Category: Religion

The Pub Philosopher watches the final episode of Dawkins on Darwin, in which Dawkins talks to science teachers:

There was an embarrassed silence as the penny dropped. Indoctrinated by years of multi-cultural relativism, these scientists had found themselves saying that science was just one way of understanding how the world was created. Whether or not they believed that was beside the point. Judging by their faces, I dont think they did but they knew what they had to say to survive in todays classrooms.

Matt watches Richard Dawkins trying to teach children about Darwin, and comes up with some useful terminology:

While its true that the creationists featured in the documentary certainly displayed a fundamental ignorance of evolutionary theory, it quickly became obvious that clearing up their misconceptions had no real impact on their beliefs. As one of the pupils at the school Dawkins visits in part 1 so concisely explained: It wasn’t that he didn’t understand evolutionary theory, it was just that his religion told him it was wrong. Through (I assume) a combination of bribes, threats and social pressure, his religious beliefs had managed to shut down a large part of his capacity for critical thought.
This is – what I’d call – “Regressive Theology”. It teaches that the Truth has already been revealed, and all knowledge which challenges it must be rejected. Failure to do so often results in the most extreme punishment conceivable.
At the other end of the spectrum[…] is “Progressive Theology”. This religious view of the world is built around the idea that understand (sic) of (the) God(s) is incomplete and one of the best ways of advancing it is through increasing our knowledge and understanding of “Creation”.

Many religious people need to feel threatened. It is one of the supreme ironies of our time that in the USA, easily the most religion-soaked country in the so-called “First World”, religious leaders get worked up into a frenzy about how Christianity is under vicious attack from a minuscule number of militant secularists. And of course the Pope joins in, to try to whip his flock into line. For these religious leaders, science – especially evolution – is, literally, a Godsend! The greater the progress of science in explaining the origins of the cosmos, the emergence of life on our planet, and the evolution of one rather curious species of hominids, the better they like it.
In part, I suspect, it’s a matter of tradition. The semi-mythical founding figure of Jesus is represented as a revolutionary, persecuted by Jews and Romans alike, and like other wacko sects during the latter part of the Roman Empire the Christians were a subversive underground movement. ((Odd that the Rick Warrens of this world seem to skate over that awkward fact.)) And fear is a great way of building solidarity. Once Christianity had achieved a near monopoly of power, it was forced to build up various forces – Satan, demons, witches, the mentally ill – as omnipresent threats, simply to instill fear and obedience. The rise of Islam was another Godsend – if Mohammed had not been born, the Pope would have had to invent him.
How many religious leaders do you hear in the USA (or Europe, for that matter), saying, “Relax; it’s OK. A handful of ‘new atheists’ may be selling a few books, but Christianity isn’t under any serious threat. In fact we’re being more and more successful in persuading politicians to pander to our prejudices and accomodate our unconstitutional demands. So chill, my flock; keep tithing and enjoying your SUVs and reality TV. There’s no danger from secularism.”
Are you kidding? That’s no way to energize the masses!
(And yes, I could have written almost the same account of Islam. I’ll leave the substitutions as an exercise to the reader.)

Miss Poppy points out that the Catholics have a long tradition of irrational violence when it comes to the eucharist:

Between the years of 1243 and 1761 thousands of Jews were tortured and executed for the crime of host desecration. Most were burned, many were mutilated. In 1370 almost every Belgian Jew was massacred, man, woman and child, for the crime of host nailing.

(Via Jesus’ General.)

The issue of transubstantiation has been in the news recently, and I have a few things to say about it. I’m going to divide the material into two postings, partly for length, and partly because there are two distinct points I want to address, one public and one personal.
Let me summarise the events in question:
(1) A student at the University of Central Florida, Webster Cook, went to mass, took communion, and smuggled the consecrated host out of the church. He then told his friends about this.
(2) Many Catholics reacted with outrage. The student was accused of kidnapping, and a spokesperson for the local diocese described it as a “hate crime”. There were demands that the student be disciplined, or even expelled by the university (for what?), and (since this is America) he received death threats. Fearing for his life, Cook returned the wafer.
(3) A number of atheist bloggers and writers took exception to what they saw as a ridiculous overreaction to a trivial prank. PZ Myers put it bluntly: “It’s a frackin’ cracker, people.”

Wait, what? Holding a cracker hostage is now a hate crime? The murder of Matthew Shephard was a hate crime. The murder of James Byrd Jr. was a hate crime. This is a goddamned cracker. Can you possibly diminish the abuse of real human beings any further?

And PZ went on:

Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? … [If] any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage […] but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web.

(4) Now the shit really hit the fan. There were demands that PZ should be fired, more death threats, and so forth. And Andrew Sullivan weighed in:

It is one thing to engage in free, if disrespectful, debate. It is another to repeatedly assault and ridicule and abuse something that is deeply sacred to a great many people. Calling the Holy Eucharist a “goddamned cracker” isn’t about free speech; it’s really about some baseline civility. Myers’ rant is the rant of an anti-Catholic bigot. And atheists and agnostics can be bigots too.

(5) To his credit, Andrew is always(?) willing to publish dissenting opinions when he receives them. In this case, they arrived quickly:

On Feb. 11, 2006 you posted the following, in relation to the Danish Cartoonists ridiculing Mohammed and Islam:

“The point is this: everyone is supposed to observe the religious constraints of one particular faith, regardless of whether we share it. And if we don’t observe Islamic etiquette … we’re lucky if we only get cursed and condemned. Get that?”

That sounds like a double standard to me. Are we supposed to be more deferential to Catholics than Muslims, when it comes to ridiculing what some of us see as silly and oppressive superstitions? I don’t recall you referring to the Danish cartoonists as “bigots.” The only difference I can see here, is that now it’s YOUR personal religion that’s being ridiculed. So of course that makes the offender a bigot.

Others offered “nuanced” support, while pointing out that:

the situation is further complicated by the fact that PZ Myers was in part defending another, [and] doesn’t the viciousness with which Cook was attacked (death threats, calls for his expulsion from university) mitigate PZ Myers response at least a bit?

(6) So how does Andrew deal with the charge? He rejects it:

My objection to PZ Myers – even as I defended his right to say whatever he wants and wouldn’t want him punished in any way – is not, in my view, a double standard. Printing a cartoon for legitimate purposes is a different thing than deliberately backing the physical desecration of sacred objects. I’d happily publish a Mohammed cartoon if it advanced a genuine argument, but I would never knowingly desecrate a Koran purely to mock religion.

Where to begin with this? Well first the blatant omission: there is not one word of outrage or opposition to the abuse of the term “hate crime”, of the death threats towards Cook and PZ, and to the generally disproportionate response by many Catholics. It’s good to know that Andrew “wouldn’t want him punished”, but he was much more forthright in his opinion of Muslims who threatened the Danish cartoonists, and towards those “moderate Muslims” who failed to condemn their violent co-religionists.
But the more blatant error in Andrew’s response is to imply that PZ was proposing to “desecrate” a “sacred object” “purely to mock religion”, and that the “physical desecration of sacred objects” cannot be a “legitimate purpose”. Says who? Why on earth does Andrew assume that desecrating an object is more significant than publishing a cartoon, or writing a book? Based on body-count, it would appear that Muslims disagree with his ranking. And PZ has no reason to respect either of those opinions, anyway. This is clearly a bit of “special pleading” by Andrew.
And why talk about “purely” mocking religion, when it was pretty clear that PZ was reacting to those who treated the failure to chew a freely-given wafer as being in the same category as, say, the killing of Matthew Shepard. Andrew is quick to attack those he describes as “Christianists”, even when to do so means vilifying their (presumably sincere) religious beliefs. (They may not be Andrew’s beliefs, but so what?) And he has spoken out against “grand-standing” on the question of flag burning, so presumably the desecration of an object of veneration can be a legitimate form of protest.
(And wasn’t it just a year ago that Andrew was telling us that among the “Things We Love About America” was “Penn and Teller burning the flag while celebrating American liberty”, apparently desecrating an object to make a point. But their real point was that freedom – and its ambiguity – are more important than mere objects, whether flags or crackers.)
UPDATE: Over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, a commenter draws our attention to a 2006 piece by Andrew Sullivan about South Park, the Scientologists, and the Catholic Church. Quoth Sully:

We need those truths and benefit from those fantasies. A free society survives partly because the powerful are mocked, and their pretensions undermined. Religions, which guard their own illusions carefully, are particularly ripe for satire. And they should be.
Whenever one human being is claiming to tell the truth about the meaning of life he is making a very powerful claim — and in a free society he also runs the risk of getting a raspberry. Laughter matters because piety begets power.
Orwell once remarked that one reason fascism never took off in Britain was because the sight of a goose-stepping soldier would prompt your average Englishman to giggle. Someone is now silencing the giggles. And our world is a lot creepier because of it.

“Giggles”? Sounds like mocking religion to me. And in fact Sullivan praises South Park’s bravery in exactly these terms:

The show is as offensive as it is inspired: the first truly post-PC television adventure. It is also brave. It doesn’t only skewer political ideology, it also aims square at religions. It has mocked Catholicism, Mormonism, evangelicalism and even featured a cartoon Muhammad as a super-hero.

(My emphasis.) I think I prefer Sully’06 to the current model.

Riazat Butt, the Guardian’s religion reporter, has been writing about Gafcon, the meeting of conservative Anglicans in Jerusalem. Ostensibly this movement is all about African bishops bemoaning the moral laxity of US and UK Anglicans, and offering them an alternative free from the blight of homosexuality. Apparently, the American conservatives (dominionists, even) who are actually behind the whole thing are now trying to keep the Africans in their place:

In the fateful press conference – regarding torture – Akinola said that what was permissible in one culture was not permissible in another, without realising that same-sex unions have become the norm in western society and should therefore be accommodated in the same way that discriminatory legislation and treatment of homosexuals are par for the course in some African countries.
If the white bishops can turn a blind eye to polygamy and persecution then surely the courtesy should be returned.

Hypocrisy seems to be thriving in the Southern Cone…
UPDATE: Ruth Gledhill of the Times has posted an analysis of Gafcon which portrays this event as far-reaching:

Organisers believe the Jerusalem gathering is the most significant event in Anglicanism in their lifetimes and will lead to a new “movement” that will herald a “new reformation”.The movement could be akin to the Anglo-Catholic and evangelical revivals that revived a moribund Church of England in the 19th century. It will possess its own bishops, clergy and theological colleges, and eventually its own structures, but will be constructed entirely within the legal constraints of existing Anglican institutions.

And she says of the participants in Gafcon:

The majority do not want a split. They want their Church back. They appear to have decided that the best way to achieve this is not to start another one but to remain within the one they have got, and reform it from within.

Well, maybe. I don’t see how a split can be avoided: I reckon that the only thing still to be decided is who will play the part of the Judean Popular People’s Front. But the reactionaries really have to make their move now: all of the trends suggest that twenty years from now there will be no constituency for homophobia.

Via the Bad Astronomy Blog comes this graph from a Gallup Poll of US beliefs.

Now a number of bloggers have commented on the party political differences that are highlighted by the survey. However, I want to ask a different, rather simpler question.
Do I know any of you?
More specifically, is there anyone that I know – someone who reads this blog – who actually falls into the category “God created humans as is, within the last 10,000 years”. Because if the answer is “yes”, I’d really love to exchange email with you.
I know that people with these ideas exist – I’m confident that Gallup isn’t simply making up the numbers – but I simply haven’t ever (knowingly) met any of you. And I’d love to learn more. Do you take medicine? Do you use computers or fly on airliners? How do you reconcile your trust in science with your anti-scientific beliefs? Do you keep the ideas in different mental compartments, or do you find them genuinely compatible? I’m honestly interested in your answer. Puzzled. Incredulous, even. But definitely curious.

The Times reports that the GMC ((General Medical Council, the governing body for medical practice in the UK.)) has drawn up a code of conduct designed to prevent doctors from imposing their religious and ethical beliefs on their patients.

GMC guidelines on doctors’ beliefs include

• You must not allow any personal views about patients to prejudice your assessment of their clinical needs, [including] patient’s age, culture, disability, gender, lifestyle, marital status, race, religion, sexual orientation, or economic status
• You should not normally discuss your personal beliefs with patients unless those beliefs are directly relevant to their care
• Patients may ask you to perform, advise on, or refer them for a treatment…to which you have a conscientious objection. In such cases you must tell patients of their right to see another doctor
• You must be open with patients – both in person and in printed materials such as practice leaflets – about any treatments or procedures which you choose not to provide or arrange because of a conscientious objection, but which are not otherwise prohibited
• If your post involves arranging treatment or carrying out procedures to which you object, you should explain your concerns to your employer or contracting body
• It is not acceptable to seek to opt out of treating a patient or group of patients because of your personal beliefs or views about them

Source: General Medical Council

Not surprisingly, a bunch of Catholic and Muslim doctors are moaning. They seem not to understand that their primary duty as doctors is to their patients, not to their superstitions.

Essential listening: last week’s Speaking of Faith®, in which Krista Tippett interviews Ed Husain:

British activist Ed Husain was seduced, at the age of 16, by revolutionary Islamist ideals that flourished at the heart of educated British culture. Yet he later shrank back from radicalism after coming close to a murder and watching people he loved become suicide bombers. He dug deeper into Islamic spirituality, and now offers a fresh and daring perspective on the way forward.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writing in The Independent on Rowan Williams monumental gaffe:

What Rowan Williams wishes upon us is an abomination and I write here as a modern Muslim woman. He lectures the nation on the benefits of sharia law – made by bearded men, for men – and wants the alternative legal system to be accommodated within our democracy in the spirit of inclusion and cohesion.
Pray tell me sir, how do separate and impenetrable courts and schools and extreme female segregation promote commonalities and deep bonds between citizens of these small isles?
What he did on Thursday was to convince other Britons, white, black and brown, that Muslims want not equality but exceptionalism and their own domains. Enlightened British Muslims quail. Friends like this churchman do us more harm than our many enemies. He passes round what he believes to be the benign libation of tolerance. It is laced with arsenic.

Also in the Independent was this elaborate exegesis by Deborah Orr, which concludes with the words:

I have to confess that it lifts my heart to imagine a legally and religiously recognised board of religious Muslim people, widely supported, and committed to taking a lead in plotting a modern yet Islamic attitude to the rights of women in Britain and around the world. It could be rather wonderful, and is quite a different proposition from the one we have been led to believe that Williams made.

But this is putting the cart so far before the horse that the poor beast can’t even see it. By all means, work to change Islam and evolve Sharia into something which incorporates “a modern yet Islamic attitude to the rights of women”, if such a thing is possible. If you succeed, then come back and talk about whether it has a role to play in supplementing the institutions of the secular state. But don’t presume success. As Yasmin Alhibai-Brown points out, today’s reality is grotesquely different from the naive utopianism of Williams and Orr:

Yet, family disputes, says Dr Williams, would be easier, within sharia. For whom exactly? The polygamous men who live in this country, yes, certainly. Not for their wives who will be told that God intends them to lower their eyes and accept unjust verdicts.
Many will be sent back to bastard husbands or flinty-eyed mullahs will take their children away. In Bradford and Halifax, they may be forbidden to drive or work where men are employed. Adultery will be punished. I don’t think we will have public stonings but violence of some sort will be meted out (it already is) with lawmakers’ backing.

Where in Williams’ dry, academic language was any compassion for these women?

According to the BBC

The Archbishop of Canterbury is said to be overwhelmed by the “hostility of the response” after his call for parts of Sharia law to be recognised in the UK.
Friends of Dr Rowan Williams say he is in a state of shock and dismayed by the criticism from his own Church.

All of which simply proves that the guy is too naive, too unimaginative to hold the post that he does. He may or may not be right; personally I think he’s out of his gourd, but several people that I respect assure me that what he intended to convey is definitely worth consideration. However, any reasonably clueful person would have been able to predict the reaction to William’s speech; the fact that he is in shock simply confirms that he is incompetent to hold the position of responsibility that he does. Predictably, blog entries are appearing with titles like “Who will rid us of this troublesome priest?”, although in this case we’re dealing with stupidity rather than punctiliousness. For context, I recommend Ruth Gledhill.
Why does all this matter? It shouldn’t, really: Muslims make up less than 3% of the population of England, and a minority of those actually want Sharia. ((Of the majority, it’s hard to separate those who genuinely don’t want Sharia from those who would like it, but recognize that such a move would provoke a backlash. Let’s assume that most are sincere.)) It’s hard to resist the suspicion that Williams is getting involved in this issue because he sees it as a way to bolster the obsolete notion that religious representatives should be involved in politics. Or perhaps he’s pandering to Akinola and the Southern Cone….