Category: osculation of faith

Nick Cohen’s BBC show, “The silence of the liberals”

March 6, 2018 • 1:00 pm

“We are watching the astonishing spectacle of non-Muslims telling actual Muslims that they’re anti-Muslim bigots”

  —Nick Cohen (11:06 in the show)

 

I’ve often spoken how the American Left and its feminist wing largely ignore the misogyny and oppression of women in Muslim countries of the Middle East. The main reason, of course, is that Muslims are considered “people of color”, which apparently trumps the rights of those having two X chromosomes. But another excuse is that “we should deal with women’s problems closer to home and not those in distant countries.”

That excuse, however, doesn’t apply in the UK, where endemic Muslim communities also practice oppression—not just of women, but of gays, apostates, and atheists. And that’s in the West.  And as in the US, the UK Left shies away from addressing Muslim sexism and misogyny. In this BBC Radio 4 show, Observer columnist Nick Cohen, whose Leftist credentials are impeccable (read his books here and here), exposes the UK Left’s neglect of homophobia and endemic sexism among their countries’ Mulsims, as well as the Left’s lack of support for Muslim reformers like Maajid Nawaz and ex-Muslim reformers like Maryam Namazie.

Here’s the BBC’s summary:

 Observer columnist and writer Nick Cohen thinks mainstream liberal culture and left-wing politicians are failing to help progressive Muslims who want to fight inequalities endorsed by culture and religion in their their communities. He calls this the “racism of the anti-racist”.

Forty years ago, Edward Said coined the term “Orientalism” to condemn the West’s patronising representations of the “exotic” East, whose inhabitants were too irrational to handle the freedoms Americans and Europeans enjoyed.

In this programme, Nick Cohen examines evidence that this old colonial condescension is re-emerging in 2018, He interviews frustrated Muslims tackling discrimination – Muslims who feel betrayed by the Liberal left who, they say, should be their natural allies in their campaigning for women’s rights and tackling discrimination such as homophobia in Muslim communities.

In this authored documentary, Nick draws from the experiences of a range of organisations and progressive Muslim individuals – Tell Mama which supports victims of anti-Muslim hate crime, Maryam Namazie from One Law for All campaigning for women’s rights against Islamic Sharia law and Jewish Beth din courts, and Amina Lone who says her outspoken views including a campaign against young girls wearing the hijab in school led to her losing her seat as a Manchester city councillor. The local Labour party failed to re-select her, blaming her attendance record.

Tell Mama founder Fiyaz Mugal’s said that those who’raised their head above the parapet to speak out were intimidated and threatened, not only by the white far right but also by Islamist extremists, while Maajid Nawaz founder of counter-extremism organisation Quilliam was on a Jihadist’s hit list.

As Peter Tatchell notes in the show, the failure of the British Left to support Muslims reformers fighting for basic human rights has denied those Lefists the moral authority to be an effective force in British politics. Somehow, intersectionalism doesn’t intersect when the oppressed groups are a. women and b. Muslims.

Click on the screenshot to go to the 28-minute show:

h/t: Grania

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

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

Grania has two beefs

November 29, 2017 • 9:45 am
Grania is cranky today because she has a sore throat and a stuffy nose and her computer at work is operating at minimal speed. Therefore she offers us two rants, both of which I share. The quotes, links, and screenshots are hers, and her beefs are in bold:

“1. Everyone is acting like a British guy getting engaged is literally the second coming of Christ. I was hoping that Americans would be more restrained, but even in the New York Times there is the obligatory fawning and  gushing of joy even from the readers. They also have a moronic op-ed from someone who writes that she never had any interest in the UK royal family until now because the female part of the engagement is mixed race.”

Grania is of course referring to the engagement of Prince Harry to American actor Meghan Markle, who wed in May at Windsor Castle. To show her fealty to the Royal Family, Markle will a. give up acting, b. convert from a Protestant to an Anglican, and c. become a British citizen. Oy! As for the link, here it is (click on screenshot to see the fawning), but Grania adds “the NYT has published around TWENTY FIVE stories on the engagement in the last 48 hours.”

And the statement from author Irenosen Okojie about how Markle’s race ignited interest in the monarchy, and may save it! (Markle’s father was white and her mother black.)

Admittedly, for the most part, until recently I’d been indifferent to the monarchy. It felt old-fashioned, an archaic and exclusive institution people of color couldn’t really connect with nor would feel particularly invested in, given its long historical association with colonial projects.

Prince Harry openly and defiantly dating Ms. Markle made me, a black British woman, see the royals slightly differently. Suddenly they — or Harry, at least — seemed more open-minded. And it wasn’t just me: Other women of color, too, I found, had begun taking notice and talking about the monarchy. Friends discussed the possibility of an engagement, whether the royals would be forward-thinking enough to give Harry permission. When the announcement finally came, the reaction from people of color on both sides of the pond was explosive; memes were deployed immediately.

. . . Are we being ushered into a new era where the boundaries of race and class will be blown open in Britain, when people will grow more open-minded about who they can consider as a mate? This is probably optimistic, though in some ways not: Interracial marriages are on the rise in Britain. In this sense, the prince and Ms. Markle are following, not leading. What is more intriguing is the question of whether, as a result of this unlikely pairing, more people of color will come to feel they have a stake in the country’s most old-fashioned institution.

It’s great that people can accept a mixed-race princess, but I don’t think that’s going to save the monarchy, which in my view deserves to die a quiet death. It will either go on, sucking money from the British taxpayer and prompting teenagers everywhere to gush about things like this engagement, or it will die, regardless of who Prince Harry marries. As for Okojie suddenly getting more interest in the monarchy because of Markle, that’s like getting more interest in the Presidency after Obama was elected.

“2. The press headlines after that stupid National Geographic show are weapons-grade stupid and show zero signs of even a modicum of critical thought.”

Here is a screenshot of a web search Grania did; it refers to National Geographic’s uncritical touting of the finding of a tomb that’s supposed to be that of Jesus Christ Himself:

Once again I emphasize that although some Christians, particularly of the Sophisticated Variety™, spurn the need for evidence for their religion, when evidence as thin is this is reported they’re all over it like ugly on a frog. They do need and want evidence, showing that faith is not enough.

National Geographic again osculates Christianity: touts possible discovery of Jesus’s tomb

November 28, 2017 • 10:30 am

For several years I’ve been pointing out National Geographic’s increasing descent into religious osculation, its lips placed firmly at the level of the Christian tuchas.  They love, for instance, to write articles about connecting Mary and Jesus to archaeology, which, though hardly conclusive, act as confirmation bias for Christians who aren’t comfortable accepting the Gospels based on faith alone. Those people need evidence and National Geographic gives it to them. If Christians didn’t want real empirical evidence, articles like this one wouldn’t be published.

Here, for instance, is one of those articles that gives succor to Christians who are encouraged to think that Jesus’s tomb has been located. Despite the site’s disclaimers (“purported tomb”), everything in the piece, including a video featuring an enthusiastic pro-Jesus professor, points toward the conclusion that yes, Jesus’s tomb has been found (sans bones, of course).

What, exactly was found? Well, a limestone tomb beneath Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre that was apparently discovered by the Romans and supposedly turned into a shrine around AD 326. The evidence for its site as Jesus’s burial place?? A marble slab (engraved with a cross) over the cave, which is taken for evidence of a shrine (e.g., Jesus), and the dating of the mortar affixing the slab to the limestone to about 345 AD.  That’s about it. Since this was either during Constantine’s reign (the Roman emperor who became a Christian) or shortly after he died, one can confect a story that Christian Romans were making memorial of Jesus’s tomb.

Against this conclusion are the facts that the “tomb” contained several niches for different bodies (this is a bit unclear), that there is no dating that it existed around 33 AD (when Jesus was supposedly crucified), the absence of any writing on the slab to indicate that Jesus was buried within, any evidence of the bones (and of course there wouldn’t be any since he was bodily resurrected), and the nonexistence of extra-Biblical evidence for Jesus’s existence as a person.  Christians would argue, of course, that Jesus wouldn’t get a new tomb, but his body simply dumped with others, and of course would scoff at the paucity of evidence for a real-life Jesus.

Regardless, what’s clear here is that National Geographic has abandoned any journalistic objectivity or skepticism, assuming that Jesus really existed and was crucified, and and has failed to point out the weaknesses of its case. I wonder why any atheist or science-minded person would even subscribe to this rag any more.

Here’s the memorial over “Jesus’s tomb”; the article doesn’t show the “tomb” itself.

 

h/t: Graham