The Republic of Dissent

The absurdity of deathbed conversions

The sugary excerpt for this Sunday is from Roger Ebert's excellent entry in his journal about  Christopher Hitchens, life,religion and what happens when even though you couldn't wait for death, she stops for you, even though she doesn't do it kindly as she did for Emily Dickinson:

Deathbed conversions have always seemed to me like a Hail Mary Pass, proving nothing about religion and much about desperation.

The amorality of the nanny state

I disagree strongly with Alain de Botton when he writes this:

A terror of old-fashioned moralism has driven all talk of morality out of the public sphere. Who would now dare to suggest how our neighbours should be judged in the vast domain we term private life? In flight from dogmatism, we stand transfixed by the dangers of moral convictions. A democratic spirit has served to generate scepticism about authority and hierarchy in every sphere. Judgments about values tremble before the incensed question of who one person could ever be to tell another how to live. Those who profess to have answers are ridiculed in a tone adopted by furious adolescents when probing at the assumptions of their parents. In the political arena, there is no faster way to insult opponents than to accuse them of trying to undertake the impossible task of improving the ethical basis of society. They can reliably be charged with believing in that most odious concept of modern secular politics, a nanny state.

Is Alain de Botton serious ? It seems to me that we live in a time when there are few nanny states in the world and that the problem of our time isn't the world has embraced the over-expansiveness of liberty. The problem of our time is "we" are still stuck with the moral system of the dark ages, which gives the privileged class (of which Alain de Botton is a member) limitless liberties while imposing  a rigid moral structure, on the masses under the name of morality, traditions, religion, and decency. It seems to me that only a man who is at the top of the food chain would say that the modern world is too free and too secular when the contrary is true. 

America is governable

The Economist's Editorial on the assertion that the American system of government is broken, and thus, America is ungovernable, its arguments have the merit to be, at the very least, more credible than the ones of Dominique Moisi about the state of America:

It is simply not true to say that nothing can get through Congress. Look at the current financial crisis. The huge TARP bill, which set up a fund to save America’s banks, passed, even though it came at the end of George Bush’s presidency. The stimulus bill, a $787 billion two-year package, made it through within a month of Mr Obama taking office. The Democrats have also passed a long list of lesser bills, from investments in green technology to making it easier for women to sue for sex discrimination.
A criticism with more weight is that American government is good at solving acute problems (like averting a Depression) but less good at confronting chronic ones (like the burden of entitlements). Yet even this can be overstated.(...)America’s political structure was designed to make legislation at the federal level difficult, not easy. Its founders believed that a country the size of America is best governed locally, not nationally. True to this picture, several states have pushed forward with health-care reform. The Senate, much ridiculed for antique practices like the filibuster and the cloture vote, was expressly designed as a “cooling” chamber, where bills might indeed die unless they commanded broad support.
Broad support from the voters is something that both the health bill and the cap-and-trade bill clearly lack. Democrats could have a health bill tomorrow if the House passed the Senate version. Mr Obama could pass a lot of green regulation by executive order. It is not so much that America is ungovernable, as that Mr Obama has done a lousy job of winning over Republicans and independents to the causes he favours.

Recent experience has shown that leadership at the top matters especially when the POTUS knows where he is going and is sure footed ideologically. One can find many faults with Reagan and George W. Bush (and I do), but they knew who they were and what they believed ideologically. They had no hesitations about leading on subjects, which mattered to them and to take no prisoners when dealing with Congress. The Health care bill has shown that Obama isn't as sure footed ideologically for he was unwilling to lead on a subject that is so central that any politicians with unshakable convictions would not have allowed the bill, which can transform the US for generations, to  become simply a piece of sausage that just had to be stuffed with anything as long as it was made.  Washington follows the lead of the president and imitates his best attributes while munching on his weaknesses. The situation  is uncertain, because Obama is yet to confront and to dismiss the idea that Obamamism is solely about Obama, and ensuring that he has a second term but not about America.

Lies in political democracies

Interesting "stuff" from William Rees-Mogg:

We have been told by Sir John Chilcot himself that the Chilcot inquiry is not a trial, and that nobody will be either acquitted or found guilty; we all know that is not true. A public judgment is being made as each section of evidence is given. In particular a quiet judgment has been made of Tony Blair’s conduct. It may never lead to his being tried in any court, but there is nevertheless a public verdict of his responsibility for the British action in Iraq.
It was Mr Blair who was responsible; his evidence shows it. He was the Prime Minister who had won two landslide elections. He could cajole, coax, threaten, anger and flatter to get his own way, a war leader who was the nearest thing to a parliamentary dictator since the wartime Winston Churchill.

These assertions raise the essential point of accountability in a democracy. The electorate by electing/choosing its leaders should bear a lot of the blame for their mistake in judgment. It is too easy not to say what was not heard them or what didn't convince enough politics and media analysts to force a change of actions. The argument isn't that illegalities are justifiable in a democracy because political leaders get elected, but to make the point emphatically that when an act falls in that dangerous and frustrating gray zone, the people must turn the guillotine away from the elected and question their own judgment and the way their elective process and system of government work in those situation. I have the strong suspicion that in both Britain and America, the problem was that there stopped to be any counter powers when it was pompously declared that we were in the age of terror. At that moment, fear ruled and the populace and the elites who wanted to be protected at all costs stopped  caring about the morality of the means to achieve what was considered to be the most just of end: their survival.

Thus although it must feel good to hit on Blair, it is more instructive to realize and accept that there is a Blair inside of most of us, that is someone who becomes blinded by the necessity to fight just wars everywhere when they are potential dangers to avoid domestic catastrophes.

Keeping religious beliefs private

I agree with this even though I seldom agree with Oliver Kamm:

Atheism is a philosophical position. I hold to it, and I regard the spread of atheism over the long term as both likely and overwhelmingly beneficial. But for cultures born of the Enlightenment, private religious belief is not so much an enemy as an irrelevance. What matters is that religion should not intrude into the public sphere. It must make its accommodation, however it chooses to get there, with modern mores, liberal values and secular education. If it won't, then it makes itself an enemy.

God obsession and God fatigue

I have to confess that I'm suffering from God fatigue nevertheless Stanley Fish's discussion of Terry Eagleton's book is worth reading even though it leaves me wondering whether any good or even useful can come out of the endless arguments between the faithful and the atheists. I think the solution might just be for both sides to get together and to settle everything with a manly dance contest so that the rest of us can move on. Sugary excerpt:

Progress, liberalism and enlightenment — these are the watchwords of those, like Hitchens, who believe that in a modern world, religion has nothing to offer us. Don’t we discover cures for diseases every day? Doesn’t technology continually extend our powers and offer the promise of mastering nature? Who needs an outmoded, left-over medieval superstition?
Eagleton punctures the complacency of these questions when he turns the tables and applies the label of “superstition” to the idea of progress. It is a superstition — an idol or “a belief not logically related to a course of events” (American Heritage Dictionary) — because it is blind to what is now done in its name: “The language of enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy,” all in the service, Eagleton contends, of an empty suburbanism that produces ever more things without any care as to whether or not the things produced have true value.
And as for the vaunted triumph of liberalism, what about “the misery wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and imperialism, the generation of poverty and famine”? Only by ignoring all this and much more can the claim of human progress at the end of history be maintained: “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.”
That kind of belief will have little use for a creed that has at its center “one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains.” No wonder “Ditchkins” — Eagleton’s contemptuous amalgam of Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, perhaps with a sidelong glance at Luke 6:39, “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?” — seems incapable of responding to “the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.”

I always thought that Christopher Hitchens should have titled his book God is absent to assert that fact that the trouble with God is that her/his/its presence is a scandal because it is made of puff and huff. The reason why I'm getting bore with this battle between believers and non-believers is that it puts God at the center of everything when s/he/it is irrelevant.

Atheists' summer camp

I found this report in the Independent disturbing because it confirms my fear that atheism is becoming like a religion and that some atheists are becoming what they hate most, that is religious zealots.

Liberalism and Western supremacism

I don't know whether I like Terry Eagleton, but he does have an unique point of view, which forces me to pause especially when I disagree with him, which is at this point almost all the time.  In an op-ed in the Guardian (hat tip: Norman Geras), he makes the following point, which isn't illegitimate, but which in my view doesn't take the context into account because it is obsessed with a particular point of view, which is the idea that atheism is a problem for the West. Sugary excerpt:

If the test of liberalism is how it confronts its illiberal adversaries, some of the liberal intelligentsia seem to have fallen at the first hurdle. Writers such as Martin Amis and Hitchens do not just want to lock terrorists away. They also tout a brand of western cultural supremacism. Dawkins strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq, but preaches a self-satisfied, old-fashioned Whiggish rationalism that can be wielded against a benighted Islam. The philosopher AC Grayling has an equally starry-eyed view of the stately march of Western Progress. The novelist Ian McEwan is a freshly recruited champion of this militant rationalism. Both Hitchens and Salman Rushdie have defended Amis's slurs on Muslims. Whether they like it or not, Dawkins and his ilk have become weapons in the war on terror. Western supremacism has gravitated from the Bible to atheism.
The irony is clear. Some of our free literary spirits are defending liberal values in ways that threaten to undermine them. In this, they reflect the behaviour of western states. Liberals are supposed to value nuanced analysis and moral complexity, neither of which are apparent in the slanderous reduction of Islam to a barbarous blood cult. They are noted for their judicious discriminations, rather than the airy dismissal of all religion as so much garbage. There is also an honorable legacy of qualifying too-absolute judgments with an awareness of context: the genuine liberal is appalled by Islamist terrorism, but conscious of the national injury and humiliation that underlie it. None of the writers I have mentioned is remarkable for such balance. On the whole, they are more preoccupied with freedom of expression than freedom from imperial rule.

Sense and sensibility

I agree with Paul Krugman on this:

The Bush administration was obviously — yes, obviously — telling tall tales in order to promote the war it wanted: the constant insinuations of an Iraq-9/11 link, the hyping of discredited claims about a nuclear program, etc.. And the question was, should you stand up against that? Not many did — and those who did were treated as if they were crazy.
I’ll never trust “sensible” opinion again. But for those who stayed “sensible” through the test, it’s a moment they’d like to see forgotten. That, I believe, is the real reason so many want to let torture and everything else go down the memory hole.

God is no longer on the West's side

Quote of the day  from the worth reading of Terry Eagleton on culture, religion, atheism, and civilization:

The idea, touted in particular by some Americans, that Islamic radicals are envious of Western freedoms is about as convincing as the suggestion that they are secretly hankering to sit in cafés smoking dope and reading Gilles Deleuze.(...)Part of what has happened in our time is that God has shifted over from the side of civilization to the side of barbarism. He is no longer the short-haired, blue-blazered God of the West-well, perhaps he is in the United States, but not in Porto or Cardiff or Bologna. Instead, he is a wrathful, dark-skinned God who, if he did create John Locke and John Stuart Mill, has long since forgotten the fact. One can still speak of the clash between civilization and barbarism; but a more subtle form of the same dispute is to speak of a conflict between civilization and culture. Civilization in this dichotomy means the universal, autonomous, prosperous, individual, rationally speculative, self-doubting, and ironic; culture means the customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective, unironic, and a-rational. Culture signifies all those unreflective loyalties and allegiances for which men and women in extreme circumstances are prepared to kill. For the most part, the former colonizing nations are civilizations, while the former colonies are cultures.

Forcing people to listen to atrocious music

A.N. Wilson has found religion again, and unfortunately, he wants to share his joy and his bewitchment with the rest of the world:

When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion – prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.

I'm happy for Wilson. I just wish he would leave the people who don't care or who don't want to hear whatever he is hearing alone for after all that is the worst thing about the pious, especially when they are Christians, they are so in love with their bad music that they believe that everybody must hear it, love it and bow to it

The empty name of God

Quote of the day from A C Grayling, which is a way to live through these next few days if you don't believe in what they symbolize:

I would wish people to live without superstition, to govern their lives with reason, and to conduct their relationships on reflective principles about what we owe one another as fellow voyagers through the human predicament – with kindness and generosity wherever possible, and justice always. None of this requires religion or the empty name of “god”. Indeed, once this detritus of our ignorant past has been cleared away, we might see more clearly the nature of good, and pursue it aright at last.

Evangelizing Atheism

Michelle Goldberg on the growing power of Atheists and non-believers:

In some ways, there's a symbiotic relationship between evangelicals and secularists. The religious right emerged in response to a widespread sense of cultural grievance stemming from the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Today's newly organized atheists and agnostics were mobilized by the theocratic bombast of Bush-era Republicans. More than ever, one's religion is tied up with one's political choices rather than family history.
That means faith won't fade into the background. If European secularism is defined by disinterest in organized religion, American secularism is largely defined by opposition to it. Thus non-believers in the United States are increasingly becoming an organized interest group, demanding their share of civic respect. The more they want to escape organized religion, the less they can ignore it.

I find the idea of Atheists following the path of evangelists, by organizing themselves in the way they did scary. I mean,  it is creepily entertaining, but nevertheless disturbing to imagine waking up on Sunday to the sounds of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins or even Michel Onfray on TV blasting God and the pious for current events or having to go to a sermon about the hypocrisy of the Pope. The point of atheism is that it has to resist the temptation to become religion-like even if doing so means getting more power and obtaining the ability to make politicians weep with fear.

A cute and unmacho foreign policy

I don't whether to puke or to say aawwww when I read these works from Kathleen Parker no I actually I wonder whether she is serious and whether US foreign policy is really about being a manly cowboy or a sensitive guy who makes American women nod and ask their kids to behave like the president. I can't wait to see the Manly Harvey Mansfield gives his take on Obama. Why are Americans so into caricatures and morality that they always want a hero who is either manly or girly, black or white (pun intended) , but never nuanced, complex, and dare I say, métis. Sugary excerpt:

For many, he was too cool by half. A Rasmussen poll reported that 57 percent of Americans want military action against North Korea. (Another war so soon?) John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the president's approach constituted "hand-wringing," which is a polite way of saying Obama is "girly."
But was Obama really too cool? Or are we not listening?
Yes, Obama did say that the U.S. will lead the way toward a nuke-free world. But he also said that the U.S. "will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies."
Translation: We're going to be sensible and try to rid the world of nukes eventually. But if someone threatens us or our allies, we will hit delete.
Is that not a big enough stick? You can bring 'em on. Or you can calm 'em down.
Obama's outreach to Muslims via his visit to Turkey was similarly inspired. He delivered virtually the same message that Bush did countless times -- that the U.S. is not at war with Islam -- but without the reminder that either you're with us or against us.
It didn't hurt that Obama dusted off his middle name, Hussein, and mentioned having lived in a Muslim country. "I get you," he implied. "We are not enemies."
A man who listens may be perceived as weak by those who prefer to talk big. But playground wisdom holds that showoffs are usually overcompensating, and the strongest one has nothing to prove. To answer the original question: When you're the big dog, you can afford to smile. The saber is understood.

Vulgarity, futility, and religion

Christopher Hitchens criticizes Blair's new holy mission and his belief that religion or rather religious faith is the way to salvage the twenty-first century:

There is something crass and nasty as well as something vulgar in Blair’s quantitative triumphalism (“more than 900 million Hindus”: such good news for those who think like the sectarian Bharatiya Janata Party). Those of us who have our doubts about the God delusion have never been under the impression that it is under-supported. But the way that Blair talks, it seems that religion’s chief pride is its availability in bulk and wholesale form. Why doesn’t he mention Mormonism, the crackpot Joseph Smith-oriented faith that is said to be the fastest-growing of them all?
One’s qualms are not quelled by the suffocatingly boring five-point agenda that is tacked lamely on to the quantitative proclamation. I think we have all, already, declared ourselves to be against malaria. With only very slightly less enthusiasm, we can perhaps find a pulse that interests us in interfaith “interaction”. Could I hint that “globalisation” has been a big subject for some time? And could I also suggest that the notion of an ethical imperative in the world of economics is not primarily or only a religious one?

Humanizing the holy and the sacred

I almost agree completely with Jeff Mason when he makes the following argument:

A Sacred spring, stone, building or physical site is a place where the mundane is bathed in Divinity and becomes a place for reverence, meditation and prayer. Sacred places and objects become holy sites of worship and veneration, matters of respect, and self-respect, to maintain and to defend.

How does the universe look when we subtract from it all thought of anything Sacred or Holy?  Have we lost anything? Is anything ‘not there’ that was there just a moment before? Or does the subtraction of the Sacred and Holy leave everything as it is, was, and always will be?  Does the water of a holy spring taste any different from an ordinary well nearby? Does the denial of the Holy pollute the water in some way? I suggest not. The universe is so amazing, so full of wonders and incomprehensibilities that we need no longer imagine the Sacred and Holy to add to its lustre.

The world would be a better place without Holy sites and sacred objects. We are worshipping our own imaginations, laying a narrative on the world that was never asked for or demanded, and which we now have a means to transcend, relieving the world of a not inconsiderable source of conflict and discomfort.

The problem with today’s perceptions of the Sacred and the Holy is that there are tied to religion, which in my opinion, make them not only dangerous, but burdensome for humans for the simple reason that it asks them to reject their humanity, which is holding them back from the Divine. Thus, the issue here is once again religionization, which universalizes and deities the particular when the Sacred and the Holy should remain about the personal, about what each of us believes is more important than anything. Because I agree with Camus that all reasons to live are also reasons to die, I believe that individuals should decide what is Sacred and Holy to them and accept the fact others may disagree fervently with her/his belief.

Free society and secularism

Timothy Garton Ash makes the following point on the importance of a secular public sphere to secure the freedoms of a democratic society:

Among the liberal essentials is equality before the law, including equal rights for men and women. Among the essentials is also freedom of religion. Since a core liberal notion is that we must be free not just to pursue our own version of the good life but also to question and revise it, it follows that we must be free to propagate, question, change or abandon our religion. In a free society, proselytisation, heresy and apostasy are not crimes. This - and apostasy in particular - is not accepted in many versions of Islam, but it is a liberal essential on which there can be no compromise.

In order to secure these freedoms, we need a secular public sphere. But what exactly do we mean by that? To say "Enlightenment values" begs the question, "which Enlightenment"? The Enlightenment of John Locke, which claimed freedom for religion, or that of Voltaire, which aspired rather to freedom from religion? (I deliberately simplify a complex history.) A liberal order in which the devotees of all Gods are free to try their hand in the public square, on an equal footing with those who insist - correctly, in my view - that there is no God? Or a liberal order in which all gods are kept as far as possible out of the public square? (The French republican understanding of laïcité is closer to the latter, the United States' first amendment tradition to the former.) I'm more of a Lockean myself, but I don't think this debate is best pursued at the abstract, theoretical level of "which Enlightenment"? Better to tackle specific issues: faith schools, new mosques, the teaching of evolution, the hijab, Muhammad cartoons and so on.

We do, however, need to be clearer about the difference between secularism and atheism. Secularism, in my view, should be an argument about arrangements for a shared public and social life; atheism is an argument about scientific truth, individual liberation and the nature of the good life. Today's debate around Islam is bedevilled by a confusion between the two. Atheists must be free to say to Muslims, Christians or Jews: "Your mind would be much more free if you gave up your ridiculous belief in God." Believers must be free to argue back: "You would have a more profound sense of personal freedom if you did believe." But neither is entitled to demand that of the other as a condition for participating as a citizen in a free society. The public policy argument about freedom for religion and the private conviction argument about freedom from or in religion should operate on different levels.

The key question is how to maintain or to build a secular society without the pious claiming that religion is essential to public life and to the health of a society. In the US, when one watches the political debate, it is impossible not to realize that it is taken for granted that religious faith is part of the political discourse and that candidates are expected to talk about their faith and other personal matters. The point is that the barrier between the private and the public when it comes to religion is never solid and that in these times when citizens want and demand certainty, secularism becomes impossible to defend.

Thanking God for anything

I just can’t find a way to agree with this, but I guess that it is easy to see the will of God everywhere when you want to believe that s/he exists:

Religion resists the oppressive efficiency of time management because there is nothing to measure. Atheists think that it's the fatal weakness of the God idea that it lacks empirical verifiability. But a world where everything is measurable and testable, and can be turned into a league table, is a world where competition can find its way into every nook and cranny of life. And this, in turn, allows no escape from the omnipresence of market forces.

Marx made the point that capitalism turns everything into a commodity - and thus people into objects. Christians would agree, but also see Marx's uncompromising materialism as being part of the problem. For in spite of Marx, this materialism has been conscripted into the service of capital and forms the bars of our cage. Which is why the Marxists failed, and why the only people offering a genuinely countercultural critique of western modernity are to be found in churches, mosques and synagogues.

Hitchens and Sophistry

Mark Sarvas accuses Christopher Hitchens of Sophistry. He laments the fact that, in his opinion, he has become in spite of his numerous gifts a propagandist and a fanatic. Sugary excerpt:

But in some ways that's apt, as Hitchens is no longer a thinker or a critic - he's a propagandist.  What else to make of his risible assertion that "A racist is a racist precisely because he can't distinguish between a Jew and another Jew, or an Asian or West Indian or Chechen." 

The propagandist, after all, trades in his inciting soundbites even as he knows the truth lies elsewhere.  Like the cheap magician, it's all about the misdirection.  But a man of Hitchens's education cannot possibly be unfamiliar with, say, The Nuremberg Laws which were careful to distinguish mischlinge - Jews of mixed parentage - down to agonizingly specific degrees.  This assertion - which underpins much of Hitchens's racial "philosophy" - is something he frequently leans on and is so patently absurd - more sophistry from the master - that it scarcely requires repudiation.

Except that Amis and Hitchens both do require repudiation, most firmly perhaps for floating this insidious notion of a "thought experiment."  This was anything but.  This was the expression of a particularly ugly strain of racism from which Amis was clever enough to try to deflect criticism by prophylactically suggesting, in essence, "I don't really mean this, of course, but ... "  And that's total shit and he should not be allowed to get away with giving himself a very clever cover from which to spew this invective.  There were surely a lot of "thought experiments" taking place in interwar Germany, as well.  Here Hitchens goes so totally off the rails that it's clear that 9/11 and Islamophobia have permanently deranged him.

The problem with the notion of a thought experiment - aside from the sheer, calculating disingenousness of the thing - is that it also provides cover not just to Amis but to plenty of others who have, perhaps, experienced similar thoughts and feelings.  But instead of summoning our better angels to challenge ourselves on why such beliefs, though seductive, are finally simplistic and repugnant emotional responses, Amis creates a safe harbor for indulging in this kind of trash.  And Hitchens should know better than to deploy his considerable rhetorical gifts to, as the headlines of his piece has it, "defending the indefensible." 

But the sad truth I've come around to at last is that Hitchens no longer knows better.  He has been irredeemably and irretrievably twisted by world events and has drowned in his own Kool-aid.  The greatest loss is that, for all his considerable gifts, he can no longer persuade.  He aims his salvos to the like-minded rabble in the cheap seats, and walks off the stage patting himself on the back for his cleverness without converting a single mind.  This trait infects all his work these days - God is Not Great, while occasionally splenetically entertaining, will not sway a single undecided.  And isn't that how a true rhetorician or polemicist measures success?

I don’t share Sarvas’s indictment of Hitchens although I agree that he tends because of his passion and his absolutism to view the world in black and white and to be difficult to have a dialogue with because it will always end in a battle where there is no give and take. Nevertheless, I think that Hitchens is necessary in spite of his flaws because he constantly put on trial the status quo and conventional ideas, but forcing those who  are content to follow or too timid to rebel to at least think.

Looking for truth in religion

John Polkinghorne reviews John Cornwell’s Darwin’s Angel, an Angelic Response to The God Delusion and  John Humphrys’s  In God We Doubt, Confession of a Failed Atheist. These two books try to rehabilitate religion by showing that Atheists are damn wrong. Polkinghorne makes the point that missing in this debate is the idea of truth, which makes it pointless because no progress is possible with it. Sugary excerpt:

Religious faith is not a matter of the unquestioning acceptance of unmotivated belief, demanded of us by some overriding authority. Quite the contrary. Faith is a commitment to a form of motivated belief, differing only from scientific reason in the nature of the subject of that belief and the kind of motivations appropriate to it. Science achieves its success by the modesty of its ambition, only considering impersonal experience open to repetition at will. Personal experience, let alone encounter with the transpersonal reality of God, does not fit within this limited protocol. The concept of reality offered by scientism is that of a world of metastable, replicating and information-processing systems, but it has no persons in it. Darwin’s angel criticizes Dawkins for a lack of trust in the power of imagination to explore reality, such as we exercise through poetry. He is said to sound “as though he would substitute a series of case-notes on senile dementia for King Lear”.

No progress will be made in the debate about religious belief unless participants are prepared to recognize that the issue of truth is as important to religion as it is to science. [emphasis added]

I think the debate between believers and non-believers is pointless if it becomes about who is right or wrong or rather who is more evil than the other. The real issue is what ought to be the place of religion and the reason why atheists are necessary is because they show that secularism is a value that is essential is a democratic and modern society. I resent religion the most when they feel the need to evangelize and to become pervasive. What is worrisome is that the fact that Dawkins and Hitchens have encountered such strong resistance. In my opinion, this resistance shows that the most important for believers isn’t truth, but the necessity to be right absolutely and to crush dissent as if they were sure that they were right, they would be bothered by people professing loudly that they weren’t.

Atheism as an identity

Dolan Cummings makes a good point about the desire of some atheists to “religionize” Atheism by establishing as an identity:

Of course, the resurgence of interest in atheism is a reaction to the perceived rise of religion, whether in the form of Islamic fundamentalism or US-style Christian conservatism. But in taking their cue from resurgent religions, atheists also adopt something of their inward-looking focus. From attempts to popularise the term ‘bright’ as a positive identity to calls for atheists to be included on the roster of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’, it seems that some want to establish atheism as an alternative, non-religious camp for people to belong to. But atheism itself ought to be the least interesting thing about atheists, who surely have various and often conflicting beliefs and passions of their own.

[…] The desire to establish atheism as an alternative identity is ultimately conservative. Rather than joining together with others who share a positive vision of the future, self-styled atheists define themselves against an external threat. Worse, it is no longer the conservatism of religion that worries non-believers, but its radicalism, its seemingly irrational passion. Where once religion was disdained as ‘the opium of the people’, today it is seen as more akin to the alcopop of the people: a dangerous and toxic influence that makes people behave in irrational ways.

Atheism loses its pertinence when it becomes religionlike and cheap. The point of saying No to religion is to remain faithful to the idea that it isn’t just the beliefs that are problematic, but the worshipping.

Transcending religion

Although I don't believe in revolutions, I believe in rebellions because I think that they are a way of showing that life in spite of its absurdity is worth fighting for. Rebellion is always about Being, about what one is or rather what one refuses to be.  Nietzsche is still necessary, relevant precisely because his philosphy shows that the religious, the sacred can crush the human and that it is essential to overcome it, to transcend it. The pronouncement of God's death is vital because it reminds us that we are alone and that Godliness is just humaness refusing to accept its thirst for and its will to power.

Christian Nation, indeed ?

Bradley Burston argues in Haaretz that Senator McCain is right when he asserts that the United States is a Christian nation. He makes the point the United States isn’t open as open to other faiths as it ought to be in spite of its secularism. Sugary excerpt:

Every Jewish kid in America who has ever worn a kippah, every Muslim who has worn external evidence of his or her devotion to Islam, knows very well that Senator McCain was right. Every public school child whose was raised in a home where Jesus was not believed to be God, and who was made to sing "Joy to the world, the Lord is come!" with devotion and feeling, know just how right McCain was. Every high school football player who began every game hearing invocation to the Lord Jesus Christ cannot help but wonder what all the fuss is about.
You don't have to look very far afield for corroboration. Witness McCain's predecessor in the Senate and as a presidential candidate, Barry Morris Goldwater, whose family name was an adaptation of the original Goldwasser. "Although Jewish on his father's side, Mr. Goldwater was raised in the Episcopalian tradition of his mother," the Washington Post wrote in a 1998 obituary.
"Neither my father nor any of our family ever took any part in the Jewish community," Goldwater wrote in an autobiography. We never felt or talked about being half-Jewish since my mother took us to the Episcopal church. It was only on entering the power circles of Washington that I was reminded I was a Jew. I never got used to being singled out in that way. My answer was always the same.
"I'm proud of my ancestors and heritage. I've simply never practiced the Jewish faith or seen myself or our family primarily of the Jewish culture. In the jargon of today's sociologist, we've been assimilated. We're American."
In a reference to Goldwater's run for the presidency, the American Jewish social commentator Harry Golden once observed, "I have always thought that if a Jew ever became President, he would turn out to be an Episcopalian."
It is fair to say that America zealously guards certain separations of church and state. But it also turns a blind blue eye to others.

Burston's observations are accurate, but this lack of openness is due to the fact that religion has crept in the political debate and that the separation between church and state is a principle fanatically fought by those who believe that only the faithful and the pious can make good politicians and good citizens. The point is that increasingly people are so drunk with their love for Jesus or whoever else that they can't accept that not only the fact that others don't share their faith, but also that it should be kept private. They believe that if the religious is private then it isn't meaningful and that if "What would Jesus do" isn't the motto of all society then they are losing an apocalyptic battle with evil. There is a name for that kind of absolutism and that is totalitarianism.

Burma, monks, religion, and politics

Pankaj Mishra has an article on Burma in which he tries, and, in my opinion, fails to make the Burmese monks’ revolt a proof that religion has a role to play in politics. He writes that militant atheists are proven wrong by the fact that Burmese monks are daring to say NO to a ruthless military dictatorship. Sugary excerpt:

Living through a worldwide upsurge of violence, most of us may find it hard to conceive of Buddhist principles as politically efficacious. Nevertheless, the history of the modern world furnishes many examples of political victories achieved through moral persuasion and spiritual strength: national self-determination in colonised countries, the civil rights movement in the US, the velvet revolutions in Russia and eastern Europe, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the gradual spread of parliamentary democracy around the world.

Today the Burmese generals confront the "authentic, enduring power" of people, before which, as Hannah Arendt presciently wrote in her analysis of the Prague Spring of 1968, a repressive regime eventually surrenders. The Buddhist monks chanting on the streets of Rangoon may look naive and defenceless when you consider the power of the political-military institutions of the modern, secular era that they are up against: heavily armed nation-states with hyper-competitive capitalist economies. Certainly, the Burmese generals know the way the world works. Apparently isolated, they play shrewdly the game of international realpolitik, buying the silence of their two rising and needy neighbours, democratic India as well as authoritarian China, with oil, gas and timber. However, to such a ruthlessly amoral politics, based on purely rational self-interest, the moral and spiritual values of religion can and often do pose a challenge.

No doubt devotees of science and rationality will continue to call for a religion-free politics. But what the Burmese demonstrators prove is that, as Gandhi said, "those who think religion has nothing to do with politics understand neither religion nor politics

Pankaj Mishra is wrong for two reasons. The first reason is that he makes the assumption is that it is the religion of the monks that is forcing them to rebel and the second reason is that he assumes that the religiosity of the monks make their revolt special. However, Mishra’s assumptions are proven false when one wonders simply why the monks are only revolting now and why if religion is such a political force, it made them accept repression for so long. The point is that the monks are revolting in spite of their religion, of Buddhism not because of it. The ruthlessness of the dictatorship in their country has made them forget that they were monks to remind them that they are men and citizens and that there are things that citizens cannot accept. We have to wonder why the monks are leading the revolt and the answer is simply that they have realized that religion is not everything and that priesthood doesn’t stop one’s humanity. For so long these monks accepted the unacceptable precisely because they refused to be men because they wanted to live peacefully in their temples and to seek nirvana while ignoring their fate of their country and their fellow countrymen. Thus, the Burmese monks aren’t an example of the role that religion has to play in politics, but on the contrary a warning about the isolationist and dehumanizing effects of religion.  It can silence people in front of atrocity because they believe that what is has to be and that the divine is in charge of everything.

One has only to remember World War II and Pius XII to understand that religion tends to make men human beings believe that they are no longer human and that therefore they don’t have to confront tyranny, but to compromise with it. After all, who can forget Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Haitian priest who led his country to a revolt against a dictatorship and later became a dictator himself because he thought that being a man of God meant that politics and his country had to serve him. Secularism doesn’t impose on the religious and the pious the obligation to remain on the fringe to wait for the return of Jesus or the end of the world and not to be involved citizens. Secular imposes on the religious the obligation not to make the political religious in an effort to make choices of policy about good and evil.

Consciousness, objectivism and religion

Onkar Ghate has written a series of articles on Ayn Rand and objectivism in the New Statesman’s faith column. His last article is very interesting and makes the following point about consciousness and religion:

At their root, the monotheistic religions say that a cosmic consciousness has primacy over existence. This consciousness decrees, and reality obeys. But in actual fact, existence has primacy over consciousness. The facts of reality exist and are what they are independent of any mind. The power of consciousness is not to create, annihilate or alter reality, but only to apprehend it. The facts of reality set the terms, which every consciousness must obey if it is to possess knowledge.

If the religious approach were correct, faith might be worth something. To believe something in absence or even in defiance of logical evidence—a virgin birth, say—might be a way to prove your blind loyalty to the supreme consciousness; only with proof of your submission, will you receive its sanction and enlightenment.
But if you understand that the religious approach contradicts the fundamental facts of reality, then faith is worthless. If you want to know the world, you need to use your own mind to grasp it, through careful observation and logical thought. You need reason.

Rand once observed that religion and philosophy address the same issues. Each seeks to offer us a comprehensive view of the world—of its nature and our place in it. They differ not in their questions, but in their method of answering: one by faith, the other by reason. Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do? Rand’s philosophy offers reasoned and unique answers to these.

Where am I? In a world that exists and is what it is, a world that’s firm, stable, natural, knowable. How do I know it? Only by means of my unadulterated reason. What should I do? Think rationally about all the values my life requires and about how to produce them, and then work passionately towards achieving them. The result? A profoundly personal joy, one that requires no external justification or sanction.

That explains precisely what the religious shouldn’t be public and that society should be secular. Once religion is placed at the center of a society and is the religious becomes political, denial of reality is inevitable. Reality becomes irrelevant since what matters is what ought to be. It is for this reason that societies that are non-secular are never democratic and free societies because human reality can never elevates itself to the level of the divine and human beings can never be trusted to make their own choices for they aren’t Gods.

Tariq and Hitch

Christopher Hitchens writes his Slate about his evening with Tariq Ramadan, the controversial Swiss Muslim who many argue is no better than a closeted Islamist. Ramadan, of course, couldn’t charm Hitchens and the fact that he tried shows that he is very conscious of his image and of the fact that being open is important for a politician, which is what Ramadan is first of all, to convey the  fact that he is a moderate. Sugary excerpt:

He often criticizes the existing sharia regimes, such as that of Saudi Arabia, especially for their corruption, but such criticism is as often the symptom of a more decided Islamist alignment as it is a counterindication of it.

In Mantua, he was trying to deal with the question of dual loyalty, as between allegiance to Islam and allegiance to the democratic secular European governments under which Muslim immigrants now choose to live. He redirected the question to South Africa, where, he said, under the apartheid system there was a moral duty not to obey the law. After sitting through this and much else, I rose to ask him a few questions. Wasn't it true that the Muslim leadership in South Africa had actually endorsed the apartheid regime? Wasn't it evasive of him to discuss the headscarf in France rather than the more pressing question of the veil or niqab in Britain? Wasn't it true that imams in Denmark had solicited the intervention of foreign embassies to call for censorship of cartoons in Copenhagen? [...] He completely dodged the question of the veil in Britain, ignored my request that he give any reason to believe that women were wearing it voluntarily, and he admitted that the Deobandi Muslim leadership in South Africa had indeed been a pillar of the old regime. On the other hand, he added, some Muslims had been anti-apartheid, and these were the "real" ones. Indeed, on everything from stoning to suicide-murder to anti-Semitism, he argues that the problem is not with the "text" itself, or with Islam, but with misinterpretation of it. How convenient. Ramadan often relies on the ignorance of his Western audiences. He maintained that there was no textual authority for the killing of those who abandon their fealty to Islam, whereas the Muslim hadith, which have canonical authority, prescribe death as the punishment for apostasy in so many words.

I share Hitchens’ skepticism about Ramadan because in my opinion, he is too slick and too smooth to be true. Tariq Ramadan reminds me of Mitt Romney. He is obviously a man with great ambition who will constantly adapt with his time by avoiding important questions about his faith (I am not making an hazardous comparison between Mormonism and Islam, but simply between secularism and those who believe that faith cannot be separate from the public domain even though they are unclear about how far they want it to go) and by switching from moderate to conservative depending on his audience and on his present political objectives. So is Ramadan dangerous? I don’t know, but is he insincere and hypocritical? Yes.

Doubt and true believers

I have read a lot lately about doubt and true believers. John Cornwell recalled the following episode about Graham Greene and faith in his article in the Guardian on Doubt and faith to make the point that Dawkins, Hitchens and others are wrong about religion and its absoluteness:

Not long before his death in 1991, I was sent by a newspaper to Antibes in the south of France to quiz Graham Greene about his religious beliefs. His faith, on the surface, seemed to be a mix of superstition, guilt and scepticism, spiced with Catholic orthodoxy. He thought it only natural to hope for an afterlife, but heaven sounded boring and hell implausible "because God is supposed to be infinitely merciful". And he admitted to uttering a prayer whenever his plane came in to land. He said he had met John Paul II, whom he thought an unpleasant dogmatist, in his dreams: "Instead of dispensing communion wafers he was giving out ornate Italian chocolates."

So which central doctrine, I asked Greene, enabled him to describe himself as a Christian? He said that he started writing fiction while working as a reporter on a provincial newspaper. So he felt he had an intuition, "as good as any Glaswegian chief sub-editor", to distinguish between fact and fiction. When he read the story in John's gospel of the two disciples racing each other to the empty tomb after Christ's body had disappeared, he felt that it was "authentic reportage". It was this, he went on, that "enabled me to doubt my doubt about the resurrection". Doubt my doubt! […]

As someone who had wavered between agnosticism and atheism for two decades, before having returned queasily to Christianity, I empathised with Greene's faith as "doubt of doubt" as opposed to faith as certitude. Faith is a journey without arrival, complicated by false turns, breakdowns, dead ends and wheel-changes. Faith, like love, is seldom entirely constant; nor is it irrevocable. While frequently assailed by doubt, faith is open to provisional, symbolic interpretations (most Christians outside the American bible belt do not take the book of Genesis literally). Those who pursue a religious vocation are not spared vicissitudes of faith and doubt, any more than card-carrying atheists. Mother Teresa, the Albanian nun who worked for the poor in Calcutta, left letters in which she spoke of her doubts right up to her death: "Where is my faith?" she once wrote to a confidant. "Even deep down ... there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. If there be a God - please forgive me." By the same token, Professor AJ Ayer, the most ardent atheist of his day, proclaimed that he believed in an afterlife following a near-death experience in 1988 when he was clinically dead for four minutes. After a few days, and an outcry from the atheists' society, of which he was the president, he partially recanted: "What I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my attitude towards that belief." Doubt of doubt.

On Point had a good show on Mother Teresa and her battle with her own doubt, which lasted more than fifty years. The question, which I was forced to ask myself, is whether doubting is forbidden for true believers. That took me back to the issue of  the nature of religion and to my conviction that it ought to be a private matter and that proselytizing should stop be for true believers an obligation motivated by the belief that non believers will die in hell or that God wants them to save the world. To come back to Mother Teresa, I do not doubt that she was a great person and that her doubt in fact makes her more human than saintly. That is the problem for religion, Catholicism especially, needs saints in order to reassure itself that it is right about human frailty and the ability to overcome it with the help of God. If saints are humans, have faults, and more importantly doubt then it must mean that God isn’t the answer and that as Camus said alone once we realize that we must rebel against the way things are. Isn’t that what Mother Teresa did, but tirelessly refusing to believe that the poor and the sick of Calcutta deserved their fate? At the end it all comes back to the myth of Sisyphus and to what we choose to believe when the rock that we spent a tremendous amount of effort and of blood to punch on top of the mountain, come back down pitilessly while we look at it thinking with tears in our eyes about the time we spent to get it up. At that moment, the question isn’t whether to continue, but whether we make the decision to believe that the human condition is vile and unsatisfactory in itself and that we must therefore look for something more, for something divine. The other alternative is to choose rebellion by refusing to aspire to be Gods to accept to be humans. At the end, Jesus became for Mother Teresa a man not a God and that it was that which helped to survive, because she understood that she was alone and that all she could do is to be a woman of action.

The quest for religious moderation

I took the time to watch Christiane Amanpour’s documentary God’s Warriors on CNN and I thought that it was fascinating even though it left me wanting more. In the last part, which focused on Christian Evangelists in America, Amanpour interviews Ralph Reed, who makes a insightful point about moderation in religion and in politics, by asserting that only fanatics or true believers (on the left and the right) are passionate enough about the issues to have the drive and to make the effort necessary to make a difference. I have the strong suspicion that he is right even though I wish that he wasn’t.

On the same subject of moderation, Carol Sarler has an article on the Spectator website in which she argues that it is a waste of time to wait for Muslim moderates because fundamentalism comes from the fact that religion is about interpretations and because believers are like snake handlers, with whom debate is pointless and unfruitful. Sugary excerpt:

When it comes to matters of faith and belief, it is not simply that the division tends to happen; it is that, surely, it must happen. As already declared, I come at this from the outside so, please, be gentle; still, it seems to me axiomatic that if you believe there is one god, and that this god has made available to you one scripture, then all beyond that — language being the inexact medium that it is — is interpretation. The inevitable problem, therefore, is that a thousand interpretations of one god’s one word mean 999 misinterpretations by people who read it and got it wrong; apostates could scarcely be worse! […]

There is a slew of young men currently writing in newspapers about how they used to be jihadists but have now seen the error of their ways and become ‘moderate Muslims’; each charts slow self-realisation of their own idiocy, rather than a peaceable conversion wrought by a sensible chat over a cuppa with an elder from a warmer, fuzzier mosque than their usual blast-happy haunt.

Whether the folly or the world will end first is not, at the moment, a happy bet. But if our time is to be limited, it would be nice to see less of it wasted on pleas for Muslim grown-ups — or anybody else — to get inside the heads of their militant mutineers with a view to gentle persuasion. The only understanding likely to be productive is of the kind needed for sufficient intelligence to catch them and thwack them; in short, as with the decision not to engage with the snake handlers, less of the word of God, with which one may disagree, and more of the laws of Man, with which one may not. At least we all know what they are and even (especially?) within the tension of terrorist threat, they are open to absolutely no interpretation at all.

Crappy Bible

Sam Jordison asserts that the Bible isn’t a good book in the sense that it contains too many literary sins. It is a great read, even though it makes me wonder if a book can have many literary sins and still be good not for the writing ,but for the story. Last year, I read Robert Alter’s translation of the Five Books of Moses and I enjoyed it very much in part because Alter succeeded in making it not only readable, but also digestible by not trying to make it a literary book. Nevertheless, I think that Jordison is right to say that one has the right to say that the bible is crap:

The literary quality of the Bible is an issue that I think is worth addressing. Firstly, there's the simple point that if the Bible really were the word of God, you'd think that He would be able to make it more interesting. Secondly, there's a war being waged against reason at the moment and it's gone time that reason started landing a few punches of its own. Why not freely state the obvious, but hitherto rarely mentioned, truth? The Good Book is not, as is so often suggested, a damn good read. It's crap. If the two Testaments tell the greatest story ever told, I am a monkey (and not just the distant descendant of one).

[…] Firstly, I do not want to suggest that the ancient books of the Bible are not fascinating and valuable historical documents (no matter how dubious their own claims to veracity).

Nor am I saying that one should not read the Bible. On the contrary, it's vitally important that those on the side of reason should study it, especially in order to know and understand what they are up against. Similarly, if more people who call themselves Christians actually read the book, they might spot a few of its internal contradictions and realise that far from being the meek and mild socialist of popular conception, the Jesus in the New Testament is an unforgiving egomaniac, obsessed with demons, who likes nothing more than to have his dirty feet kissed (Luke 7: 44-5). They might also see that the God they pray to, is, as Evelyn Waugh once quoted Randolph Churchill, "a shit." Failing that, literalists might at least start taking the instructions about not eating shellfish as seriously as they do those that encourage homophobia, and so lessen the burden on our over-fished seas.

Thirdly, and most importantly in terms of such an artistic judgement of the Bible, I'm not denying that some absolutely wonderful manipulations of the English language can be found in the King James version. I also wouldn't dream of suggesting that this translation hasn't been profound influence on English literature. What I would say, however, is that the most important word in the previous sentence is translation.

Getting beyond questions of Faith

The best article I read last weekend was David Martin’s review of John Gray’s 
Black Mass: Apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia in the Times of London Literary Supplement. In his book, John Gray argues that even secular ideologies, which are predominant today have been shaped by religion in some form and that today, the world is experiencing the death of utopia, which is leading to the return of Apocalyptic religion, which is the source for more violent conflict. In his review, Martin criticizes Gray’s book for being incomplete and for ignoring points, which contradicts his thesis. Sugary excerpt:

Yet in Black Mass he begins: “Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion. The greatest of the revolutionary upheavals that have shaped so much of the history of the past two centuries were episodes in the history of faith – moments in the long dissolution of Christianity and the rise of modern political religion”. I happen to think the first truth has greater analytic power than the second, and the notion of the long dissolution of Christianity ignores what recent research has to show about the resilience of Christianity through most of the nineteenth century. But the power of Gray’s analysis does not depend on whether he has read deeply in the sociology of religion, or on the extent to which he gives a one-sided account of New Testament scholarship, as if much modern criticism had not challenged Albert Schweitzer’s eschatological emphasis in The Quest of the Historical Jesus a century ago. Rather, his analysis depends on revising the boundaries of categories like religion and politics: it is boundary changes that generate whole new vistas of argument. Once you revise your categories in a sufficiently radical way, the conferences of our contemporary Conservative and Labour parties in secular Britain, each of them singing Blake’s “Jerusalem” from a different hymn book, look like assemblies of votaries devoted to what Tennyson called the “one far-off divine event / To which the whole creation moves”. The French may think master-narratives are out, along with belief and morality, but in fact the language of politics, even in secularist France, is saturated in a teleological moralism. Political language is, as Georges Sorel eloquently showed, profoundly mythic. [Emphasis added]

Gray pours particular scorn on the idea that we have arrived at some “sunlit upland” where liberal democracy is in principle victorious: Francis Fukuyama eat your heart out. All the supposed signs of a secure and liberal future, such as the European Union and the United Nations, are founded on a contingent historical flux which can change direction at any time, and could just as easily usher in the hegemony of Chinese or Russian totalitarian capitalism. For Gray, the boasted achievements of the United States are equally precarious, as witness the reversal of its most solemn constitutional guarantees at the onset of a terrorist threat far less dangerous to its way of life than the actions taken to combat it. Our democratic order is not founded on some secular version of Christian Providence but a vulnerable local achievement, only exportable by violence on the mistaken assumption that, once you strike away the chains of history, tradition and culture, a New Man will emerge in the image and likeness of Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine.

After reading Martin’s review, I kept wondering whether at issue wasn’t the question of the omnipresence and the omnipotence of religion (independently of God's existence) within civilizations. Gray and Martin believe in the omnipotence of religion in the sense that they believe that religions are in fact inescapable and that secularism is condemned to become religious or to adopt religion theology to justify its moral values. Even though this belief leads both Gray and Martin to different conclusions, it is striking to see that they have trouble imagining politics, morality, and even the world without religion. I may be wrong, but I believe that it is from this belief that the problem  conflict originates since it cheapens the discussion on utopia, ideology, modern politics and everything else. After all, once you limit the parameters of an essential discussion, it becomes practically impossible not to reach erroneous conclusions and to escape the traps of circular reasoning.

Seeking the Human within the Sacred

Roger Scruton defends religion against what he believes to be Atheist’s triumphalism. He argues that  by Réné Girard’s theory about violence and the sacred, showed that religion is the solution against violence and that a rational person is the one who seeks to understand it rather than to mock and challenge it. Sugary excerpt:

Thinkers like Dawkins and Hitchens conclude that religion is the cause of this violence and sexual obsession, and that the crimes committed in the name of religion can be seen as the definitive disproof of it. Not so, argues Girard. Religion is not the cause of violence but the solution to it. The violence comes from another source, and there is no society without it since it comes from the very attempt of human beings to live together. The same can be said of the religious obsession with sexuality: religion is not its cause, but an attempt to resolve it. […] I suspect that, like Nietzsche, Girard has reminded us of truths that we would rather forget—in particular the truth that religion is not primarily about God but about the sacred, and that the experience of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated (the routine tribute paid to it in modern societies) but never destroyed. Always the need for it will arise, for it is in the nature of rational beings like us to live at the edge of things, experiencing our alienation and longing for the sudden reversal that will once again join us to the centre. For Girard, that reversal is a kind of self-forgiveness, as the concealed aggressions of our social life are transcended—washed in the blood of the lamb. […] Of course, you don't have to follow Girard into those obscure and controversial regions in order to endorse his view of the sacred as a human universal. Nor do you have to accept the cosmology of monotheism in order to understand why it is that this experience of the sacred should attach itself to the three great transitions—the three rites of passage—which mark the cyclical continuity of human societies. Birth, copulation and death are the moments when time stands still, when we look on the world from a point at its edge, when we experience our dependence and contingency, and when we are apt to be filled with an entirely reasonable awe. It is from such moments, replete with emotional knowledge, that religion begins. The rational person is not the one who scoffs at all religions, but the one who tries to discover which of them, if any, can make sense of those things, and, while doing so, draw the poison of resentment.

Scruton is missing the point for he sees atheism as a kind of absolutism, which can withstand neither criticism nor dissent when the contrary is true. I suspect that Hitchens and Dawkins have read Girard’s La Violence et le Sacré and his other texts and found it interesting and accepted that Girard believed what he wrote, but weren’t persuaded by his theory. You will rarely see an atheist at the corner of a street on a microphone screaming madly to try to convert people by telling them that the end of the world is coming and that they must repent in order to be saved. The point is that Atheism is most cases isn’t a religion and that Atheists aren’t trying to proselytize or to evangelize but are simply asserting their right not only to dissent, but to live in a society that doesn’t pick a side and decides that religion is not only good, but the norm. Atheism is about the right not to believe, to express it, and to defend secularism against attempts to make religion thought and belief not only the norms, but also the only things acceptable. Isn’t there anything more frightening and triumphant that to claim that to without religion, human beings are not whole and that damnation is the punishment for those who don’t believe?

Of course, it is possible to argue that religion exists because there is a human need for the sacred as there is one for sex, bad faith, and chocolate, but such a statement doesn’t say much and doesn’t advance for the debate for need has nothing to do with reason or with morality. In spite of its shortcomings of , Scruton’s article is interesting because it proves Hitchens, Dawkins, and other Atheists’ point about the faithful and their religion: they have trouble accepting dissent and difference. Most of the people who “believe” cannot accept the fact that someone can assert without her/her assertions being on ignorance, arrogance, and human frailty that s/he doesn’t need religion, but s/he cannot stand it. Why does religion faith leads, in too many cases, to so much insecurity and intolerance.

Deconstructing God

This video (hat tip: Murad Ahmed) is a long one in which Christopher Hitchens discusses his latest book, God is not Great and answers some interesting questions about religion, materialism, Darwinism, and Karl Marx. It is long, but worth watching.

Michel Onfray and absoluteness

Caspar Melville has a vivid portray of French Atheist Michel Onfray in the New Humanist (Hat tip: Mark Thwaite). Onfray is a French version of both Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens except that I would say that his critic of religion is more philosophical, but as blunt as those of Dawkins and Hitchens. In the New Humanist article, Julian Baggini says the following about Onfray, which he admits is based on his only book translated in English, (In defence of Atheism) :

What struck me was that he is if anything more strident than Dawkins et al, and usually I find that tiresome. But because he directs his criticisms very precisely at particular aspects of Christianity, Judaism ad Islam, I think he hits the target more often. Instead of a general diatribe against this generalisation called “religion” he asks tough questions about particular religions.

However, he still neglects the moderate “dogma-lite” versions of religion that most people actually follow, claiming that these are no more than pick-and-mix dilutions of the true faith. That is, I think, a weakness he shares with many atheists. In a way, we have a more fundamentalist view of religion than most believers, because we insist to truly be a believer, you have to swallow a whole lot of doctrine, and that anyone who doesn’t is just following a “wishy-washy”, not entirely bona fide religion.

However he is prepared to make analytic and strong criticisms of Islam. These tough questions have to be asked, and most are too afraid to ask them.

What I love most about Onfray is that he reassures me about my own absoluteness, by showing that it may not always be a barrier to analytical thought, but always a leitmotiv for it.

The goodness of blasphemy

Christopher Hitchens in his usual blunt manner defended in Slate the need to offend God-Fearing people especially Muslims (hat tip: Michael C. Moynihan). Hitchens made the point that being afraid to offend the religious is a form of surrender against the irrational and the absurd. Moreover, to Hitchens, the issue is as much about free speech, as about a society not giving in to the extremism of faithful and not establishing special rules for them by shielding them against criticizing, dissent, and yes, even blasphemy. Sugary excerpt:

But the plain fact is that the believable threat of violence undergirds the Muslim demand for "respect."

Before me is a recent report that a student at Pace University in New York City has been arrested for a hate crime in consequence of an alleged dumping of the Quran. Nothing repels me more than the burning or desecration of books, and if, for example, this was a volume from a public or university library, I would hope that its mistreatment would constitute a misdemeanor at the very least. But if I choose to spit on a copy of the writings of Ayn Rand or Karl Marx or James Joyce, that is entirely my business. When I check into a hotel room and send my free and unsolicited copy of the Gideon Bible or the Book of Mormon spinning out of the window, I infringe no law, except perhaps the one concerning litter. Why do we not make this distinction in the case of the Quran? We do so simply out of fear, and because the fanatical believers in that particular holy book have proved time and again that they mean business when it comes to intimidation. Surely that should be to their discredit rather than their credit. Should not the "moderate" imams of On Faith have been asked in direct terms whether they are, or are not, negotiating with a gun on the table?

On principle, I agree with Hitchens, but I think that there is a middle point between surrender and full frontal confrontation. The issue is not simply a religious one, but one of cultural differences and a complex of superiority or of inferiority. I’m trying to say that confrontation is necessary in most cases because it forces a conversation about right and wrong by forcing people to understand that certain things are unacceptable and that they must tolerate accept that they are not the world and religion and culture cannot be used to justify the unjustifiable. However, a confrontation must not be used as an excuse to debase important discussions about what is permissible and inexcusable to a third grade level by limiting them to insults and childish tantrums about who is right, which God is greater, and who has superior morals. Thus, my concern is about more about the tone and style for too often people use a condescending tone and correct statements of facts to reaffirm illogically ideological preferences or simply to resort to insults to avoid debates about culture, religion, and reason.

So is Hitchens right? He is, but useful and needed conversations must not become screaming matches where the goal becomes to offend and to shock rather than to make blunt arguments about wrong, rights, God, culture, and reason. That said the age of blasphemy is over and the most important issue is no longer blasphemy or tolerance, but the willingness to accept that others have the right to offend you  and to disagree bluntly.

Substance and New Atheism

Peter Berkowitz dismisses the so-called new atheism in an article in the Wall Street Journal. He asserts that it lacks substance and they are just part of a lucrative book business, which aims at selling books. Sugary excerpt:

Profitability is not the only feature distinguishing today's fashionable disbelief from the varieties of atheism that have arisen over the millennia. Unlike the classical atheism of Epicurus and Lucretius, which rejected belief in the gods in the name of pleasure and tranquility, the new new atheism rejects God in the name of natural science, individual freedom and human equality. Unlike the Enlightenment atheism of the 18th century, which arose in a still predominantly religious society and which frequently went to some effort to disguise or mute its disbelief, the new new atheism proclaims its hatred of God and organized religion loudly and proudly from the rooftops. And unlike the anti-modern atheism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which regarded the death of God as a catastrophe for the human spirit, the new new atheism sees the loss of religious faith in the modern world as an unqualified good, lamenting only the perverse and widespread resistance to shedding once and for all the hopelessly backward belief in a divine presence in history.

So Messrs. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and the rest have some fair claim to novelty. But not where it really counts. They contend that from the vantage point of the 21st century, and thanks to the moral progress of mankind and the achievements of natural science, we can now know, with finality and certainty, that God does not exist and organized religion is a fraud. The disproportion between the bluster and bravado of their rhetoric and the limitations of their major arguments is astonishing.

The case for the new new atheism has been restated most recently and most forcefully and wittily in "God Is Not Great" by my friend Mr. Hitchens. It must be said that Mr. Hitchens is simply incapable of uttering or writing a dull sentence. And it should be added that only a very daring or very foolish person would throw down the gauntlet on an issue so close to Mr. Hitchens's heart.

But his arguments do not come close to disproving God's existence or demonstrating that religion is irredeemably evil. Consider Mr. Hitchens's contention, elaborated at length and with gusto, that religion by its very nature compels people to behave cruelly and violently. According to Mr. Hitchens, religion educates children to hate nonbelievers, encourages grown-ups to engage in slaughter and conquest for God's greater glory, and obliges the "true believer" to restlessly circle the globe subduing peoples and nations until "the whole world bows the knee."

Berkowitz misses the point. It isn’t up to Atheists or rather up to new atheists to prove that religion is bad and that God indeed doesn’t exist, but rather to those who claim the contrary to realize that faith isn’t science. One of the points of atheists and of skeptics is that  because believers cannot prove that God exist they should burden the rest of society with their beliefs by assuming that they have the Truth and that they have God on their side. The best argument that Berkowitz can come up with are one that deals with substance and certainty proves presently the point that Hitchens and others are trying to make that one of the central problems of religion is that it doesn’t tolerate non-believers and always see them as people are not only in the wrong, but who have no value argument. As to Berkowitz’s claim that new atheism is essentially a commercial enterprise, it is so laughable and ridiculous that I’m tempted not to answer, but I’m going to have because I have the sense that he made it in good faith. If the criterion for credibility and for substance is unprofitability then what so can be said about all the religious and spiritual books out there? Religion and spirituality sell far more books that atheism yet profitability isn’t the strongest argument against them.

However Berkowitz’s article even though it is unconvincing, shows how much atheists “bug” some believers, which is interesting given the fact that those same people argue that they have most of the answers and shouldn’t therefore worry about what a group of people think of religion, of faith, and of God. The crux of the issue is precisely that believers have become in most cases so fundamentalist that they are becoming totalitarian in the sense that people who say no to and who challenge them become shallow and greedy people who are inspired by greed, by human frailty, or by the devil. What does it say about believers that in spite of their certainties, they cannot stand the fact that they can be challenged?

Dawkins, appearance and irrationality

Francis J. Beckwith argues that Richard Dawkins is irrational because he is incapable on focusing on something other than appearance and is uncompromising. The problem with Beckwith’s criticism is that he uses circular reasoning to reach his preestablished conclusion that Dawkins is irrational. Sugary excerpt:

But Dawkins, in fact, does not actually believe that living beings, including human beings, have intrinsic purposes or are designed so that one may conclude that violating one’s proper function amounts to a violation of one’s moral duty to oneself. Dawkins has maintained for decades that the natural world only appears to be designed. […] But this means that his lament for Wise is misguided, for Dawkins is lamenting what only appears to be Wise’s dereliction of his duty to nurture and employ his gifts in ways that result in his happiness and an acquisition of knowledge that contributes to the common good. Yet because there are no designed natures and no intrinsic purposes, and thus no natural duties that we are obligated to obey, the intuitions that inform Dawkins’ judgment of Wise are as illusory as the design he explicitly rejects. But that is precisely one of the grounds by which Dawkins suggests that theists are irrational and ought to abandon their belief in God.

So if the theist is irrational for believing in God based on what turns out to be pseudo-design, Dawkins is irrational in his judgment of Wise and other creationists whom he targets for reprimand and correction. For Dawkins’ judgment rests on a premise that—although uncompromisingly maintained throughout his career—only appears to be true.

Hitch vs. Hitch

The Independent has a worthwhile article on Christopher Hitchens and his very different brother and their differences. I didn’t know Hitchens had a brother, but it is interesting to read what he thinks of his brother’s eccentric behavior and beliefs:

Peter Hitchens went on the attack in a review of his elder sibling Christopher's new anti-religion book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything .

"People sometimes ask how two brothers, born less than three years apart, should have come to such different conclusions," wrote Peter, adding enigmatically: "To which I'd answer that I'm not sure they're as different as they look, and that it's not over yet."

Other than an acknowledg-ment that, "[Like] everything Christopher writes, it is often elegant, frequently witty and never stupid or boring" , Peter's review was damning, and even questioned whether Christopher truly believed his own assertion that there isn't a God.

Peter, 55, confirms to me that he was implying in his review that Christopher, 58, was closer to religious belief than he had ever accepted. " There is always, in the atheistical struggle with God, the fight against temptation. If it didn't matter to you, why write a book about how wrong it is? The first person you have to convince with any book you write, is yourself. If you didn't need convincing... why go to all those lengths?"

Religious faith and respect

Sue Blackmore refutes Tony Blair’s assertion that religious faith is not inconsistent with reason. She writes that she doesn’t want to live in a world where religious faith is respected because respect then leads to a tolerance for the intolerable and for irrationality. Sugary excerpt:

Of course people of faith want us to respect their beliefs. For they have no other way of defending them than to appeal to respect, to promise rewards for believers, or threaten punishments for unbelievers. So anyone who cares about the truth should resist these meme tricks. Religious faith is something that we should struggle to throw off when we have better ways of learning the truth about the universe we live in; something we should overcome rather than something we should respect.

I, for one, do not want to live in a world where religious faith is respected. I do not want more "faith-based initiatives". I do not want more faith schools, and our great universities should continue to teach people to think for themselves, to respect the truth, and to take nothing on faith.

Reading Blackmore’s article reminded of something that happened to me this week. I was in the subway when a lady in a wheelchair who  was next to me who was reading her bible told me started to talk to me about God and the fact that he loved me. It made me feel uncomfortable because I didn’t want to be impolite, and the only way for me to escape this embarrassing situation was to get out before my stop. I’m talking about this experience to agree with Blackmore on the fact that the invasion of the public sphere by religion is justified with the sanctimonious assertion that religion must be respected. Invoking respect is a way to stop the debate and to force people like me who believe that religion should be private and that when it isn’t it should be willing to be disrespected and to face strong opposition. The world seems to be in a phase where there is no longer such a thing as the private sphere for it is assumed and accepted that what is private is shameful and meaningless and that what is seen is valuable and meaningful. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t read their bible in the subway but I’m saying that the presumption that faith and religion must be ostentatious, proselytized and worn on one’s sleeves to matter is dangerous and anti-modern.

Atheism and pretentiousness

Theo Hobson argues that Atheism is pretentious and cowardly in the Guardian’s Comment is Free. However, his arguments to prove his thesis aren’t argument against Atheism, but an angry, petulant, and childish reaction to what he considers intolerable rejections of Faith and of God. Sugary excerpt:

Atheism is pretentious in the sense of claiming to know more than it does. It claims to know what belief in God entails, and what religion, in all its infinite variety, essentially is. And atheism is muddled because it cannot decide on what grounds it ultimately objects to religion. Does it oppose it on the grounds of its alleged falsity? Or does it oppose it on the grounds of its alleged harmfulness? Both, the atheists will doubtless reply: religion is false and therefore it is harmful. But this is to make an assumption about the relationship between rationality and moral progress that does not stand up. Atheism is the belief that the demise of religion, and the rise of "rationality", will make the world a better place. Atheism therefore entails an account of history - a story of liberation from a harmful error called "religion". This narrative is jaw-droppingly naive.

Some will quibble with the above definition. Atheism is just the rejection of God, of any supernatural power, they will say, it entails no necessary belief in historical progress. This is disingenuous. The militant atheists have a moral mission: to improve the world by working towards the eradication of religion.

Hobson is in fact arguing that Atheism is a form of religion  because he cannot comprehend anything that does not have a religious form. It is for this reason that he must redefine atheism to be able to counter it by arguing that it is religious-like in the sense that atheists have the hidden agenda to proselyte the world to remake it at their image. Hobson isn’t absolutely wrong in the sense that Atheism can become irrational and take the form of a religion when it stopped to be rational to become solely reactionary. However, this is true of anything taking to extremes and which ignores reality. It is for this reason that religion can be in itself dangerous for it tends to encourage willful blindness to reality and to humanity. Thus, Hobson’s quarrels is not really with Atheism, but with what he considers to be religion without God, which is in his view intolerable. His real quarrel is with religion itself for his argument is really that only God justifies the excesses and the irrationality that come with religion.