Category: osculating the rump of faith

Ex-Muslims of North America booted from Starbucks for wearing their group’s tee shirts

September 4, 2018 • 12:00 pm

I’m a great admirer of the Ex-Muslims of North America organization (EXMNA), whose President is Muhammad Syed and whose Executive Director is Sarah Haider. They actually do stuff rather than just talking, and they’re courageous to do it in public knowing that an apostate Muslim is, to many active Muslims, deserving of death. I suspect these apostates are even worse than Jews to Islamists! At any rate, to be a public ex-Muslim these days is to evince bravery.

And you also court the disapprobation of non-Muslim Leftists, who revere Muslims as Oppressed People of Color and demonize those who criticize the religion or its pervasive oppression. You’re also spurned by the many people who are simply afraid to be around ex-Muslims because their mere proximity means you might be in danger—but even if not you’re certainly around “Islamophobes.”

That explains the incident described on the EXMNA website (click on screenshot to read about it).

What happened is that EXMNA members were in Houston handing out flyers at the Islamic Society of North America’s annual conference, as well as speaking to conference attendees. That itself is a brave thing to do.  Taking a break, the EXMNA people repaired to a nearby Starbuck’s coffee shop. They weren’t protesting there, but simply looking for coffee.

But they were wearing teeshirts that said “I’m an Ex-Muslim, Ask Me Why” and “God Love is Greatest”.  Those aren’t even that “in your face”, but it was enough for Starbucks to kick them out. As the report notes:

“I was surprised. I was simply drinking my iced coffee and scrolling through my phone, and they told me I needed to leave, so I asked why”, says Lina an ex-Muslim Syrian woman who had traveled to the conference on behalf of EXMNA. “I was told that they are not allowing protestors at the property, I assured the woman that I was not a protestor. She then asked me if I was part of the event or a guest at the hotel. I was neither. I was then told that even though I was a paying customer, I was not allowed to be on the premise as it was reserved for guests and event members for the weekend and that they will not be allowing anyone else on their private property. However, I noticed the Starbucks was still open to the public and I didn’t see anyone else being asked to leave.”

In other words, Starbucks was feeding them a line of bullshit.

Upon additional inquiry after leaving the premises, the hotel employees stated on video that the EXMNA group was not welcome due to their T-shirts, and repeatedly claimed the group was “protesting”, a charge which all volunteers explicitly denied multiple times.

“This appears to be a case of discrimination,” says President of Ex-Muslims of North America, Muhammad Syed. “We were asked to leave the premises and informed that we could only enter the premises if we removed the shirts, none of which stated anything inflammatory. The treatment was unjust and especially cruel considering the plight of ex-Muslims. We are killed and abused all over the world for our disbelief. It is unconscionable that companies like Starbucks and Hilton acquiesce to conservative religious sensibilities”.

. . . Armin Navabi, an Irani atheist activist, was in Houston on behalf of EXMNA. “Our goal was to see how tolerant Muslims can be, to our delight, we found many Muslims were tolerant”, he stated. “On the other hand, we found that many Westerners were intolerant. It seems that “saviors” of Muslims are more sensitive about anything that could potentially offend Muslims than Muslims are themselves.”

Hazar, another Syrian ex-Muslim who was in Houston for ISNA, states “I expected negative pushback of our presence by ISNA itself but in fact, most Muslims we talked to were welcoming. And so I certainly didn’t expect to be discriminated against on American soil by the Hilton staff for refusing to be closeted about my ex-Muslim identity. It was important for me to represent ex Muslims at ISNA because we are some of the lucky few that are able to do so with minimal consequences in comparison to those of us who aren’t privileged enough to live in a democratic society. And yet today, the treatment we received by the staff at the Hilton felt just as dehumanizing.”

Here’s a video of the EXMNA members getting the boot, apparently because they’re considered “part of the protest”.  Even someone not wearing a shirt with any motto was apparently prohibited because he was “part of the protest”.  But I’m sure they’d let Muslims in wearing shirts that said “Allah is greatest”, or religionists saying “I’m not an atheist. Ask me why.” This is simply discrimination against ex-Muslims.

I’m not sure about the legality of what Starbucks did, but I’m certainly going to write to them in protest. (Their drinks are overpriced, anyway.) You can see where to write below the video.

Reader Patrick, who sent me a link to the EXMNA article, adds this:

The ISNA conference took place at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston.  The nearest Hilton is the Hilton Americas, which does have a Starbucks.  Their address is 1600 Lama St., Houston, TX 77010.  Their phone number is (877) 421-9062.  Starbucks corporate complaint page is:  https://customerservice.starbucks.com/app/contact/ask/
A bit of my own complaint (I used the “In our stores” form and asked for a response):

A confused paean to faith in the New York Times

March 29, 2018 • 9:25 am

On many liberal sites these days, including the New York Times, we see an increasing coddling of religion—exactly the opposite of what should be happening as secularism in the U.S. increases. I’m not sure why this is; perhaps it’s a spillover from the Leftist reluctance to criticize Islam (and perforce to praise all faiths), or perhaps it’s a pushback against the death of religion in the West. Regardless, much of this kind of writing is either irrational or, as in the case of the new piece below, makes no sense whatsoever.

Click on the screenshot to read this confused, space-wasting op-ed:

First, the author. The NYT describes Jennifer Finney Boylan as “a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College of Columbia University and the author of the novel “Long Black Veil.” Her Twitter description says she is the author of “15 Books. [JAC: the list is here] NYTimes op/ed writer. Trustee, PEN America; former Co-chair of the Board, GLAAD. Professor of English, Barnard/Columbia.” She’s a transgender woman, the first to head up GLAAD (a gay media-monitoring institute), and her website is here.

What the article seems to describe (it’s hard to tell because it’s both poorly written and loaded to the gunwales with overemotionality) is an aging transgender woman who lost her faith when she was young, and then recaptured it in some form a few years ago. But did she? The “agony” she describes appears to be her reluctance to go into a church, which seemed to have salubrious results. The “I didn’t get it until I was older” is unclear because it’s uncertain what she “gets” (she doesn’t really seem to become a believer), and as for “belief doesn’t come easy”, well, it’s not clear that even now she has any religious belief. What the piece conveys is the trite observation that it’s great to have loving friends, and that for Boylan, Jesus prompted that feeling. But read it for yourself.

Here are a few excerpts following Boylan’s initial description of Balaam’s talking donkey in Numbers—one of the things that caused her to reject the reliability of Scripture:

Back then, I thought that doubt (also known as “common sense”) was my roadblock to a spiritual life. Now, these many years later, I have come to believe that doubt is, in fact, the drive wheel of faith, not its obstacle.

She doesn’t describe how doubt drives faith, and that sentence is simply left hanging.

One Sunday morning a few years ago, I wandered out of my apartment in New York without having a clear sense of where I was going. The next thing I knew I had pulled into a nearby church, where I looked around suspiciously, and thought, “Please, God, don’t make me do it.” I sat in a pew.

The sermon that day was not about talking donkeys. It was about feeding the hungry. It was about working for equality. It was about justice for minorities, and gay and lesbian and bisexual and trans people. It was about giving refuge to people — including immigrants and refugees — who do not have a home.

It was, in the end, about only one thing: the necessity of loving one another.

Well, Jesus, I thought. I could get behind that.

What we see, then, is that Boylan was fighting any exposure to religious faith (is that the “agony” she describes? I don’t think so, as it’s the agony of faith, not unbelief). Then she hears a sermon about social justice, and suddenly she is infused with love.

That’s fine, of course; there’s no doubt that religion has prompted some good acts. (I’m not agreeing, however, that in the net religion has been a good social force.) But just because it does that doesn’t say anything about the factuality of Scripture. In fact, Christian scripture has also led people to hate: to hate gays, to hate women, to hate blacks, to hate Jews (millions were murdered on the claim that they killed Christ), and so on. Boylan seems simply to have been ready to love people more, and in this case a church visit was the catalyst.

But she’s clearly softened on Christianity.  In the end, her church experience—and I don’t know if it’s continuing—simply infuses her with feelings of love. What this has to do with vindicating faith or prompting “belief” that’s “worth it” remains mysterious:

We have had hard lives, my old friends and I, in some ways. Since we first met in 1970, there have been all kinds of misfortunes. There have been car accidents and job losses, divorces and heartbreaks, newborn babies whose lives were endangered. One of us is in a wheelchair now.

But here we all are, on the threshold of 60, and still deeply connected to one another. That day in New Jersey, as I sat there with these precious souls at the shore — can I call them anything but old men now? — it occurred to me that I have seen things a lot more improbable than talking donkeys turn out to be true. What greater miracle could there be than friendships that last a lifetime?

The next morning, my friend Kenny and I were up early enough to see the sun rise over the Atlantic, standing on the same beach where we had stood, nearly half a century before, as teenage boys. Thirty years ago, before I came out as trans, he’d been my best man.

He is still my best man.

Listen: I do not know if an actual person named Jesus rose from the dead. I hope that this is true, but I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

I know this though: On Sunday morning I stood on a beach with the friend of my youth, our arms around each other’s shoulders. The rising sun burst over the ocean, and the light shone on our faces.

And the donkeys talked! This is simply breathy, overblown, and just plain bad writing.  What was the country’s best newspaper doing when it accepted this piece?

What is the point of Boylan’s purple prose? If it’s that religion makes some people do good, why didn’t she just say that?  But of course lots of people do good and don’t need religion as the catalyst. Music, for instance, is another such catalyst, and perhaps Boylan could have skipped her agony by listening to James Taylor (see also here):

New York Times editorial page editor makes the “Little People” argument for religion

March 1, 2018 • 10:30 am

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

—Karl Marx  A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. 

As “mainstream” publications like the New York Times and New Yorker become increasingly regressive, we can expect to see more osculation of religion, even though the tenets of religion are false and the U.S. is becoming more secular. (One characteristic of Authoritarian Leftists is their refusal to criticize faith.)  In an op-ed yesterday, David Leonhardt, a columnist and the associate editorial page editor for the New York Times, not only praises a pro-religion column by conservative Ross Douthat, but cites a study purporting to show that religion is a net good in the world (click on the screenshot to read the piece):

An excerpt:

The benefits of faith. In his Sunday column this week, Ross Douthat issued something of a challenge to secular liberals. They think of themselves as empiricists, Ross wrote, but they’re actually close-minded about several powerful forces for good, starting with religion.

“When people and societies are genuinely curious,” he continued, “they are very reasonably curious about everything, including things happening in their bodies and their consciousness and more speculative realms.”

If you read Douthat’s column, you’ll see it’s a critique of Steve Pinker’s thesis, described in his new book Enlightenment Now, that the world is getting better, and that a big reason for that improvement is the rejection of dogma and superstition pushed by religion and faith. In fact, Douthat claims that, contrary to all reason, being irrational—whether that’s manifested in astrology, spiritualism, or religion—actually promotes the curiosity that pushes science forward. As Douthat argues:

. . . in many instances the interests that Pinker dismisses as irrational hugger-mugger, everything from astrology to spiritualism, have tended to strengthen during periods of real scientific ferment. It’s why Isaac Newton loved alchemy and the Victorians loved séances; it’s why charismatic Christianity has spread very naturally with economic development in Africa and Latin America and why the Space Age coincided with the spread of all those health food stores.

Which is why if Pinker and others are genuinely worried about a waning appreciation of the inquiring scientific spirit, they should consider the possibility that some of their own smug secular certainties might be part of the problem — that they might, indeed, be stifling the more comprehensive kind of curiosity upon which the scientific enterprise ultimately depends.

Smug secular certainties, indeed? Has he read Pinker’s book, which is based on data? As usual, what issues from Douthat’s pie-hole is nonsense:  religion in the West is waning strongly, regardless of the spread of “charistmatic Christianity” in Africa and Latin America. Douthat fails to realize that the economic development in places like Africa and Latin America depends largely on science produced in more secular countries, and that correlation between scientific ferment and superstition (even if it’s real, and I Douthat) is not causation. Read Douthat’s column if you want to see an Orwellian conviction that superstition actually increases our respect for empirical data.

Back to Leonhardt’s, who then cites data that I find a bit dubious (see below):

The column reminded me of a pattern that, as a secular liberal myself, I’ve long found inconvenient: Religion is correlated with a lot of healthy behaviors and positive outcomes. All else equal, religious people have higher educational attainment, earn more money, use drugs and alcohol less and commit fewer crimes, according to a long line of social-science studies (that have frequently been done by secular liberals).

The question about these findings is the old correlation-causation question: Does religious faith lead to these healthy behaviors? Or is something else, independent of faith, causing them?

He then cites a 78-page study—and I haven’t yet read it—but the link is in the column’s excerpt below (my emphasis):

A clever new study tries to offer some answers. It’s not anywhere near the last word on the matter, obviously, but it is intriguing.

. . . The group taught 15 weeks of classes to more than 6,000 very poor Filipinos. Some of the students received a version that combined religious teachings with advice on health and employment. Others received only the nonreligious parts. By comparing the different batches of students, the economists hoped to isolate the effect of religion.

The results: Six months later, those who received the religious education indeed reported feeling more guided by religion. They were also earning more money, largely by shifting from agricultural work to higher-paying jobs, such as fishing or self-employment. And even small pay increases can be a big deal for people living in extreme poverty.

. . . No study is definitive. But I do find the overall evidence of religion’s ancillary benefits to be strong. That evidence hasn’t made me personally religious. I’m still quite comfortable with my secularism. But the evidence has made me more humble and open-minded about how the world can go about solving some of its problems.

Does this convince you that religiosity has “strong ancillary benefits”? Of course I’m biased against that, but let’s look at the description. The subjects were “very poor Filipinos”, not reasonably well-off Westerners, which, after all, is whom Leonhardt is addressing. Even taking these results at face value, remember that the most religious people in both the U.S. and across nations are those with the lowest well being, and thus tend to look to a heavenly being for succor rather than their governments. This might explain the “feeling more guided by religion” part. After all, if you get a religious education, why wouldn’t you feel more guided by religion?

As for earning more money, I’d want to see the effects of four treatments: “religion alone”, “religion combined with advice on health and employment”, “advice on health and employment alone” and “no treatment.”  Perhaps a reader can have a look at the survey, and see if “religion alone” has a bigger effect than “advice on health and employment”, or if the combined treatment had a bigger effect than “religion alone.”

At any rate, this one study in the Philippines, showing that religion combined with secular advice is better than secular advice alone (I’m presuming here), flies in the face of other data that Leonhardt doesn’t mention. As I’ve discussed before, in both Faith Versus Fact and a 2012 paper in Evolution (free access with Unpaywall), the most religious countries in the world are those with the lowest well being. Conversely, countries with the highest well-being (and, according to a UN survey, the happiest inhabitants) are the most secular countries: countries like Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, and so on. (That includes the U.S., which using sociological measures doesn’t have such a “successful society”.)

This holds true among states of the U.S. as well, though I don’t have the correlation at hand. The “red states”, which are highly religious, tend to have lower well being than “blue states”, with more secularist and liberals. Here are two figures from a post I did in 2012, showing data from a Gallup poll”. First, the degree of religiosity in American states:

And overall well being:

 

There’s a striking correlation, at least visually: those states with the lowest well being have the highest religiosity. (I’m willing to be that this is statistically significant.) That, and the data among countries, does not suggest that religion motivates people to better their lot. Of course these are just correlations, but sociologists such as Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have theorized that religiosity is a response to low well being: if your society is not taking care of you, you look for solace and help to gods. An alternative hypothesis is that believing in God makes you create worse societies.  The first explanation (first adumbrated by Marx in his famous quote) makes more sense to me, but the second may carry a lick of sense as well. If you’re hopeless and think that either god will help you or that your lot will be better in the next life, you have less impetus to improve your society.

Either way, the data from everyplace outside the small group of poor Filipinos discussed by Leonhardt refutes his thesis on the effect of religion on material well being. Of course, he doesn’t mention that.

What bothers me about Leonhardt’s article is the fact that, as he admits, he himself is a nonbeliever—or at least a “secularist” who isn’t religious.  Presumably, then, he thinks religion is good for the “little people”, as it inspires them to work harder and make more money, even if the tenets of religion aren’t true. Good for thee but not for me!  How incredibly condescending and patronizing can one be? Does he seriously think that teaching religion to people is one way “the world can go about solving some of its problems”?

And remember, this patronizing git, who pretends to be “humble,” is largely in charge of the entire op-ed section of the country’s best newspaper.

h/t: Greg

Templeton gives millions of dollars to promote “intellectual humility”

February 6, 2018 • 10:30 am

Perhaps readers can help me out with this one. First, remember that the goal of the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) has always been what its namesake specified in its will—Sir John’s money was to be used to promote the use of science as a way of helping make “spiritual discoveries”, i.e., entangling fact and faith. As Wikipedia notes:

. . . . .one of the major goals of the Templeton Foundation is to proliferate the monetary support of spiritual discoveries. The Templeton Foundation encourages research into “big questions” by awarding philanthropic aid to institutions and people who pursue the answers to such questions through “explorations into the laws of nature and the universe, to questions on the nature of love, gratitude, forgiveness, and creativity.”[29]

Templeton asserts that the purpose of the Templeton Foundation is as follows:

We are trying to persuade people that no human has yet grasped 1% of what can be known about spiritual realities. So we are encouraging people to start using the same methods of science that have been so productive in other areas, in order to discover spiritual realities.

— Sir John Templeton, Interview with Financial Intelligence Report

What, pray tell, is a “spiritual reality”?

“Big Questions”, of course, is a euphemism for “spiritual and religious questions”, as the JTF has been sweeping the religious aspect of its mission under the rug. Here’s part of its mission statement (click on screenshot to go to site):

Note the questions. Some are already answered by science (Do we have free will? Is evolution directional? Are we immortal?), and the answers are all “no”. But of course the motivation for those questions is religious, not scientific. As for “What is love?”, do they seriously think they’ll be able to answer that? However, this shows the religious foundations that still underlie the JTF’s activities.

And the JTF is loaded. Loaded with so much dosh that they can easily skew the direction of research—in science, in sociology, in psychology, and in theology—toward the aims they want. Look at this money! $77.4 million awarded just in 2016! And the endowment is huge!

Reader Michael called my attention to one of Templeton’s recent funding areas: “science and humility”, for whose study the JTF has appropriated millions of dollars. For example, in 2013-2015 it gave 2.7 million dollars to St. Louis University to study “the philosophy and theology of intellectual humility”.

Here’s the original announcement of the grant from St. Louis University . (The middle two paragraphs come straight from Templeton’s description of the grant, in the screenshot below).

The emphases are mine:

The Philosophy and Theology of Intellectual Humility

Saint Louis University has received a generous grant from the The John Templeton Foundation to explore the subject of intellectual humility. The Templeton Foundation will contribute over $2.7 million to the project, with contributions by SLU bringing the total grant to over $3 million. The Philosophy and Theology of Intellectual Humility project will focus on a variety of philosophical and theological issues relevant to the topic of intellectual humility. The project is being led by John Greco and Eleonore Stump.

Intellectual humility is an intellectual virtue, a character trait that allows the intellectually humble person to think and reason well. It is plausibly related to open-mindedness, a sense of one’s own fallibility, and a healthy recognition of one’s intellectual debts to others. If intellectual humility marks a mean between extremes, then related vices (on the one side) would be intellectual arrogance, closed-mindedness, and overconfidence in one’s own opinions and intellectual powers, and (on the other side) undue timidity in one’s intellectual life, or even intellectual cowardice.

The project will focus on a variety of philosophical and theological issues relevant to the topic of intellectual humility, as informed by current research in the empirical sciences, including: virtue epistemology; regulative epistemology; peer disagreement; intellectual humility, intellectual autonomy and deference to authority; religious pluralism; divine hiddenness; intellectual humility and theological method; biases, heuristics, dual-process theories and evolution; intersubjectivity and mind reading.

The Saint Louis University effort complements the activities and research occurring under Templeton’s Science of Intellectual Humility project by encouraging philosophers and theologians to integrate empirical research on questions surrounding intellectual humility into their own investigations.

Note, please, that this project is “informed by current research in the empirical sciences”. What I take this to mean is that the project is aimed, as is so often the case with Templeton, at doing down naturalism and criticizing “scientism”, at the same time promoting religion by looking for “divine hiddenness” and using the “theological method”. They don’t appear to address this topic “informed by current work in theology”.  While scientists themselves can be less than humble, science itself is, and any scientist saying they were using faith to discern the truth would be laughed out of the field. All of us, even if personally arrogant, must couch our findings in terms like “this suggests that. . . ” or “we suspect. . .”. Yet theologians generally operate with certainty or near certainty, and nobody accuses them of a “lack of humility.”

As far as I can see, then, “intellectual humility” is aiming an arrow directly at science, not at theology. For when the dust settles, theology and religion are far more arrogant than science, with doubt being at best a trivial part of theology, rarely encouraged in religion, with religion having no tools to ascertain what is really true. What can be more arrogant than holding as firm truth that there is a God and his son/alter ego Jesus was killed and resurrected to expiate our sins? Or that Allah dictated the Qur’an to Muhammad through an angel, and that Qur’an is the final truth. It will be a cold day in July when Templeton decides to examine the “intellectual arrogance” of theologians!

And now Templeton has given another $5.75 million to the Humanities Institute of the University of Connecticut (click on screenshot) for another mushbrained humility initiative:

Part of the announcement (my emphasis):

The John Templeton Foundation has awarded $5.75 million to the UConn Humanities Institute for research on balancing humility and conviction in public life.

The grant is the largest for the humanities ever awarded to UConn, and is one of the largest humanities-based research grants ever awarded in the United States.

. . . The grant will allow the Humanities Institute, which is part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, to sponsor three high-profile public forums; summer institutes for high school teachers on how to incorporate intellectual humility into their classes; an online course on project themes; and a series of awareness-raising media initiatives. The co-principal investigator for the project is Brendan Kane, an associate professor of history and associate director of the Humanities Institute.

The project’s research activities include a visiting fellowship program hosting leaders from the academic, media, and non-profit sectors; an international research funding competition targeting interdisciplinary teams of researchers pursuing project themes; four research workshops hosted at UConn; and a collaboration with UConn’s Mellon Foundation-funded “Scholarly Communications Design Studio” for the presentation of project research in new interactive modalities.

And their definition of “intellectual humility”:

For the purposes of this CFP, intellectual humility can be understood to involve the owning of one’s cognitive limitations, a healthy recognition of one’s intellectual debts to others, and low concern for intellectual domination and certain kinds of social status. It is closely allied with traits such as open-mindedness, a sense of one’s fallibility, and being responsive to reasons. Traits and behaviors opposed to intellectual humility and its allied traits, then, would include closed-mindedness, overconfidence in one’s opinions and intellectual powers, dogmatism, an exaggerated sense of intellectual autonomy, reluctance to pursue and consider new evidence, intellectual arrogance, and intellectual vanity.

For the life of me, I can’t see the value of investing $8 million in studies of “humility”.  My take, as I said, is that this money is meant to fund studies of “scientism”: the overreach of science beyond its so-called proper boundaries, and the role that close-mindedness among scientists (e.g., towards God) impedes intellectual advance.

But I welcome other people’s takes. Templeton is really good at cloaking its accommodationist agenda, and I can’t quite figure this one out.

Finally, a cartoon comment from reader Pliny the in Between:

 

National Geographic has a new book on famous Bible characters

January 26, 2018 • 12:30 pm

Reader Graham saw this for sale in his local supermarket:

It turns out that this is actually a book that came out in November, and the Amazon sales don’t look very good.

Now I haven’t seen this, and Graham didn’t describe its contents, but my question is this: what the hell is National Geographic publishing stuff like this? As I’ve described several times, recently the magazine has been on a pro-religion and pro-Christianity kick, cranking out books, movies, and articles implying that what’s described in the Bible is real.  Thanks, Rupert Murdoch! (He and his Fox network bought the magazine.)

Even the Amazon site doesn’t describe the book’s contents. The only substantive discussion of what’s in it is on this i24 broadcast (an Israeli television station). Although the guest, “spiritual mentor” Ronnie Hatchwell says this: “At the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether the stories happened or they didn’t, but they do influence us”, she does pitch the woo later on (“we’re all searching for the god within us”; “we’re always drawn to this bigger power, which is God”, etc.). To judge where Hatchwell’s coming from, here’s what she says on her website:

Ever since I was a little girl In Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harrari, Zimbabwe) and then a  teenager in London, England, I have encountered telepathic and out of body experiences. I always felt that there was more to life as we see it.

Sometime in the late 80’s I underwent an experience which was to change the way I perceived life in general.

I began what is known as channeling – it first came about as “automatic writing” where I would receive non stop information. This was an extremely high intelligence which to my knowledge at the time had no resemblance to anything I had ever come across. This information always signed itself off as SOL, which I was later informed to be the initials of SERVICE OF THE LORD -in Kaballah “Malachei Ha”sharet”- I once took the writings to a Kabalist who was quick to say that the information that I receive is exactly that of Kaballah and that because it comes through me the language is easier for the laymen…

Ooookay. . . .  What appears to be going on here is that National Geographic, which was hemorrhaging money until it was bought out by Murdoch and his empire, is trying to drum up business by adding a big dose of Christianity to the National Geographic brand. Does anybody here still subscribe to this rag?

h/t: Graham

Garry Wills whitewashes the Qur’an

December 25, 2017 • 11:30 am

Garry Wills is one of those smart people—one of those prolific and thoughtful intellectuals—who baffles me because he’s an observant Catholic. I can never fully understand how people who are smart and reality-oriented, and whose lives are prosperous and well ordered, can nevertheless go to church and pray to a being for whom there’s no evidence. If he believes in the Transubstantiation and Resurrection, so much the worse.

In one way all religions occupy the same boat: that vessel floating on the sea of supernatural belief. And so it’s common for believers in one sect to defend those in others, even if those other sects fosters dangerous extremism.

And so we have scholar and author Garry Wills pulling a Karen Armstrong/Reza Aslan tactic: writing a book about the Qu’ran and telling us that we’ve all misunderstood it—that’s it’s not only not that bad, but actually a wonderful book about the love of God for humans, and about how humans should love each other.

The review notes that Wills claims that the Qu’ran is basicially a document of concordat, of love, and even of respect for women. And of course “jihad” doesn’t mean crusade, but something nice:

In fact, [Wills[ points out, jihad does not mean “holy war.” It means “striving” — as in striving to lead a moral life. The main point of the Quran’s discussion of violence is to establish limitations on its use, and to “abstain from violence to the degree that that is possible.” While a few endlessly cited verses have to do with violence, “the overall tenor is one of mercy and forgiveness, which are evoked everywhere, almost obsessively.” This is what is striven for in the Quran, not war.

Well, I’ve read the Qur’an, and this is not the Quran I find—the one that’s filled with threats of hell and calls to smite unbelievers and apostates.  Yes, there is no explicit call in the Qur’an for women to cover their bodies, and yes, jihad has several meanings, but for some sects of Islam that doctrine has been turned even more violent through interpretation. This is the opposite of Christianity, in which secular morality has tamed the more violent behavior of its adherents. Islam has yet to undergo such a reformation, and is less likely to do so because because its words are taken more literally.

What Wills has done, apparently (and I will read his book to check) is construe the Qur’an in as favorable a light as possible, just as Karen Armstrong has done. Why? I can only guess that because he’s religious, he has a propensity to see only the good in other religions and in their gods. And you don’t make yourself popular by writing a book showing that the Qur’an is filled with threats, violence, and hatred.

I urge you to read the Qur’an for yourself (be sure to get a translation that is generally approved by scholars) and see if you can find the benignity, love, and peace that Wills sees. Judge for yourselves.

But I wonder how Wills would excuse the god of the Old Testament, who is explicitly genocidal, judgmental, and thoroughly nasty. And how does he deal with the fact that some branches of Islam, using the very words of the Qur’an, have used their faith to justify horrible acts. Does he know more about what it means than do the imams?

UPDATE: Oct. 6, 2018. Here’s an interesting discussion of the Qu’ran at the podcast site Made You Think. Go here to hear it.  Some topics:

  • The different writing styles of the Quran at the beginning and the end
  • Interpretation of Arabic and context at the time of Muhammad
  • Strategies to build and spread virally a set of beliefs
  • Changing views on sex, alcohol and women
  • The validity of 600 AD concepts on today’s world
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Giles Fraser says Meghan Markle will make the royals more Jesus-like

December 2, 2017 • 10:00 am

I swear, I used to read the Guardian as my go-to paper in the UK years ago, but I wouldn’t read it now. One reason is its mawkish catering to faith, as instantiated by the new column below. The author, Giles Fraser, is a broadcaster, writer, and Anglican priest. He’s combined the last two into a thoroughly ridiculous column (ongoing name, “Loose Canon”) with a misleading heading (click on it to go to article)

After beefing that the idea of “monarchy” in England is the “Old Testament” idea of kingship—one of grandeur and authority—Fraser longs for the return of the “New Testament” idea of kingship (yes, for Britain), which emphasizes humility and the hegemony of religious law over secular law. (He quotes the Archbishop of Canterbury as saying that he, Justin Welby, is an “extremist” because he puts his faith above the law.)

Here’s Fraser saying why he wants the monarchy to be more like Jesus:

But the theological picture is not yet complete. Because, for Christians, this monarchy is not as it is popularly imagined. Indeed, the kingship of Jesus is a total inversion of the whole power and gold crowns and wealth thing. Power is renounced. His coronation was on a cross, wiping spit from his face. His crown was made up of thorns, digging into his head. The moment in which he becomes king looks to all the world like an abdication. He may have been born in royal David’s city, but that is where the comparisons end. In Jesus, monarchy is redefined, upended.

This is why it is so disappointing that the coronation service draws almost exclusively from Old Testament ideas of kingship, and the servant king hardly gets a mention. Perhaps the priestly courtiers over at Westminster Abbey would think it rude to remind the monarch that Christian kingship is an indignity. They want the coronation to be all about the glamour of dressing up and processing, all ermine and orbs and the music of Handel’s glorious Zadok the Priest – King Solomon’s priestly courtier.

But what about the headline? Why is Meghan Markle, who isn’t even a member of the Church of England (she’s going to convert, which I think is the law), going to “bring the royals closer to Christ the King”? The answer is lame:

I don’t know if the impressive Meghan Markle believes that she is entering a fairytale family. And I do slightly worry that the introduction of Hollywood glamour into the royal family serves only to reinforce the wrong sort of monarchy, the bread-and-circuses version. On the other hand, if she can bring some of her campaigning spirit for the dispossessed into the mix, the monarchy will be all the richer for it. And also be brought much closer to the spirit of that troublesome servant king into whose service she has decided to become baptised.

Well, I hope she infuses the royal family with some idea of service, but it’s not going to make it more Jesus-like. Remember that Princess Diana campaigned against land mines and called attention to the scourge of AIDS, but it didn’t bring the dour Queen and Prince Philip any closer to Jesus.

When a man like Fraser wastes a whole column on a Jesus whose existence is even questionable, and who could have written the whole column without even mentioning Jesus (i.e., make the royals more activist), it makes me doubt his sanity? And when the Guardian publishes it, it makes me doubt their commitment to good journalism, including well written opinion pieces.

h/t: Phil