they work off debts. If enslavement and involuntary servitude remain, it is as criminal punishment, when prisoners must work as a condition of their sentence. (The more onerous forms of this, like chain gangs, no longer exist. Now prisoners make license plates, work in machine shops, or tend gardens.) But work as punishment is not at all equivalent, despite what Ali implies, to what ISIS is doing to Yazidi women. Her bringing up the very strict 13th Amendment, which basically outlawed all slavery of non-convicts, is meant to deflect attention from ISIS’s sex slavery.

I have to say that I find Ali’s argument truly revolting—not just because it’s intellectually weak and actually deceptive, but because it debases the entire realm of university scholarship of which I’m a member. When I see pieces like hers—lame apologetics that are meant from the outset to reinforce an opinion already held—I thank Ceiling Cat that I am a scientist: a member of the guild in which using your scholarship to reinforce emotional commitments is considered a sin.