Whence moderate Islam?

December 12, 2011 • 6:34 am

I keep looking for the “moderate” form of Islam in the Middle East, but have trouble finding it. I guess its main home is elsewhere. But I’ve recently come across four items that bear witness to the hatred of Muslims for Jews (I’m not claiming it’s not reciprocal), and to the fact that religion poisons everything.

Here, from Memri (Middle East Media Project) TV, is a clip of a supposedly moderate Islamic preacher, Sheikh Nayef Hajjaj Al-Ajami, from the moderate Islamic state of Kuwait, talking about the Jews on November 25:

“Servants of Allah, let us be aware that our struggle with the Jews is one of faith, identity, and existence. Read the Koran, where Allah says: “Never will the Jews or the Christians be satisfied with you until you follow their creed,” so that you may know what the Jews conceal within their hearts. . . and so you may know that the Jews of the past were evil, and the Jews of today are even worse.  . the enemies of the divine prophesies, the scum of mankind, who incurred the curse and wrath of Allah, and whom Allah transformed into apes and pigs and taghut worshippers [worshippers of any divinity except Allah].”

Here’s a twelfth-grade textbook from Saudi Arabia:

Among the topics are these:

The struggle with the Jews is not political but religious. From p. 91:

“Whoever studies the nature of the conflict between the Muslims and the Jews understands an important fact, [namely that] this is a religious conflict, not a dispute about politics or nationality, or a conflict between races or tribes, or a fight over land or country, as some describe it. This is a deeply rooted enmity, a conflict between truth and falsehood, between monotheism and polytheism, between heresy and faith.”

So much for the common assertion that the Muslim/Jewish animosity, suicide bombings, are purely civil and political, and never about religion. Remember, this is what the kids are being taught.

The Jews spread corruption and fitna [chaos and internecine rancor].  From pp. 91-92

“In modern times, Jewish influence has cut deeply into several Western countries, and [the Jews] have taken control of their economies and media. These countries were exploited for the Jews’ benefit, and the two sides [i.e., the Jews and the West joined forces and] combined their interests in order to wipe out Islam.  . . .”[After] the Jews strayed from the correct religion brought [to them] by Moussa [Moses], peace be upon him, they did not take root in any land, nor did they legally own any land. They wandered in [various] regions, for wandering from place to place and being divided is in their nature. The Jews lived as oppressed minorities throughout the world, and caused corruption in every land they entered. In every country where they settled, they were a source of trouble and fitna. They build up their confidence by frightening others, which is why the peoples hated them and why they came to be known for their deceit and cunning.”

The Qur’an describes the corruption of the Jews.  From pp. 92-94:

“The noble Koran is the best source to acquaint us with the [Jews’] personality and psychological makeup. The expressions ‘Jews’ and ‘Children of Israel’ appear more than 63 times in the book of Allah, may He be exalted. They were the nation charged with ruling the earth, but Allah took their [role of] leadership away from them due to their corruption and destructiveness, and because they killed the prophets. The following are a few brief descriptions of some of their traits, as they appear in the noble Koran:”

JAC:  These traits (read the link) include attacking Allah, killing prophets, lying, deception, sinning, racism, cheating, cowardice, envy, and “lust for life,” which I take to mean avoidance of a glorious death.

Jihad will force the Jews out of Palestine.  from p. 112:

“Jihad for the sake of Allah is the only path to liberating Palestine. Only through jihad did the Muslims conquer Jerusalem, and only through jihad did the Crusaders leave Palestine. Likewise, only through jihad will the Jews leave Palestine.

“The only point of departure in our handling of the issue of Palestine [should be] absolute faith in Islam and in the fact that all rulings related to this issue must be derived from [Islam].”

If this stuff is drilled into you at age twelve, what are you going to believe?  And it further shows, as I’ve argued before, that a huge element of radical Islam is based not on politics, disaffection, or dispossesion, but simple religion-based emnity.  Do we deny that these people believe what they say?

Next we have the ravings of Sheik Yusaf al-Qaradhawi, an influential Muslim scholar a prolific figure on Al Jazeera television, and a spiritual leader of Muslim Brotherhood (he is Egyptian), which claims to have won the recent elections for the Egyptian parliament. He has characterized his own views as “moderate Islam.”  Note, though, that according to Wikipedia al-Qaradhawi has been denounced by Muslim scholars in the Middle East for giving Islam a bad name.  Indeed he has!

This video doesn’t look so moderate: he argues that Hitler was a punishment that Allah imposed upon the Jews for corruption, and “put them in their place.”  The Holocaust was “divine punishment,” and was exaggerated anyway. And he longs to go to Palestine, shoot the Jews himself, and thereby achieve martyrdom.

Finally, to round things out, and show that Islamic viciousness is not limited to the Middle East, here’s a report by Andreew Gilligan from the Telegraph that Sheikh Saad al-Beraik spoke at the East London Mosque (apparently regarded as a haven for “moderate” Islam), and called for Muslims to abduct and enslave Jewish women:

“Muslim brothers in Palestine, do not have any mercy neither compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don’t you enslave their women? Why don’t you wage jihad? Why don’t you pillage them?”

I thought this kind of stuff went out with the Old Testament.

Is there anyone who doubts that, considering all major religions, Islam is the most pernicious.  Of course Catholicism gives it a run for its money.

h/t: Malgorzata

Creatures of the deep sea

December 12, 2011 • 4:25 am

We often forget about all those bizarre creatures that have evolved in the deep sea. Here’s a video compilation of unusual—and scary—species from two episodes of BBC’s series Planet Earth/Blue Planet (I’m not sure whether those are two series).

See if you can guess the first, second, third, and fifth animals.  The ctenophores (one is #4) always amaze me.

h/t: Michael

Tim Tebow and his Jesus-soaked football: NYT further osculates the rump of faith

December 11, 2011 • 1:22 pm

One of the nuttiest aspects of religion is the belief that God really cares about whether one team or another wins a soccer, football, or baseball game. How can anyone imagine that any deity worthy of respect takes sides? Nevertheless, millions of people believe that.

Frank Bruni, an op-ed columnist writing in today’s New York Times, analyzes the effusive religiosity of the Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow. In “Tim Tebow’s gospel of optimism,” Bruni first claims that he’s put off by Tebow’s on-field displays of faith:

With Tebow there’s no getting away from it. He uses the microphones thrust in front of him to mention his personal savior, Jesus Christ, and has said that heaven is reserved for devout Christians. He genuflects so publicly and frequently that to drop to one knee in the precise way he does has been given its own word, along with its own Web site, where you can see photographs of people Tebowing inside St. Peter’s, in front of the Taj Mahal, on sand, on ice and even underwater.

But then he excuses these displays because they are, after all, signs of a resolve to win—a resolve buttressed by Tebow’s faith:

He reminds us that strength comes in many forms and some people have what can be described only as a gift for winning, which isn’t synonymous with any spreadsheet inventory of what it supposedly takes to win.

This gift usually involves hope, confidence and a special composure, all of which keep a person in the game long enough, with enough energy and stability, so that a fickle entity known as luck might break his or her way. For Tebow that state of mind comes from his particular relationship with his chosen God and is a matter of religion. For someone else it might be understood and experienced as the power of positive thinking, and is a matter of psychology. Either way it boils down to stubborn optimism and bequeaths a spark. A swagger. An edge.

. . . The Broncos are the talk of the league. More and more people are watching. And you could indeed say they’re tuning in to find out how far God can take a team. Because that’s just another way of saying how far grit can.

No it’s not, not at all.  God does not equal grit.  Perhaps belief in God can confer grit, and I have no doubt that in Tebow’s case it does. But there’s a difference between a dogged drive to win and a drive premised on God being behind you and directing the football.

Bruni decries the ridicule that some fans heap on Tebow’s displays.  I don’t agree, for the displays themselves are ridiculous: they’re public thanks to a God who supposedly cares about the fate of the Denver Broncos.  That’s ludicrous.  If Tebow wants to make a public display of this faith, then we’re fully entitled to publicly ridicule him.

Here’s one of those displays.  Isaiah 40:31 is this:

but those who hope in the LORD

will renew their strength.

They will soar on wings like eagles;

they will run and not grow weary,

they will walk and not be faint.

and they will score the touchdowns.

New York Times: those “Nones” without religion really do believe in God

December 11, 2011 • 9:30 am

Eric Weiner, correspondent for National Public Radio in the US and author of a book on happiness, published a bizarre editorial in yesterday’s New York Times.  I suppose it was written to promote his latest book, Man Seeks God: A Flirtation with the Divine, which describes his return to faith after a bout in the hospital:

Man Seeks God came about after a health scare landed me in the hospital. I was in pain, awaiting a diagnosis, when a well-meaning nurse asks me a simple, blunt question: “Have you found your God yet?”  This out-of-the-blue query nags, prods, and ultimately launches me on a far-flung journey to do just that.  And so I am off, searching the globe for a faith that fits.

That reminds me of Francis Collin’s conversion from atheism to faith, which he describes in Salon:

And one of my patients, after telling me about her faith and how it supported her through her terrible heart pain, turned to me and said, “What about you? What do you believe?” And I stuttered and stammered and felt the color rise in my face, and said, “Well, I don’t think I believe in anything.” But it suddenly seemed like a very thin answer. And that was unsettling. I was a scientist who was supposed to draw conclusions from the evidence and I realized at that moment that I’d never really looked at the evidence for and against the possibility of God.

Weiner summarizes his book, but doesn’t reveal the ending:

For most of my life, I have been a “spiritual voyeur,” privy to a wide range of religious practices, but never seriously considered these concepts in my own life. I was an agnostic by default. Face to face with my own mortality, though, and spurred on by the question of what spiritual principles to impart to my young daughter, I decide to correct this omission, undertaking a worldwide exploration of religions and hoping to come to a personal understanding of the divine. In other words, I wanted to answer the nurse’s question.

If anything has the earmarks of a bestseller, this does.  The public likes nothing more than books reassuring them that there really is a Sky Father out there (remember Heaven is for Real?).  In his New York Times piece, “Americans: Undecided About God?“, Weiner reassures us that, despite the decline in religiosity in America, faith really is alive and well here—it just needs some good p.r.

Weiner’s piece doesn’t begin well:

For a nation of talkers and self-confessors, we are terrible when it comes to talking about God. The discourse has been co-opted by the True Believers, on one hand, and Angry Atheists on the other. What about the rest of us?

As if no religious moderates have weighed in in the discussion! In fact, there seem to be more religious moderates complaining about the co-opting of the discourse than there are True Believers and Angry Atheists engaged in that discourse. And really, are all atheists “angry”? That’s just a perjorative adjective, meant to slur them. I don’t think anyone, for instance, would describe Dan Dennett as “angry”.

Although there are scary people out there who claim no religious affiliation, it turns out, according to Weiner, that most of them really embrace God:

The rest of us, it turns out, constitute the nation’s fastest-growing religious demographic. We are the Nones, the roughly 12 percent of people who say they have no religious affiliation at all. The percentage is even higher among young people; at least a quarter are Nones.

Apparently, a growing number of Americans are running from organized religion, but by no means running from God. On average 93 percent of those surveyed say they believe in God or a higher power; this holds true for most Nones — just 7 percent of whom describe themselves as atheists, according to a survey by Trinity College.

A bit of Googling has not turned out a Trinity College survey that gives the figures described by Weiner, but I did find a Trinity College survey from 2008: the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) Report  (pdf at link). The survey asked the key question, “What is your religion, if any?”

The results showed that the “nones” (“Nones/No Religion) comprised 15%, not 12%, of the population (up from 8.2% in 1990). And that ARIS survey includes, under the “Nones”,  those who used the terms None, No religion, Humanistic, Ethical Culture, Agnostic, Atheist, Secular.  As that ARIS report notes:

This bloc can be described as the non-religious, irreligious and anti-religious bloc. It includes anti-clerical theists, but the majority are non-theists.

In that survey, only 0.67% of all Americans described themselves as “atheists,” but I couldn’t find the proportion of Nones who were self-described atheists. [UPDATE: As J. Navaro points out in a comment below, the data for “Nones” who are nonbelievers is contained in a second 2008 document at the link above, “American Nones: The Profile of the No-Religion Population.” And in that document we find that while 7% of American Nones are indeed “atheists,” saying “there is no such thing as God,” 19% are “hard agnostics (“there is no way to know”) and a further 16% are “soft agnostics” (I’m not sure).  These add up to 42% of the Nones being atheists or agnostics, a figure that Weiner doesn’t mention. So Weiner’s statement, “On average 93 percent of those surveyed say they believe in God or a higher power; this holds true for most Nones,” is completely misleading, for 93% of Nones certainly do not believe in God or a higher power!]

Now perhaps only 7% of Nones, as Weiner notes, are atheists, but that really underestimates the number of these who don’t believe in God. As we know, many people who are effectively atheists don’t like using that unpopular label, and might well call themselves, “agnostic,” “seculars,” or “humanists”.  But perhaps Weiner is using a different survey.

At any rate, Weiner reports that he used to mock God until that health scare:

I used to be that way, too, until a health scare and the onset of middle age created a crisis of faith, and I ventured to the other side. I quickly discovered that I didn’t fit there, either. I am not a True Believer. I am a rationalist. I believe the Enlightenment was a very good thing, and don’t wish to return to an age of raw superstition.

We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt.

I’m not quite sure what he means that “we Nones hope to believe in God one day.”  Do even most Nones hope to believe in God?  And how will they achieve that hope if they have no religious belief?  The problem with Weiner is that in this piece he claims to speak for all Nones, but that’s arrant nonsense.

And I, for one, am a None who’s offended by Weiner’s conflating the positive effects of religions with whether religious claims are true:

Nones don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.” (We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”)

Shades of Andrew Sullivan!  “Truth” is what you make of it, apparently.

It’s a curiously discursive piece that seems to go nowhere. In the end, Weiner bemoans the fact that religion isn’t much fun these days, and has become a solitary pursuit.  He proposes, as did Julian Baggini, a new and less Goddy religion:

There lies the problem: how to talk about the private nature of religion publicly.

What is the solution? The answer, I think, lies in the sort of entrepreneurial spirit that has long defined America, including religious America.

We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones among us. And for all of us.

In other words, he’s telling us we should all be Quakers or Unitarian Universalists.  Good luck with that, Mr. Weiner!  It always amuses me when someone tells religious people that they should jettison their faith in favor of a new and different one.  It’s like telling Democrats that they really should be Republicans. Why, exactly, would they give up their cherished beliefs for some crazy Apple Religion? Will Southern Baptists, or Catholics, drop their faith and follow Weiner?

And it hasn’t escaped my notice that a religion that encourages doubt might not be consonant with one that “allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment.”

I’m baffled why the New York Times would publish such an incoherent piece, though it wouldn’t be out of place at the Guardian.

h/t: John Brockman

Steve Pinker answers questions and criticisms about his book

December 11, 2011 • 5:50 am

I’ve recommended Steve’s new book, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, and, nearly two-thirds of the way through it, my initial enthusiasm has remained.  It’s an engrossing and enlightening read, and of course very well written.  All of us should read it, despite its daunting length.

The book has inspired a lot of discussion—and no small amount of criticism—and Steve has weighed in on some of the commentary.  Over at his website you’ll find “Frequently asked questions about The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.”

If you’ve read the book (or contemplate reading it, though I’d read it first), do have a look at his thoughtful responses.  Perhaps this exchange will interest readers the most:

Atheist regimes in the 20th century killed tens of millions of people. Doesn’t this show that we were better off in the past, when our political and moral systems were guided by a belief in God?

This is a popular argument among theoconservatives and critics of the new atheism, but for many reasons it is historically inaccurate.

First, the premise that Nazism and Communism were “atheist” ideologies makes sense only within a religiocentric worldview that divides political systems into those that are based on Judaeo-Christian ideology and those that are not. In fact, 20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judaeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any of hundreds of other belief systems. They were based on the ideas of Hitler and Marx, not David Hume and Bertrand Russell, and the horrors they inflicted are no more a vindication of Judeao-Christianity than they are of astrology or alchemy or Scientology.

Second, Nazism and Fascism were not atheistic in the first place. Hitler thought he was carrying out a divine plan.  Nazism received extensive support from many German churches, and no opposition from the Vatican. Fascism  happily coexisted with Catholicism in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Croatia. See p. 677 for discussion and references.

Third, according to the most recent compendium of history’s worst atrocities, Matthew White’s Great Big Book of Horrible Things (Norton, 2011), religions have been responsible for 13 of the 100 worst mass killings in history, resulting in 47 million deaths. Communism has been responsible for 6 mass killings and 67 million deaths. If defenders of religion want to crow, “We were only responsible for 47 million murders—Communism was worse!”, they are welcome to do so, but it is not an impressive argument.

Fourth, many religious massacres took place in centuries in which the world’s population was far smaller. Crusaders, for example, killed 1 million people in world of 400 million, for a genocide rate that exceeds that of the Nazi Holocaust. The death toll from the Thirty Years War was proportionally double that of World War I and in the range of World War II in Europe (p. 142).

When it comes to the history of violence, the significant distinction is not one between thesistic and atheistic regimes. It’s the one between regimes that were based on demonizing, utopian ideologies (including Marxism, Nazism, and militant religions) and secular liberal democracies that are based on the ideal of human rights. On pp. 337–338 I present data from Rummel showing that democracies are vastly less murderous than alternatives forms of government.

Now you can argue that Pinker is splitting hairs to argue about proportions of populations rather than actual deaths, although I do think he’s right to do so.  Yes, each individual death is a tragedy, but proportions measure the chance that a given individual in a given society will meet a violent death, and he makes a compelling argument that that chance has declined over time.

But I’m always surprised that religious people equate religiously inspired genocides with those of Hitler, Mao, Stalin and the like.  While the latter may have killed some people because they were religious and hence offended the atheist aspect of state ideology, the vast majority of deaths were not due to atheist leaders’ animosity toward the faithful.  They were due to the leaders’ animosity toward those they perceived as hindering the realization of their totalitarian utopias. The deaths were due almost entirely to ideological animosity—or, in the case of Hitler, to the hatred by those of Christian heritage toward those of the Jewish faith.  And that hatred ultimately came from religious differences.

h/t: Chris

Hitchens dispels the bromide that suffering makes you stronger

December 10, 2011 • 1:17 pm

Thank Ceiling Cat that Christopher Hitchens is still among us, and still writing.  His latest piece at Vanity Fair, “Trial of the will,” an obvious play on Leni Riefenstahl’s movie.  His purpose is to dispel the myth that suffering is empowering and ennobling:

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

Hitchens, whose health has declined but not his prose, graphically describes the sufferings he’s endured in hopes of a cure.   It’s ineffably sad; he has so much more to say!

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

Hitch won’t be with us much longer, I fear—though I hope otherwise—and although he may not consider his sufferings empowering to him, I think they are to us.  If nothing else, it shows us how we should meet our end: fighting, but with grace.

From Vanity Fair: "The author in Houston, where he is receiving treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center."

h/t: Michael