It's all in the interpretation

More woman-friendly interpretations of Islam may be penetrating into the grassroots more and more. For example, in an interview, Zakia Nizami Soman of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, "a movement of Muslim women across India struggling for their citizenship rights," says:

Islam speaks of a God who is just. The Quran has given women equal rights and equal dignity. We are as much God's followers as men are. The problem arises not from the Quran but from distorted, patriarchal interpretations of the Quran and other texts by some sections of the ulema. This is something that we have to fight against. Islam is a religion of justice. So, how, if it is interpreted properly, can it discriminate against women? For us, religion is something between the individual and God, a belief grounded in the faith that God cannot be unjust towards women. So, even if a thousand maulvis stand up and demand that women are inferior and that we should remain shut in their homes we will refuse to listen to them.

Good. Mind, you, this translates into saying that the moral message of Islam is exactly what Soman wants it to be. Which is fine: with so much room for "interpretation," religious speech is essentially meaningless. It can be whatever a group of the faithful interprets it to mean.

Islam would then become an incoherent set of moral intuitions wrapped up in supernatural endorsements. That is also fine. It would be even better if the faithful then also kept their supernatural stuff out of serious intellectual enterprises such as science. That's too much to ask for, but still, I can only welcome whatever goes against the notion of a clearly identifiable "Islam."

When is a religious public sphere acceptable?

My default view of religion and public life is hard-core secularist: the less our public conversations are conditioned by supernatural beliefs, the better.

Having said that, I also have to acknowledge that the current reputation of secularism among political thinkers is ambiguous at best. Many religious people don't like secularism. That isn't surprising, but many religious thinkers have been more successful lately in pressing their view that secularism illegitimately handicaps people of strong faith. Many conservatives are suspicious of secularism. Even if not necessarily believers themselves, they favor the climate of piety and deference to established authority religion often reinforces. A publicly acknowledged religious culture, they say, provides the best context for a life of virtue. And the cultural and anticolonial left also has little to say in favor of secularism. Secularism is yet another liberal Western preoccupation to be unmasked as a device of oppression or cultural imperialism. And so on.

In some circles secular liberalism is still the default position. The science-types I hang out with, being a physics person, usually fit the bill. That's what we feel most comfortable with; we rarely question it. But it also seems to me that, especially if we are committed to some form of democracy, we should be looking for ways of accommodating politically active religious people without demanding that they leave their religious convictions out of the public conversation.

The problem for me is that I can think of few immediate examples where a less secular public sphere is something that I can shrug, adapt to, and live with. In science and science education, which is my daily experience, I am convinced that supernatural beliefs should be kept as distant as possible. They too often corrupt the scientific conversation. I am not looking to stick science up religious noses, but I am also not interested in trying to spin science to make it less abrasive to religious sensibilities.

So in what is closest to my experience, I am very little inclined to compromise secularism. This, I expect, cramps my imagination when I try to think of other contexts where I would think that a more religious public sphere is acceptable.

Still, here's a try. I generally have not been too impressed with the notion that we need to harness ordinary people's religiosity to protect our environment. Perhaps if our public life was such that non-human life and the natural environment were to acquire a more sacred or semi-sacred coloration, we wouldn't be in as deep shit as we are today. But in practice, the strongest religions we have on offer—the Abrahamic monotheisms—are scarcely better than secular liberalism in their indifference toward (or even encouragement of) human rapacity.

But then again, I'm getting desperate. As the looming Copenhagen debacle is demonstrating, our political systems are thoroughly inadequate in coming up with an appropriate response to the civilization-threatening crisis we face. Put simply: we are screwed. We are determined to do next to nothing. Our political inertia, and the institutional shortsightedness built into our economic and political thinking, make us unable to respond to the prospect of disaster. And this is almost entirely a secular failing.

So maybe if secularism's reputation were to get even worse, and it faced practical political collapse, this need not be a bad thing. If the more religious public sphere we'd end up with were able to put the check on human rapacity that secular liberalism has so thoroughly failed at providing, than, hell, let secularism fade away as soon as possible. I don't expect this to be likely; my bet is that things are likely to be even worse when more people take monotheism more seriously. But as I said, I'm desperate.

Roll the dice.

New Chick Tract

50 Voices of Disbelief

50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schüklenk, is now available.

It turned out to be very good book. I contributed one of the chapters, so I didn't want to say anything about the book before I read it all through. But now that I've done so, I'm impressed. Almost all of the short chapters, which range from personal reflections to more detailed arguments, are both very readable and quite interesting as well. In many cases, I learned something. The wide range of backgrounds of the writers—not just philosophers and scientists but science fiction writers and political activists as well, also make this an intriguing volume.

I'm glad to have been part of this project, and I hope the book does well.

Fairness doesn't enter into it

Saturday we adopted three kittens from the local animal shelter. But one died overnight. The other two got an emergency vet visit.

We were worried about the other two for the next few days, but they seemed fine. Then, yesterday, another one suddenly collapsed without much warning. We rushed her to the vet, but in a few hours she was dead. The third is now at the vet, and his prospects are not good.

My wife kept saying this was not fair. I kind of understand what she means. On the other hand, I also don't. Fairness really doesn't enter into it. That's just the way things are. Little kittens die suddenly, leaving us emotional wrecks. In the scale of ugliness life can deliver, losing kittens you've just bonded with are pretty small, really. I confess, remarking on the fairness of life doesn't even occur to me. Fairness of human arrangements is one thing—in my cynicism, I often don't expect fairness, but I don't have trouble making sense of a complaint that, say, some economic policy is unfair. But life in general? I just have to cope, even if this means for few days I will go around feeling like I'm suppressing a scream every moment of the day.

And the gods don't enter into it either. If I had a more religious temperament, perhaps I could make more sense of complaining about the unfairness of the universe. I could curse the gods. But how could that possibly help? The universe doesn't run according to my wishes. Even if I could take seriously the minute possibility that some supernatural agent was in charge, that wouldn't change.

The Strongest Argument for Christianity

In a major departure from my usual debunking mode, I am going to offer what I consider the strongest argument in favor of Christianity. No, let me hasten to assure everyone, I am not going all “Tony Flew” here. I think the arguments for the existence of God, whether considered individually or cumulatively, are totally worthless. Some theistic arguments are inferior specimens of a very dubious genre, i.e., metaphysical argument. The rest are instances of an even worse genre: pure pseudoscience. As anyone can tell from reading my candid little tome Why I am not a Christian, available in the “modern library” of the Secular Web, I regard Christian apologetics as a travesty, a farrago of bad history, inept biblical scholarship, and rampant illogic. Most doctrines of orthodox Christianity to me are as bizarre and incredible as Greek or Norse mythology—and a lot less fun. That said, I think there is one very strong argument for Christianity: The argument from the endlessly astonishing rottenness of human beings.

The train of thought leading to this present essay was set in motion a couple of weeks ago when I was reading in the morning paper the debate before the Supreme Court concerning whether videos showing animals being killed or tortured could be suppressed or whether such restriction violates the first amendment free speech guarantees (I shall not take any position here on that question). The article said that one kind of “entertainment” they were trying to control was something called “crush videos.” Now, crush videos constitute one form of human depravity that I had never heard of, and I wish I still had not. According to the article, such videos feature women in high heels crushing tiny animals to death. I was nearly made violently ill by the idea that any creature biologically classifiable as Homo sapiens would derive pleasure, prurient pleasure, I assume, from watching whores stomp small, helpless animals to death. I really thought that by age 57 I had pretty much heard it all, but I had not.

Now maybe you regard cruelty to animals as deplorable, but just do not have the sort of visceral reaction I get to things like this. Maybe it is man’s inhumanity to man that really appalls you. Well, you don’t have to look far at all to find plenty of that. A friend and fellow WWII buff gave me a copy of Richard J. Evans’ outstanding The Third Reich at War. This is an excellent book that achieves the very rare combination of impeccable scholarship with page-turning readability. I could not read it however. I found it simply too disturbing. We hear so much about the Nazi’s big crimes, like Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Babi Yar, etc., that we forget about their ordinary everyday atrocities. For instance, after the invasion of Poland (70 years ago last month), the Nazis began to enforce their policy of brutal racial oppression of the untermenschen, i.e., Jews and Slavs. Evans tells about an incident where a Polish peasant picked a fight with a German soldier and wounded him with a knife. In retaliation, the Germans killed everybody in the peasant’s village. However, it was only a small village, and so did not contain enough inhabitants to fill the quota of retaliatory murders that had been set. So, with Teutonic thoroughness, they stopped a passing train, pulled off enough passengers to meet the quota, and shot them on the spot. Such incidents were far from extraordinary. Indeed, they were quite mundane occurrences in Nazi-occupied territories, especially in the East.

A central, indispensable doctrine of Christianity has always been the inherent rottenness of human beings. More formally, this is the doctrine of original sin. Of course, the doctrine of original sin was originally construed by Augustine as a taint passed on biologically from parent to child, starting with Adam and Eve. As a theory of the genetics of sinfulness, the doctrine has always, understandably, elicited derisive howls from unbelievers. When removed from its pseudo-biological garb, however, the idea is quite profound. Augustine held that before the Fall, humans could choose either to sin or not sin. Since the Fall, we have lost the power to refrain from sin, and wallow in bondage to concupiscence, by which Augustine meant all evil desire, not merely the sexual sort. The Reformed tradition called the post-Fall human state one of “total depravity,” by which they did not mean that humans are incapable of any good, but that every aspect of human nature and human life has been infected by sin (see Van A. Harvey, A Handbook of Theological Terms, Macmillan, 1964). In other words, nothing human is pristine. No human relationship, institution, or activity is free of corruption, and quite a few are rife with it (e.g., politics, business, religion, and—Dare I say it?—academe). Further, the fallen state is not only a psychological or sociological phenomenon, but a metaphysical one, said Augustine. Put plainly, that means that there is nothing human effort or striving can do to correct the situation; there is no going back to Eden.

The doctrine of original sin is quite ferocious and uncompromising, of course, and gentler souls such as liberal Protestants and humanists have always been appalled by it. Surely, it seems far too gloomy and pessimistic to view humans in general in terms of total depravity. Surely, the Nazis were exceptionally monstrous and those who make or enjoy crush videos are among the outer fringes of the most despicable degenerates. Such behaviors are outrageously offensive to decent people, of whom there are many everywhere. Right? Of course, one determined to portray the human race in a negative light will never lack supporting evidence. However, for all the innumerable infamies committed by humans, we can point to equally numerous acts of kindness, mercy, and compassion. Even heroic acts of goodness are well known and frequent. Surely, the vast majority must practice common decency, or there could be no organized, sustained society at all. If we were as bad as all that, we would be living in Hobbes’ state of nature—where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Right? Aren’t the doctrines of original sin and total depravity simply thinly disguised misanthropy?

At one time I would have answered that last question with a resounding “YES!” Actually, I might still answer the question in the affirmative; what has changed is that I increasingly regard misanthropy as a rational view. A recent show on the History Channel depicted what would happen to the earth if humans were to simply disappear and leave everything else intact. Now I can’t help thinking that the scenario is not a half bad idea. However, even if we concede the liberal and humanistic objections to the doctrine of original sin—i.e., that there are many decent people, and many acts of kindness, and generosity, etc.—that still does not refute the idea of total depravity. Again, total depravity does not mean that there is no good in humanity. It does not deny our ordinary distinctions between good people and bad. It even does deny that there could be moral progress, e.g., that someday we might end slavery worldwide. Rather, it implies that “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” In other words, everybody is at least a bit rotten (Come on; ‘fess up), and very many are pretty awful (e.g., office tyrants and deadbeat dads), and some (e.g., Nazis and animal torturers) are unspeakably vile.

So, the Christian depiction of the human condition seems to be spot-on. This is one thing Christianity gets exactly right. There is something deeply and seemingly irremediably wrong with us. We stain everything we touch. Even the citadel of reason is breached. As an academic, I long regarded intellect as a very high if not quite the highest good. Now I think it is grossly overrated. I have come to realize that I.Q. and rationality are hardly correlated at all. On the contrary, I have discovered the appalling extent to which very many of the smartest people employ their intellectual gifts and high-powered intellectual tools (like analytic philosophy) to create and defend pernicious ideologies and towering lunacies. Maybe worse are those who sell their intellects to the service of the highest bidders. “Reason is a whore,” said Luther, and, by God, he was at least 90% right.

So, chalk one big one up for Christianity.

Unknown offensive cartoon

I ran into this cartoon in a Turkish news story about a court case. Apparently it inspired some Islamists to bomb (or attempt to bomb; it wasn't clear) the secularist newspaper that originally ran it:



The offensive bit is the pig dressed in hijab. "AB" stands for the EU; it's in the context of the apparent enthusiasm of the moderate Islamist party that runs Turkey to join the European Union.