"The secret of freedom... a brave heart."

In The History of the Peloponnesian War (431–413 BCE), recounting the Athenian leader Pericles’ Funeral Oration (delivered after the first year of the war with Sparta), the historian Thucydides (c.460–400 BCE) wrote the following passage, which I hope youngsters still study:

Fix your eyes on the greatness of Athens, as you have it before you day by day, fall in love with her, and when you feel her great, remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honor in action… For the whole earth is the sepulcher of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men’s lives. For you, now, it remains to rival what they have done and knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom and the secret of freedom, a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy’s onset.

But I’m sorry to say, it appears that many Westerners have not taken that message to heart. Yet, some have – and so have some brave ex-Muslims.

An example of a “brave heart” is the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders. In last week’s post I suggested why he shouldn’t release his promised film (entitled Fitna, Arabic for ‘chaos’ or maybe ‘ordeal’), which he said would show that the Koran (or Quran or Qur’an) was “a fascist book inciting hatred and killing.” In that blog, I didn’t question Wilders’ bravery but argued that, rather than release his film, he could help Holland and humanity more by hiring some comedians to try to rid the world of all religions using ridicule.

This week, Wilders announced that he wouldn’t proceed with a March 28 press conference where he intended to show his film (although it’s expected that the film will become available on the internet). As reported by Thomas Landen in the Brussels Journal:

The Nieuwspoort Press Center in The Hague, which is run by a board of journalists, publishers and government press officers, demanded that Wilders pay 400,000 euros for extra safety measures. “Apparently, you have to be a millionaire to organize such an event,” Mr. Wilders said. “Even if I had the money I am not going to spend it on a press conference.”

Viewed from essentially any angle, the entire episode seems sad – and bad – save for Wilders’ courage.

Of course Wilders’ freedom of speech to criticize some “holy book” shouldn’t be constrained, and the Dutch Foreign Minister’s statement that “…freedom of expression doesn’t mean the right to offend” is about as despicable as they come. But as described in the above-referenced article by Landen, for Islamic extremists to threaten Wilders’ life (and this week, even threaten the lives of children whose last name is Wilders, even though they’re unrelated to the politician) and for Wilders to be living in Army barracks for his protection are absolutely horrible. We must defeat the terrorists.

Further, for a member of the board of directors of the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever Corporation (no doubt most concerned about Unilever’s sales in Muslim countries) to state to the Dutch media that “Geert Wilders is evil, and evil has to be stopped” plus call upon the Dutch people to “rise in order to stop Wilders from preaching his evil message” are enough for me to boycott Unilever products. Even few prostitutes, I suspect, adopt profit as their prime motive.

And if that’s not enough, consider the following paragraph from Landen’s article (referenced above):

Last week Henk Hofland, the nestor of Dutch journalism, proposed on Dutch television that the Dutch authorities lift Geert Wilders’ police protection. “Let him feel what it is like for those whose lives he endangers,” Hofland, the former editor of NRC Handelsblad, the leading newspaper in the Netherlands, opined. Mr. Hofland, who was given the title “Dutch journalist of the century” by his colleagues in 1999, asserted that, if Dutch citizens get murdered in retaliation for Wilders’ opinions on Islam, not the assassins are to be blamed, but the politician. Apparently, to Hofland and his ilk being critical of Islam is worse than slaughtering innocent people in the name of Islam.

Both the courage of some people and the cowardice of others are astounding.

Last week in this blog I gave another illustration – an astounding illustration – of courage. I quoted what the brave Syrian-American Wafa Sultan said on Al-Jazeera TV. She deserves America’s Medal of Freedom. This week, the “Saudi intellectual” Turki Al-Hamad provided the world with another astounding example of courage. On Al-Arabiya TV, he stated the following:

The taboos in Saudi Arabia are different from the taboos in Lebanon, and from the taboos in Egypt, and so on, even though I believe that in all these countries, they tend to view the taboo itself as fundamental. This was not the case in the past. I believe that we've reached the point where everything is ruled by prohibitions. Everything is prohibited unless it is proven to be permitted. This is the problem of Arab society and culture. Instead of making progress, we are regressing – and if only we were regressing in a reasonable manner. Unfortunately, we are regressing in a superstitious and unreasonable manner.

We… have forsaken this future for the sake of myth. We live in the world of the supernatural, not in the real world, which we have completely neglected…

In the past, our society was more open, more accepting of other opinions and different behavior. But [in] the so-called 'religious awakening' – and I regard it as a religious 'slumber,' not as an awakening … everything has turned upside down. The dead have taken control over the living.

I blame the political regime. I blame the Arab intellectual. I blame the prevalent culture. It is a mixture of many things. Let me give you an example. The prevalent culture is backward, yet the political regime uses this culture to glorify itself, without realizing that it is destroying the future. That's one reason. Another example is when intellectuals turn everything into ideology, riding a wave of populism and flirting with the peoples, instead of enlightening them. They flirt with the peoples and follow them, rather than leading them. I place the blame to some extent on these intellectuals. The prevalent culture is stagnant. It does not recognize the ‘other’, and does not want to recognize that it is one of many cultures in the world. It considers itself to be the ‘number one’ culture – the world itself. Therefore, as said by a poet from the age of pre-Islamic ignorance – and I believe that we are still living in that age – “We are a people of worthy of world leadership – or the grave.” We cannot live in the middle ground between these two extremes, and that is the problem…

From the early 20th Century to this day, we constantly hear people say: “We should adopt the good things [from the West] and ignore the bad.” You cannot do such a thing. When you consider the products of modern civilization – the car, the computer, and so on – these are all products of a certain philosophy, a certain way of thinking. If you adopt the product, but ignore the producer – you have a problem. You cannot do such a thing. [For us,] the product is new, but the thought is not. We move forward with our eyes looking backward.

After this period of my life, I am very pessimistic about the possibility of making real changes in our culture and society. I hope I am wrong. In any case, this does not mean we should not try. Future generations will ask what we did about this. At least we tried; at least we made our voice heard. Time will tell whether we were successful in achieving any result…

Perhaps some people might be unimpressed with Turki Al-Hamad’s courage (and I expect that there are brave producers of this TV show who also should be congratulated, especially given the recent rulings by the Arab Propaganda ministers, mentioned in an earlier post). But if people are unimpressed, they should realize that in 2006, the cowardly fool Osama bin Laden included Al-Hamad in his list of those who should be killed:

The freethinkers and heretics who defame Islam, and mock and scorn our noble Prophet – their case and the law concerning them have been clearly expounded by Imam Ibn Qayyim [Al-Jawziyya]. He made it clear that the crime committed by a freethinker is the worst of crimes, that the damage caused by his staying alive among the Muslims is of the worst kind of damage, that he is to be killed, and that his repentance is not to be accepted...

Among these heretics is Ahmad Al-Baghdadi in Kuwait, and Turki Al-Hamad in the Land of the Two Holy Shrines – a fatwa concerning the latter was issued by Sheikh Hamud Al-'Uqala – and many others like them.

It is intolerable and outrageous that the heretics are among us, scorning our religion and our Prophet… Therefore, you must fear Allah and do His will. Do not consult anyone about the killing of these heretics. Be secretive in carrying out that which is required of you.

I describe bin Laden as a coward (as are all Islamic terrorists), because it takes zero courage to die believing that you’ll be instantly transported to paradise for eternity, and I describe him as a fool (as are all Islamic terrorists) for staking his life on an idea that doesn’t have a shred of evidence to support it.

But I must leave it to competent, future historians to identify all the brave and intelligent people who were raised as Muslims and tried to transform and/or eliminate still another of the past’s silly superstitions. Nonetheless, I would call their (and the reader’s) attention to those Muslims, “secular Muslims”, and ex-Muslims who endorsed the St. Petersburg Declaration, namely,

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Magdi Allam, Mithal Al-Alusi, Shaker Al-Nabulsi, Nonie Darwish, Afshin Ellian, Tawfik Hamid, Shahriar Kabir, Hasan Mahmud, Wafa Sultan, Amir Taheri, Ibn Warraq, Manda Zand Ervin, and Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi.

I encourage readers to study what they wrote. It starts with:

We are secular Muslims and secular persons of Muslim societies. We are believers, doubters, and unbelievers, brought together by a great struggle, not between the West and Islam, but between the free and the unfree.

We affirm the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience. We believe in the equality of all human persons.

We insist upon the separation of religion from state and the observance of universal human rights.

We find traditions of liberty, rationality, and tolerance in the rich histories of pre-Islamic and Islamic societies. These values do not belong to the West or the East; they are the common moral heritage of humankind.

We see no colonialism, racism, or so-called “Islamaphobia” in submitting Islamic practices to criticism or condemnation when they violate human reason or rights…

As more examples, there are the brave and intelligent ex-Muslims (all of whom have received death threats by Muslim maniacs) who produced and signed the Manifesto: Together facing the new totalitarianism, namely:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Chahla Chafiq, Caroline Fourest, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji, Mehdi Mozaffari, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, Antoine Sfeir, Philippe Val, and Ibn Warraq.

I again encourage readers to study what they wrote; it starts with:

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.

We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity, and secular values for all.

The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammad in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilizations or an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism, and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom, and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people…

In addition, Ali Sina deserves special recognition, for the many contributions at his website, such as the Letter to Mankind. This letter from “the ex-Muslim Movement” includes the following:

Today humanity is being challenged. Unthinkable atrocities take place on daily basis. There is an evil force at work that aims to destroy us. The agents of this evil respect nothing; not even the lives of children. Every day there are bombings, every day innocent people are targeted and murdered. It seems as if we are helpless. But we are not!

The ancient Chinese sage Sun Zi said, “Know your enemy and you won’t be defeated”. Do we know our enemy? If we don’t, then we are doomed.

Terrorism is not an ideology, it is a tool; but the terrorists kill for an ideology. They call that ideology Islam…

We are a group of ex-Muslims who have seen the face of the evil and have risen to warn the world. No matter how painful the truth may be, only truth can set us free. Why this much denial? Why so much obstinacy? How many more innocent lives should be lost before YOU open your eyes? A nuclear disaster is upon us. This will happen. It is not a question of “if” but “when”. Oblivious of that, the world is digging its head deeper in the sand.

We urge the Muslims to leave Islam. Stop with excuses, justifications, and rationalizations. Stop dividing mankind in “us” vs. “them” and Muslims vs. Kafirs. We are One people, One mankind! Muhammad was not a messenger of God. It is time that we end this insanity and face the truth. The terrorists take their moral support and the validation for their actions from you. Your very adherence to their cult of death is a nod of approval for their crimes against humanity.

We also urge the non-Muslims to stop being politically correct lest they hurt the Muslims’ sensitivity. To Hell with their sensibilities! Let us save their lives, and the lives of millions of innocent people.

Millions, if not billions of lives will be lost if we do nothing. Time is running out! “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.” Do something! Send this message to everyone in your address book and ask them to do the same. Defeat Islam and stop terrorism. This is your world, save it.

Although my opinion is incidental, I would like to humbly express my gratitude to each and every one of those people (and I’m sure, many others should be mentioned, but in my ignorance, I have failed to identify them), for so bravely trying to help humanity.

Meanwhile, in contrast to my praise, the following illustrates a little of the stupid, maniacal responses from Muslim extremists:

Now we have drawn out a hit list of a “Who’s Who” guide to slam into. Take your time but make sure their (sic) gone soon – oh, and don’t hold out for a fatwa it isn’t really required here… Has anyone got that Christian kaffir “Ibn Warraq’s” real name yet…?

Well them [sic)] disbelievers [the signatories] have in effect signed a death wish via this statement so to hell with them, we’ll just provide the help that they so dearly crave.

Still, though, the question continues: What actions should we take to stop the cowardly, stupid, Muslim supremacists? Certainly I’m in favor of bombing their terrorist training camps (wherever they are, including Pakistan), exposing their hate-filled handbooks (such as the Koran), and ridiculing their stupid supernaturalism. But none of that is enough. Just as a single murderer can terrorize a community, it takes only a tiny number of fanatics to terrorize a nation: it’s astoundingly simpler to destroy than to create; any fool can throw a monkey wrench into a machine; any idiot can be wrapped with explosives that are wired to blow up within a crowd; a small group of trained Islamists can find a way to detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the West.

To stop them, I must admit that threatening to retaliate for any further attacks by eliminating Mecca seems increasingly appealing: given that the terrorists are living in a fantasy land in which they and their “holy shrine” are protected by an invisible f[r]iend in the sky, then as H.L. Mencken suggested, heaving a dead cat in their sanctuary could be the most sensible approach to get them to smarten up. To those who say that it's unwise to fight hornets by striking at their nest, that it’ll cause an even bigger swarm of hornets to attack, I’d point out that there’s already a huge swarm of them; so, a good start toward eradicating them is to put on protective gear and fire-bomb their nest. Therefore, as a first step, I’d encourage the U.S. Congress to withdraw our agreement to the Article of the Geneva Convention that prohibits destroying “cultural and historical sites” and to promulgate: if Muslim maniacs conduct another large-scale attack on the West, then the President is to request Congressional approval for obliterating Mecca – of course with suitable warnings, so that those who desire could abandon it and those who desire could "protect it" with their "martyrdom" . If consequences would include the needs for a regime change in Saudi Arabia and incarcerating all Wahhabi clerics, then so be it.

Yet, for the longer term, I’d suggest an additional approach. Since the long-term solution to Muslim madness is to educate Muslim children to learn how to think critically (i.e., to learn how to hold beliefs only as strongly as relevant evidence warrants), then I’d encourage all western nations to establish their own, new type of Peace Corps. Maybe call them IPSO FACTOs: International Peace Squadrons for Objective, Factual and Appropriate, Critical Thinking and Operations. I’d like to see at least a million European and American Muslims per year (committed to freedom and to human rights and who have been tested to demonstrate that they understand and can instruct others in critical-thinking skills) fan out across the Muslim world and, fluent in the language and sensitive to the culture in the country of their destination (maybe for a two-year assignment), teach Muslim children how to apply the scientific method in their daily lives. For that matter, we could help humanity if suitably trained and suited IPSO FACTO members (Muslims, Christians, Free-thinkers, whatever) were deployed also to much of Africa and South America.

But even that wouldn’t be enough: it’s not enough that a few intellectuals are brave; it’s not enough to be protected by brave men and women in uniform; it would not be enough to threaten to bomb Mecca or to send out IPSO FACTO members to teach children critical-thinking skills. As an illustration of why it’s not enough, consider the final few paragraph of Landen’s report (referenced above):

The Dutch showed what stuff they were made of two years ago, when they made life impossible for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an elected member of their parliament, just like Mr. Wilders. Her neighbors sued to get her removed from the apartment where she was living under police protection. The court of appeal ordered Ms. Hirsi Ali to leave her house within four months, invoking… the European treaty for Human Rights. As the judges said:

The court considers in its ruling that the neighbors have been put into a situation that has contributed to them feeling less safe in their own house. That feeling is extended to the communal living spaces of the apartment complex, but also to their own apartments. The court argues that this is a severe violation of one’s private life (as per Article 8 of the European Treaty for Human Rights).

Ms. Hirsi Ali [now living in the U.S.] was booted out of her own house by virtue of the European Treaty for Human Rights because Muslim fanatics threatened her, thereby causing her neighbors to “feel less safe in their own house.” Soon, Mr. Wilders, whatever one thinks about his opinions, his motives or the wisdom of his decisions, will be booted out – also in the name of grand principles such as human rights – because he makes others feel less safe. That is his crime: While the majority of the Dutch are willing to submit, he is not.

Thucydides said, “The secret of freedom [is a] brave heart”, but it doesn’t follow that, if you’re brave, then you’ll feel free: the brave fight so that their loved ones, who in a civilized society should include their neighbors, will be free.

For my part, I have checked that I can rapidly assemble the gun in my bedroom and I’ve decided to apply for a permit to carry it while I go for my daily walk: I don’t feel so free as I did when I was a youngster, but I hope that, eventually, my grandchildren and other youngsters will feel freer.

www.zenofzero.net

From Walden to Wilders to Wisecracks

Thank Science for the Internet!

With it, for example, a stimulating virtual tour of Walden Pond is just a click away.

In my experiences, the virtual tour of Walden Pond is as stimulating as being there – and if you have fond memories of your own special part of nature, then maybe the virtual tour is even better than reality.

For Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), Walden Pond was his own special part of nature – and of reality. In 1845 he borrowed an ax, bought $28.12½ worth of building materials, and built himself a cabin adjacent to Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts (on land owned by his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson). For the next two years and two months, the cabin was Thoreau’s home.

While at Walden Pond, Thoreau refused to pay taxes, because he was opposed to slavery, the poll tax, the Mexican war, and the Massachusetts’ religious tax, as he explained in his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience”. Below is a little from his famous essay, in which I’ve taken the liberty to try to modernize some spelling and punctuation.

I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster…

It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case…

I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies. And so a man…

I think sometimes, “Why, this people mean well; they are only ignorant; they would do better if they knew how. Why give your neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not inclined to?” But I think, again, “This is no reason why I should do as they do, or permit others to suffer much greater pain of a different kind.”

Again, I sometimes say to myself, “When many millions of men, without heat, without ill-will, without personal feeling of any kind, demand of you a few shillings only, without the possibility (such is their constitution) of retracting or altering their present demand and without the possibility (on your side) of appeal to any other millions, why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force? You do not resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately; you quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities; you do not put your head into the fire.”

But just in proportion as I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, and consider that I have relations to those millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, I see that appeal is possible… But if I put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal… and I have only myself to blame. If I could convince myself that I have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according (in some respects) to my requisitions and expectations of what they and I ought to be, then (like a good Muslim and fatalist) I should endeavor to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it is the will of God.

And above all, there is this difference between resisting this and a purely brute or natural force: that I can resist this with some effect. But I cannot expect, like Orpheus, to change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts.

As for why, in the first place, Thoreau chose to leave Concord and live in a cabin, in his 1854 book Walden, or Life in the Woods, he explained:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, [to] see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

In his 1854 review of Walden, A.P. Peabody wrote:

The economical details and calculations in this book are more curious than useful; for the author’s life in the woods was on too narrow a scale to find imitators. But… [Thoreau] says so many pithy and brilliant things, and offers so many piquant, and, we may add, so many just, comments on society as it is, that this book is well worth the reading, both for its actual contents and its suggestive capacity.

For example, there’s Thoreau’s:

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Some of those who were influenced by Thoreau to “strike… at the root [of evil]” included leaders of the anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, and trade unionist movements, as well as Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In contrast, the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders (leader of his “Freedom Party”, which won nine of 150 seats of the lower house in the 2006 elections) has recently been busy “hacking at the branches of evil.”

The particular branch of the evil tree of religion on which Wilders has been hacking away is Islam. In multiple ways he’s let it be known that soon he’ll release a 10-minute film he has produced in which he promises to promote his quoted ideas that the Koran is a “frightful and fascist” book, a “fascist book inciting hatred and killing”, and that “it should be banned, just like [Hitler’s] Mein Kampf”, which is the only book whose distribution is banned in the Netherlands. As you probably know, Muslims worldwide have begun to react violently to Wilders’ plan.

This week, in a letter to the Dutch newspaper De Volkskant, Wilders wrote:

If I had announced that I was going to make a film about the fascist character of the Bible would there have been a crisis meeting of Holland’s security forces? Would I have received as many death threats as I have done since announcing I was making a film about the Koran? Of course not. The fact that a 10-minute film not yet shown could, according to some, lead to economic boycotts, riots and other horrible things says everything about the nature of Islam. Nothing about me…

Well, actually, I disagree: it says (or at least suggests) quite a bit about Wilders.

• It suggests that he’s hacking away at only one branch on the tree of religious evil, while standing on another branch of the same tree; thus, even though it has been stated that “he considers himself an atheist”, notice that every webpage behind the homepage at his site ends with the phrase “God bless [the] PVV [Partij Voor de Vrijheid, i.e., Wilders’ Party for Freedom].”

• It suggests that he’s a hypocrite, because if he has read the Bible (and he might be expected to have read it, given that he was raised a Roman Catholic and he “received his secondary education at the… R.K. St. Thomas College”), then he would know that the Bible is also a “fascist book inciting hatred and killing”; therefore, he could equally well advocate banning the Bible.

• And most importantly, if his prime goal is to gain more political power to prevent the Islamization of the Netherlands, then it suggests that he’s chosen to hack at the branches of the tree of religious evil rather than chop at the trunk or dig at the roots.

Nonetheless, I agree with Wilders that the Koran is a “fascist book inciting hatred and killing” and that “Islam is not a religion; it’s an ideology” – as is Christianity (but not Judaism or Hinduism), in the sense that the word ‘ideology’ (but not ‘religion’) has come to mean promoting the widespread adoption of a set of ideas.

Also, I certainly agree with Wilders and disagree with the Dutch Foreign Minister, Maxime Verhagen, who tried to criticize Wilders with the foolish remark: “…freedom of expression doesn’t mean the right to offend.” As Salman Rushdie wrote:

At Cambridge University I was taught a laudable method of argument: you never personalize, but you have absolutely no respect for people’s opinions. You are never rude to the person, but you can be savagely rude about what the person thinks. That seems to me a crucial distinction: people must be protected from discrimination by virtue of their race, but you cannot ring-fence their ideas. The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible…

It does matter. People have the fundamental right to take an argument to the point where somebody is offended by what they say. It’s no trick to support the free speech of somebody you agree with or to whose opinion you are indifferent. The defense of free speech begins at the point when people say something you can’t stand. If you can’t defend their right to say it, then you don’t believe in free speech. You only believe in free speech as long as it doesn’t get up your nose. But free speech does get up people’s noses.

Earlier, H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) said similar:

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected… We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

Yet, although I support Wilders’ goal, I don’t support his plan to hack at only one branch of the evil religious tree: not only is it futile, it’s probably worse than useless.

Further and unfortunately, it’s been found to be essentially pointless to try to chop at the trunk of the tree: the wood is hard and our axes blunt – and the damnable clerics of the world have erected a huge barrier around the tree to protect their own parasitic existence. Capable con artists that they are, they’ve capitalized on the people’s ignorance, grief, fear, herd instinct, etc., they’ve offered their faithful flocks fanciful solace and fictitious rewards, and the obedient fools then indoctrinate their children in the clerics’ balderdash. So, the vicious cycle of ignorance continues for still another impenetrable generation.

Many brave axmen have attacked the trunk of the tree, from the Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates, to Epicurus and Seneca the Younger, and from Robert Ingersoll, Bertrand Russell, and many more, to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Karl Marx made some progress, but the cost in sweat and blood was incalculable. He wrote:

Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Substantial quantities of data (historical and current) support his subsequent claim that improving economic conditions would and will weaken religions, but other data show that it’s not enough. For example, most of the 9/11 and other terrorists were not economically deprived – nor was bin Laden.

But Marx also saw that alleviating economic hardships would be insufficient to eliminate religion:

Criticism [of religion] has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses…

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

But it’s not enough to criticize religion: to describe all religions as infected legalism, polluted and putrefying politics, and discredited, defunct science is just hacking at the branches and ineffectually chopping at the trunk. In reality it’s been found, in most cases, that such criticism is worse than useless, since it just stimulates the bunker mentality of the religious – as illustrated by the reactions to the Danish cartoons and the recent reactions even to suggestions about Wilders’ film. Thus, rather than examine their beliefs, religious fanatics explode bombs wrapped around their waists and fly hijacked airliners into skyscrapers – so they can continue to waste their lives within their religious fantasies and worse, by far, maim and kill others in the process.

Yet, in addition to hacking at the branches and chopping at the trunk of the evil religious tree, many people have, in fact, made substantial efforts digging out its roots – again including the Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates and so on, and including Freud, who wrote:

While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded. Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery… If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.

Digging still deeper, the huge problem encountered is the enormous number of roots that feed the evil religious tree, including (as I’ve mentioned in an earlier blog) power mongering of clerical leaders, pandering by politicians, male chauvinism, misogyny, and worst of all, child abuse. Further, beneath it all – indeed, not just in the root system but within the very moisture of the soil that nourish the roots – is the root cause of all religions, namely, ignorance.

One of the brave souls digging at the ignorant source of religion – one of the bravest of the brave (whom the FBI should be protecting) – is the American-psychiatrist Wafa Sultan, born and educated in Syria. Here’s some of what she said on Al-Jazeera TV on 21 Feb. 2006:

Why does a young Muslim man, in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up? In our countries, religion is the sole source of education and is the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched.

More than 2400 years ago, Socrates succinctly summarized similar ideas:

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.

Further, at his bogus trial, after he was convicted of the trumped-up charge, “Socrates is guilty of not believing in the gods in which the state believes, but brings in other new divinities; he also wrongs by corrupting the youth”, Socrates reportedly said:

To fear death, gentlemen, is nothing else than to think one is wise when one is not; for it is thinking one knows what one does not know. For no one knows whether death be not even the greatest of all blessings to man, but they fear it as if they knew that is the greatest of evils. And is not this the most reprehensible form of ignorance, that of thinking one knows what one does not know?

And yet, just as in Socrates’ day and before, the clerics of the world continue to be guilty of “the most reprehensible form of ignorance”, claiming that they know what they don’t. In fact, they provide little evidence that they even know what ‘knowledge’ means.

Therefore, if Wilders (or anyone) would seek to banish religious ignorance from their nation (or preferably, from the world), the best way to dig out the roots of the evil religious tree is to ensure that all children are taught how to develop their own “critical-thinking” (or “evaluative-thinking” or "scientific-thinking”) skills, which is a topic that I recently addressed elsewhere. In a nutshell, the skill is to apply the scientific method in one’s daily life, and thereby, to hold beliefs only as strongly as relevant evidence warrants. If everyone did that, the evil tree of organized religions would soon wither away.

Unfortunately, however, the clerics have hatched a hideous Catch-22. For obvious reasons, they oppose “their” children learning critical-thinking skills. You can’t keep a con game running for more than 5,000 years by permitting people to think for themselves! Therefore, to break free from the clerics’ Catch 22, to exit their vicious circle, to strike at the roots of their evil, more must be done: the acidic soil on which religion and the clerics feed must be buffered.

To buffer that acidic soil, it’s critical to recognize that religion isn’t rational; it feeds on emotions. As C.W. Dalton wrote in his 1990 book The Right Brain and Religion:

Believers are interested in fulfilling emotional and spiritual needs, not intellectual needs. In some cases, one might as well try to use reason on a dog. For many people God is primarily a warm feeling. How can one argue with a warm feeling? Arguing with someone who places reason below faith and biblical authority is blowing against the wind.

Actually, though, there is an effective way to “argue with a warm feeling”. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp on 30 July 1816:

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them…

Stated differently: the most effective way to “argue with a warm feeling” is with another feeling; in particular, the cold feeling generated in religious people when they are ridiculed for having been so foolish as to buy into a con game perpetrated by a bunch of clueless clerics. As H.L. Mencken (the most famous of the reporters at the Scopes trial) wrote:

The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.

In her appearance this week on Al-Jazeera TV, in remarks for which Al-Jazeera has subsequently and unfortunately (but understandably) issued its “deepest apologies” for comments that “offended Islam”, Wafa Sultan saw some of it:

The Muslim is an irrational creature ruled by instincts. Those teachings have deprived him of his mind, incited his emotions, and reduced him to the level of an inferior creature that cannot control himself or react to events rationally…

If you want to change the course of events, you must reexamine your terrorist teachings, you must recognize and respect the right of the other to live, you must teach your children love, peace, coexistence, and productive work. When you do that, the world will respect you, will consider you in a better light, and will draw you in a better light.

But I think that H.L. Mencken saw it and said it more clearly:

The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe – that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

Therefore, my recommendation to Wilders would be that, if he wants to help both his homeland and humanity, then he shouldn’t release his film criticizing the Koran. Not that the criticism isn’t correct, but it’ll just harden the Muslims’ bunker mentality. Instead, he should (for example) hire some competent comedians whose wisecracks would ridicule all religions, excoriate all clerics, and most importantly, get all who bought into their clerics' con games rolling in the aisles -- not in some religious trance but laughing at themselves for paying fortunes, forfeiting their freedoms, for permission to live within fairy tales!

Similarly for all of us: rather than argue with religious people, it’s better to poke fun at them – as best seems fit. Maybe I’ll provide some illustrations in another blog, but meanwhile, some fun suggestions can be found at some of the great comics on the internet, such as at the homepages of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Russell’s Teapot, and the links provided there.

www.zenofzero.net

Good News & Bad News

As per usual, this week there was some good news and some bad news.

Some good news was contained in a Pew Forum survey of the “religious landscape” in the U.S. Here’s how Bob Parks summarized the results in his weekly newsletter:

Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the Pew survey finds a changing landscape. More than a quarter of Americans have left the faith they were born in. Americans who are unaffiliated with any religion have seen the greatest growth in numbers as a result. Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses. Is there any indication that Americans are becoming more rational? Perhaps. About a fourth of those who are unaffiliated describe themselves as atheist or agnostic.

In more detail, the results show that (16.1±2)% of us were “unaffiliated” with any religion, including 1.6% atheists, 2.4% agnostic, and 12.1% “nothing in particular”. That contrasts with results I’ve summarized elsewhere: by 1999, one careful survey of Americans showed that 11.4% and another showed that 11.2% chose a “no religion" preference – “the second-largest single belief group in America, second only to Roman Catholics.” The new results suggest that since 9/11 and the subsequent publication of some great, conscious-raising books (e.g., Sam Harris’ The End of Faith and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion), our numbers have climbed from about 30 million Americans to maybe 50 million.

"Maybe", because the bad news is that, as per usual, the survey had serious flaws in methodology. One was in the form of the question asked by the (probably religious) pollsters employed by the Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI): rather than inquire about people’s “religious affiliations” (a loaded question, containing “the fallacy of interrogation” or “the fallacy of presupposition” – similar to asking if you’ve stopped beating your wife yet), the pollsters should have first asked a more general and more neutral question, such as:

Do you have a natural or a supernatural worldview; that is, is it your opinion that everything that exists is natural or do you believe in the existence of supernatural things, such as ghosts and gods and similar?

And another serious flaw in the Pew survey is the potentially huge bias caused by its sampling methodology. Only 35% of those contacted (by telephone) consented to an interview (by telephone), and of those, only 86% completed the survey. Thus, the response rate was 24%.

What’s the matter, people, don’t you want to let the religious fundies know where you live? Welcome to the club! I’ll bet that the results are about as reliable as 1940s' surveys by Nazis asking people how many Jews were in their household.

If people in the Pew Forum (or any organization) really wanted to know what a significant percentage of all Americans think about the stupid god idea, then they’d ask appropriate questions and guarantee anonymity, for example, by conducting their survey by mail, paying all expenses, and legally committing themselves to a million dollar liability for each respondent ever identified.

But meanwhile, there was some good news. Reporting on a Gallup poll, an AFP news report by Karin Zeitvogel states:

About 93 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are moderates and only seven percent are politically radical, according to the poll, based on more than 50,000 interviews.

The bad news is that the result means: there’s “only” ~90 million Muslims who won’t need much convincing to become terrorists. And reality may be much worse – if one abandons the dubious assumption that Arabs, in particular, told the pollsters what they really thought, rather than (as is customary) to say what they thought the visitors wanted to hear (i.e., that they were peaceful).

But then, there was the good news in a report by Robert Pigott of the BBC that included the following:

Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam – and a controversial and radical modernization of the religion. The country’s powerful Department of Religious Affairs has commissioned a team of theologians at Ankara University to carry out a fundamental revision of the Hadith, the second most sacred text in Islam after the Koran.

The Hadith is a collection of thousands of sayings reputed to come from the Prophet Muhammad. As such, it is the principal guide for Muslims in interpreting the Koran and the source of the vast majority of Islamic law, or Sharia.

But the Turkish state has come to see the Hadith as having an often negative influence on a society it is in a hurry to modernize, and believes it responsible for obscuring the original values of Islam.

It says that a significant number of the sayings were never uttered by Muhammad, and even some that were need now to be reinterpreted.

Commentators say the very theology of Islam is being reinterpreted in order to effect a radical renewal of the religion.

Its supporters say the spirit of logic and reason inherent in Islam at its foundation 1,400 years ago are being rediscovered. Some believe it could represent the beginning of a reformation in the religion…

An adviser to the project, Felix Koerner, says some of the sayings – also known individually as “hadiths” – can be shown to have been invented hundreds of years after the Prophet Muhammad died, to serve the purposes of contemporary society.

“Unfortunately you can even justify through alleged hadiths, the Muslim – or pseudo-Muslim – practice of female genital mutilation,” he says.

“You can find messages which say ‘that is what the Prophet ordered us to do’. But you can show historically how they came into being, as influences from other cultures, that were then projected onto Islamic tradition”…

As part of its aggressive program of renewal, Turkey has given theological training to 450 women, and appointed them as senior imams called “vaizes”. They have been given the task of explaining the original spirit of Islam to remote communities in Turkey’s vast interior.

One of the women, Hulya Koc, looked out over a sea of headscarves at a town meeting in central Turkey and told the women of the equality, justice, and human rights guaranteed by an accurate interpretation of the Koran – one guided and confirmed by the revised Hadith. She says that, at the moment, Islam is being widely used to justify the violent suppression of women.

“There are honor killings,” she explains. “We hear that some women are being killed when they marry the wrong person or run away with someone they love. There’s also violence against women within families, including sexual harassment by uncles and others. This does not exist in Islam... we have to explain that to them.”

‘New Islam’
According to Fadi Hakura, an expert on Turkey from Chatham House in London, Turkey is doing nothing less than recreating Islam – changing it from a religion whose rules must be obeyed, to one designed to serve the needs of people in a modern secular democracy. He says that to achieve it, the state is fashioning a new Islam.

“This is kind of akin to the Christian Reformation,” he says. “Not exactly the same, but if you think, it’s changing the theological foundations of [the] religion. “

Fadi Hakura believes that until now secularist Turkey has been intent on creating a new politics for Islam. Now, he says, “they are trying to fashion a new Islam.”

Significantly, the “Ankara School” of theologians working on the new Hadith has been using Western critical techniques and philosophy. They have also taken an even bolder step – rejecting a long-established rule of Muslim scholars that later (and often more conservative) texts override earlier ones.

“You have to see them as a whole,” says Fadi Hakura. “You can’t say, for example, that the verses of violence override the verses of peace. This is used a lot in the Middle East, this kind of ideology. I cannot impress enough how fundamental [this change] is.” 


Great news! Right? Reformation!! Enlightenment, finally reaching the Muslim world!!!

Oh, sure, they’d have troubles. Recall the troubles in Europe that came with the reformation of Christianity. It’s easy to imagine the troubles when the ideas of the Ankara school of theologians clashed, for example, with those of the "mentally challenged" theologians at the Cairo “university” Al-Azhar. But at least the news provided some hope that “light might conquer darkness still”.

But then the bad news hit two days later. At IslamOnline, Ahmad Maher debunks the BBC report with his report, entitled “Turkey Classifying Not Revising Hadith”. For example:

“Make no mistake, we are not after modifying or revising the Hadith,” Mehmet Gormez, deputy director of the religious affairs authority Diyanet and supervisor of the project, told IslamOnline.net in a phone interview. “What we are actually doing is re-classifying, re-categorizing the Hadith and translating it into Turkish, no more no less.”

He shrugged off media suggestions that Turkey was re-writing the Hadith and creating a new Islam. “They made too much fuss and took the project out of its real context. We are neither fashioning a new Islam nor dare to alter the fixtures maxims of Islam,” Gormez said emphatically.

“The Western media have read what are doing from a Christian perspective and understood it in line with their Christian and Western cultures.” When it comes to Islam, Gormez said, the Western media is used to focusing on women’s status and jihad.

In comments on these events at Jihad Watch, “Matamoros” summarized them succinctly:

Religious Reformations in History
The Protestant Reformation: 1517–1648
The English (Anglican) Reformation: c.1520–1566
The Islamic Reformation: Feb 27th – Feb 29th, 2008 (both dates inclusive)

Ah but, meanwhile, there was some really great new – and I’m not being facetious: Al-Jazeera (Qatar) stood firm!

Two weeks ago in this blog, in a note entitled “Islam’s Dark Ages Grow Dimmer”, I commented on the muzzling of Arab TV stations by Arab Propaganda ministers. The referenced AP report by Maggie Michael contained the following:

The new rules allow countries to suspend, terminate or refuse to renew the licenses of TV network offices that violate them. Qatar, whose government funds the popular station Al-Jazeera, was the only nation of the 21 Arab states not to sign the charter.

At the great website established by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), there’s news not only that Al-Jazeera (Qatar) didn’t fold, they stood firm – and with style!

What follows is some of the transcript of the video clip. If you, also, don't do Windows (and if all you "do" is English and if the clip isn't in English), then ya gotta read what follows!!

Moroccan Satirist Bziz Bound and Gagged on Al-Jazeera TV in Mockery of Arab League Resolution to Limit Freedom of Speech on TV

[Following are excerpts from an interview with Ahmad Al-Sanousi “Bziz”, a Moroccan political satirist, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV (Qatar) on February 20, 2008]

Host: Political satires that make fun of presidents of Western countries, using comedians or puppets, have become the most famous TV shows, and they are very popular in France, the U.S., Britain, and most European countries. None of these presidents has ever banned or prohibited any political satire, or places any artist on trial, even though they make a mockery of these presidents. [TV shows] join other forms of satire – first and foremost, theater and caricatures. In our Arab world, however, the Arab information ministers have convened, and issued revolutionary edicts and resolutions, threatening with fire and brimstone and with an iron fist anyone who gets it into his head to insult, whether explicitly or implicitly, a ruler, a minister, or even a guard working for an Arab government. In keeping with these edicts, our guest today is the artist Al-Sanousi, one of the most prominent political satirists in the Arab world… The viewers should know that for the past 18 years, Ahmad Al-Sanousi has been forbidden to perform, or even to appear in the state-run media in Morocco…

[Following is a short satirical sequence featuring the host and Al-Sanousi. Al-Sanousi is sitting at his seat, bound and gagged.]

Host: We’ve had you bound and gagged, because we cannot trust you to watch your tongue. From now on, we intend to implement the resolutions on all our guests. We will not allow anyone to insult any leader, or his wife, his children, his grandchildren, or his great-grandchildren – down to the 100th generation. We will not allow this.

[Al-Sanousi tries to argue, but he is gagged so his words cannot be heard.]

Host: We will not allow any guest to insult any minister or even a guard working for the government. The only ones you are allowed to criticize as much as you like are the downtrodden peoples.

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: Mmmm...

Host: Enough! We will keep you tied up. What do you say? Do you accept the terms? Will you be polite and refrain from insulting anyone?

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: Mmmmm...

Host: Look... if you try to make fun of me – are you familiar with this rod? You’ve been beaten with it in the past, right?

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: Mmmmmm...

Host: In 1996.

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: Along with the unemployed.

Host: This rod is ready. If you deviate to the left or to the right – the rod is here. Have you ever experienced this whip? We will be using these instruments on some of our guests. We will use the rod and whip on our guests. If this is enough to keep him polite and make him adhere to the rules – okay. Otherwise, we will cut off his tongue with these shears, and serve it as an offering to the rulers and governments. All the insolent guests – we will chop off their tongues. We adhere to the resolutions.

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: The resolutions of the minister?

Host: Of the Arab information ministers. Are you going to abide by the rules, or shall we keep you tied up? Do you see the men I have brought here, the ones who tied you up? Each of them has a rod. If you don’t abide by the rules, I will unleash them on you. So are you going to abide by the rules? Guys, release him.

[The men untie Al-Sanousi and remove his gag.]

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: Are these...

Host: Enough!

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: Are these the Arab information ministers? Is this an Arab information minister?

Host: No, I got them from the Ministry of the Interior. They specialize in torture. If you deviate, I’m keeping the instruments right here.

[Here begins the actual interview]

Host: What do you think of the monumental resolutions made by the Arab information ministers?

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: First of all, these are Arab “execution” ministers.

Host: What, you are being [insolent] already?

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: No, it was just a pun. I did not break the rules. This is the first time that the ministers have made a resolution, Allah be praised. They convened and made a resolution, and that’s great… Our state-run TV channels have become an instrument of torture.

Host: In what way?

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: For instance, they arrest somebody, place him in a solitary cell with no windows, and make him watch the state-run TV channel 24 hours a day. You know that on state-run channels, they air news bulletins and other programs which are dedicated to glorifying the ruler – but no news or information. After a few hours of watching, the detainee collapses.

Host: He collapses?

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: Yes, because he has been watching Arab state-run TV for 12 years. Then he confesses to things he has done and things he has not done. Another guy was watching...

Host: In other words, state-run TV has become an instrument of torture?

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: It has become an instrument of psychological and physical torture. If I put you in front of a state-run TV channel for 24 years... 24 hours will seem like 24 years, and you will confess to things you did and things you didn’t do.

Host: What should they do to improve these channels?

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: I think one of the ministers who convened in the “League of Arab Censorship” should have suggested making the news bulletins musical.

Host: In what way?…

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: I think, for instance, that when the anchor reads the news, he should make it interesting.

Host: Give us an example.

[Al-Sanousi takes out a lute and begins to play.]

Ahmad Al-Sanousi: For instance [sings]: “Now on the news, on the news, on the news... His presidential highness has received several ministers…”

Host: You must be obedient and loyal, and glorify the president or the ruler every day, so they will be pleased with you.

I say: a rousing cheer for Al-Jazeera! Good job fellas!! In fact, brilliant!!!

But then, there’s more bad news out of Egypt. Last week in this blog, I suggested that child abuse can lead to adult hate (which can lead to child abuse, in a never-ending cycle of violence). This week, a mentally challenged lawyer by the name of Ibrahim Elias was on Egyptian TV promoting child abuse. Again courtesy MEMRI, here’s a portion of the transcript of the video clip:

Ibrahim Elias: Yes. Instilling discipline is carried out in stages: First, you may deny things from the child, and at the end, you may beat him. Beating was permitted as a means of instilling discipline. Not every child should be beaten, and not on every occasion. How and when to beat is determined according to necessity, and the necessity should be evaluated. Who knows better, Allah or us? Our Lord knows best. The Prophet Muhammad said: “Order your children to pray, until the age of seven, and beat them so they pray, until the age of ten.” The Prophet Muhammad talked about beating. Allah said in the Koran in Surat Al-Nisa – and I don’t want to get the women mad at me: “As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, refuse to share their beds, and beat them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them.” This is verse 34 in Surat Al-Nisa. Disobedience by a wife or a child means violation of orders. In other words, it is a transgression. When a child commits a transgression that merits a beating – he should be beaten… Weren’t [the great Egyptian authors] Al-’Aqqad and Taha Hussein beaten? Weren’t they beaten on the soles of their feet so that they would memorize the Koran and thousands of poems?

Interviewer: Is that what made Al-’Aqqad who he was?

Ibrahim Elias: Yes, they became great scholars.

Interviewer: Thanks to beatings, whole institutions were created…

Ibrahim Elias: Our society will fall apart. We have our own education. These ideas are imported from all kinds of conferences about female circumcision, child-beating, wife-beating, and polygamy. These imported ideas don’t work for us, and they will not be implemented in Egypt as long as Al-Azhar exists.

Let’s hope that this lawyer Ibrahim Elias never becomes a judge. He relies not only on hearsay evidence, but hearsay of hearsay. I’m thinking about what Thomas Paine wrote in 1794 book The Age of Reason [quoted below, with liberty taken to update some punctuation and spelling and to add a few notes in square brackets].

Every… [organized, revealed] religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals: the Jews have their Moses; the Christians [have] their Jesus Christ…, the [Muslims] have their Muhammad [and, after Paine wrote this, the Mormons had the Rigdon-Smith conspiracy]… Each of those [religions rely on]… certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God: the Jews say that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say that their word of God came by divine inspiration; and the [Muslims] say that their word of God was brought by an angel from Heaven [just as the Mormons claim, for their Book of Mormon]. Each of those [religions] accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some other observations on the word ‘revelation’. Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man. No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if He pleases [if he were to exist!]. But admitting, for the sake of [argument], that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that [first] person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication – after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the Commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some “historian” telling me so. The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention. [Paine adds the footnote: “It is, however, necessary to except the declaration which says that God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children; it is contrary to every principle of moral justice.”]

When I am told that the Quran was written in Heaven and brought to Muhammad by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former [and similarly for the Book of Mormon]. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it.

When also I am told that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not. Such a circumstance requires much stronger evidence than their bare word for it. But we have not even this – for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so. It is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon such evidence.

And so, when Ibrahim Elias asks, “Who knows better, Allah or us?”, I answer, unequivocally: "We do!" And when he claims, “The Prophet Muhammad said: ‘Order your children to pray, until the age of seven, and beat them so they pray, until the age of ten’,” I say – with all respect that’s due: “Blow it out your ear, ya stupid nut!”

And finally for this list is the good/bad news that the brave “dean of Saudi bloggers”, Fouad al-Farhan has finally been heard from. After being kept in solitary confinement and held for 82 days, he was permitted to phone his family. His “crime” appears to be derived from his blog's theme:

Searching for freedom, dignity, justice, equality, public participation, and all the rest of lost Islamic values…

In the column at the right, I’ve added a link to the Free Fouad Campaign. And suggestions to the contrary notwithstanding, I’d bet that behind Fouad’s incarceration are the Saudi “thugs” dedicated to the Promotion of Vice and the Prevention of Virtue.

And yes, I meant to write it that way – although it’s opposite from the way they write it. But as is common with dumb thugs and conniving clerics, they don’t yet see that Abraham, Moses, Ezra, Jesus, all the popes, Muhammad, and Hitler were all wrong:

The worst vice is to blindly obey; the greatest virtue is to figure things out for yourself.

www.zenofzero.net

Pity the poor children

Published this week was the transcript of a recording of a Muslim in Britain teaching his son to hate. The Muslim's name is Parviz Khan. He pleaded guilty to plotting the kidnap and butchery of a British Muslim soldier (cutting his head off “like a pig”), a butchery that he “planned to film and release for propaganda purposes.” Below is some of the transcript of his “shouting at his five-year-old son when he made a mistake” reciting the Koran:

“Who do you kill?” asked Khan.
“America kill,” said the boy.
“Who else you kill?” said Khan.
“Bush I kill,” said the boy.
“And who else?” demanded Khan.
“Blair kill, both people kill”…
Then the pair began chanting at each other.
Khan said: “Kuffar [non-believers]” the boy said: “Kill.”
Khan said: “Mushrik [polytheists]” and the boy said: “Kill.”
Then it continued with: “Hindu?… Kill… Sheedi [blacks]?… Kill…”

Such hideousness stirred memories of hideous images in my mind. For example, last week I saw the video of kids in Iraq being trained as terrorists by Al Qaeda. That brought to mind my seeing little kids in Pakistani madrassas (they can’t be called schools), rollicking back and forth as they read or recited the Koran. Think of kids forced to memorize such hate from the Koran as is listed here.

Of course, it’s not just Muslim kids who are subjected to such stupidity. Through the Atheist Blogroll (see link on the right) I went to the Atheist Media Blog and unfortunately watched the video “Cutting Edge: Baby Bible Bashers”. The grownups shown are adults? They're Christians? Pity the poor children!

In turn, that Christian hideousness reminded me of what I didn’t want to remember about the “Pastor” Fred Phelps, the “god hates [this-than-and-the-other thing]” leader of the Westboro Baptist Church. Among the many Phelps videos available on the web, maybe have a look at this one: the poor little kids (Phelps’ grandkids) obviously don’t understand what they’ve been taught to hate.

Which brought to mind the horrible but valid line by the TV-cartoon character Homer Simpson: “Kids are great… You can teach them to hate what you hate…”

Any normal sense of decency demands to know: how could parents (such as Phelps’ oldest daughter) treat their children so horribly? But then, the answer is obvious from reading the book Addicted to Hate by Jon Michael Bell (with Joe Taschler and Steve Fry) about the Phelps family: throughout their lives, Phelps beat his children (both boys and girls), as well as his wife, mercilessly; throughout their lives, they’ve lived in terror.

In turn, although the authors of the book didn’t provide many details (probably because they’re lost), there is the following about Phelps’ own father:

Fred’s father was a veteran of World War One, and throughout his life suffered from the effects of a mustard gassing he’d taken in France. He found work as a detective for the Southern Railroad to support his family. The railroad security force or “bulls”, as they were called, had a reputation for brutality when they patrolled the yards to prevent the itinerant laborers, washed out of their hometowns by the Depression, from riding the freights. “My father,” says Pastor Phelps, “oft-times came home with blood all over him.” Suddenly he stands up, turning his face away, and exits.

I'd bet that Phelps learned how to hate and to abuse children from his own father, just as Hitler no doubt learned how to hate (especially Jews) from his own father, who beat Hitler mercilessly – apparently responding to his own beatings for being a “Jewish bastard”, after his mother had been impregnated by the son of the Jewish family who had hired her as a maid and who wouldn’t let their son marry her (Hitler’s grandmother).

Thereby, what the writers of the Simpson series failed to mention is that the most effective way to teach kids how to hate is to show them hate.

In particular, I’d bet that the Muslim who was recorded teaching his child to hate was taught how to hate by his own family, since emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of children (both boys and girls) is rampant in Muslim countries. For example, the following is from an assessment by Jamie Glazov entitled “The Sexual Rage Behind Islamic Terror” published at FrontPageMagazine.com on 4 October 2001:

Throughout the Islamic Middle East, men and women are taught to be vehemently opposed to pleasure, especially of the sexual variety. Men are raised not only forbidden to touch women, but to even look at them. Sex before marriage is not just a sin – but a criminal offence. It is punishable by a severe beating at best, and an execution at worst.

The sexual privileges that are allowed in Islamic cultures are permitted to men. Women’s sexuality and social independence represent major threats to male supremacy and are tightly controlled. Thus, as the Moroccan feminist Fitna Sabbah reveals in her book Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, there is a disturbing conflict in the Middle East between sexual libido and repression. A deep-seated fear of, and hostility to, individuality prevails, and its main expression exists in misogyny.

Socially segregated from women, Arab men succumb to homosexual behavior. But, interestingly enough, there is no word for ‘homosexual’ in their culture in the modern Western sense. That is because having sex with boys, or with effeminate men, is seen as a social norm. Males serve as available substitutes for unavailable women. The male who does the penetrating, meanwhile, is not emasculated any more than if he had sex with a wife. The male who is penetrated is emasculated. The boy, however, is not, since it is rationalized that he is not yet a man.

In this culture, males sexually penetrating males becomes a manifestation of male power, conferring a status of hyper-masculinity. It is considered to have nothing to do with homosexuality. An unmarried man who has sex with boys is simply doing what men do. As the scholar Bruce Dunne has demonstrated, sex in Islamic societies is not about mutuality between partners, but about the adult male’s achievement of pleasure through violent domination.

There is silence around this issue. It is the silence that legitimizes sexual violence against women, such as honor crimes and female circumcision. It is also the silence that forces victimized Arab boys into invisibility. Even though the society does not see their sexual exploitation as being humiliating, the psychological and emotional scars that result from their subordination, powerlessness and humiliation is a given. Traumatized by the violation of their dignity and manliness, they spend the rest of their lives trying to get it back.

The problem is that trying to recover from sexual abuse, and to recapture one’s own shattered masculinity, is quite an ordeal in a culture where women are hated and love is interpreted as hegemonic control.

With women out of touch – and out of sight – until marriage, males experience pre-marital sex only in the confines of being with other males. Their sexual outlet mostly includes victimizing younger males – just the way they were victimized.

In all of these circumstances, the idea of love is removed from men’s understanding of sexuality. Like the essence of Arab masculinity, it is reduced to hurting others by violence. A gigantic rupture develops between men and women, where no harmony, affection or equality is allowed to exist. In relationships between men, meanwhile, affection, solidarity and empathy are left out of the picture. They threaten the hyper-masculine order.

It is excruciating to imagine the sexual confusion, humiliation, and repression that evolve in the mindsets of males in this culture. But it is no surprise that many of these males find their only avenue for gratification in the act of humiliating the foreign “enemy,” whose masculinity must be violated at all costs – as theirs once was.

Violating the masculinity of the enemy necessitates the dishing out of severe violence against him. In the recent terrorist strikes, therefore, violence against Americans served as a much-needed release of the terrorists’ bottled-up sexual rage. Moreover, it served as a desperate and pathological testament of the re-masculinization of their emasculated selves.

In his powerful on-line book entitled Psychohistory: Childhood and the Emotional Life of Nations, Lloyd deMause presents compelling evidence for his thesis that:

…the ultimate cause of all wars and human misery is the parental holocaust of children throughout history – an untold story of how literally billions of innocent, helpless children have been routinely killed, bound, battered, mutilated, raped and tortured and then as adults have inflicted upon others the nightmares they themselves experienced.

In Chapter 4 of his book, deMause states:

It may seem simplistic to conclude that most of human destructiveness is the restaging of early traumas and that what we must do if we wish to put an end to war and social violence is teach adults how to stop abusing and neglecting and begin respecting and enjoying their children, but I believe this is precisely what our best scientific evidence shows.

It is of course extremely difficult (and as Karl Popper warned, it can be extremely dangerous) to conduct large-scale experiments to test psychological and social theories, but as deMause describes in his Winnicott Memorial Lecture, entitled “What the British Can Do To End Child Abuse”:

The results of outlawing the hitting of children are dramatic. In Sweden, the first country to abolish corporal punishment of children… [the law] not only has public support… [hitting children – even in its mildest forms – {has} been reduced from 53% to only 11%], but in addition, only 6% of younger Swedes today say they support corporal punishment. Practice in Sweden, as well as attitude, has changed… with only 3% of school children saying they had been slapped by their parents, and only one child in 25 years having been killed by their parent. The results of this dramatic decrease in hitting have been spectacular. The number of children needing social work care has decreased by 26%, the number of youth convicted of theft declined by 21%, the rates of alcohol and drug abuse by youths have declined dramatically, and the rate of youth suicide has also declined. What is most astonishing is that in Sweden and in other countries outlawing the hitting of children the populations actually began by being in favor of corporal punishment, but after their legislatures passed their anti-hitting law despite this pro-hitting mood, the general public gradually became more and more opposed to corporal punishment, without any dramatic intrusion by the state into family life.

I wonder if this experiment in Sweden is why, after a two-week visit, I expressed my feeling to my host that “Sweden is an island of tranquility in an ocean of insanity.”

In Chapter 9 of his book deMause goes even further:

That gods are usually perpetrators restaging early physical abuse is the answer to Freud’s question: “Why does religion seem to need violence?” When violence against children disappears, religious and political violence will disappear. Religions and politics as we know them will no doubt disappear also. Religions work by constructing sacred spaces that contain triggers for switching into trances in order to access people’s alters and obtain some relief from their tortures.

Consistently and as a case in point (see the second plot in my earlier blog), among all nations Sweden is most advanced in rejecting the god idea.

All of which brings to mind what the Buddha so perceptively said 2500 years ago:

In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible.

We could now add: to dispel hate, violence, and all gods from the world, teach all children in the world to love – by showing each and every one of them that you care for their welfare.

www.zenofzero.net

Islam's Dark Ages Grow Dimmer

This week, Islamic clerics and colluding Muslim politicians have forced the Arabs farther back into their clerically imposed version of the Dark Ages. Here’s a brief summary of the news as given at the Middle East Media Research Institute blog:

The ministers of information of the Arab countries agreed on a document during their meeting in Cairo on Tuesday {2008/02/12} that would limit the margin of freedom of satellite TVs, in the event they “insult the [political] leaders and the national and religious symbols”. The document authorizes a host government to withdraw the license of any TV, or freeze its activities, that violate these rules.

Yesterday (2008/02/15), a more complete, Associated Press report by Maggie Michael contains the following:

Cairo, Egypt (AP) – Arab governments have adopted new rules meant to rein in satellite television talk shows that have become forums for rollicking criticisms of Arab regimes and discussions of taboo topics.

The “Charter of Principles” approved this week by Arab information ministers is being viewed by the region’s media circles as a concerted move to muzzle stations.

The charter prohibits criticism of Arab leaders and religious figures, warning in vague terms of the harm to social peace, national unity and public morals. It demands “adherence to objectivity, sincerity and respect to the dignity of the countries, nations and their national sovereignty.”

The new rules allow countries to suspend, terminate or refuse to renew the licenses of TV network offices that violate them. Qatar, whose government funds the popular station Al-Jazeera, was the only nation of the 21 Arab states not to sign the charter.

“Some satellite channels have deviated from the right path,” Egyptian Information Minister Anas el-Fiqi told the ministers who gathered in Cairo on Tuesday. “There are violations that have taken place, violations taking place around the clock, which require a serious stance”…

A case in point (of such “violations”) was recently described by Marwan Kraidy in a report entitled “Hypermedia and Governance in Saudi Arabia”. Saudi Arabia is ostensibly a monarchy, but behind the monarchs, it’s controlled by the fundamentalist (Sunni) Wahabi sect of Islam. This is the same sect that uses Saudi oil revenue to build mosques and spread Islam nonsense throughout the world, with a budget of approximately $3 billion per year (which is larger than the Soviet’s propaganda budget at the height of the Cold War) and similar to the Soviets, with the goal of emasculating the U.S. Constitution and similar Constitutions in other Western countries. The following paragraph is my brief outline of Kraidy’s informative report.

In Saudi Arabia, from the early 1960s when TV was first introduced until recently, all television programming was strictly controlled by the Wahabi clerics. During the 1990s, satellite TV became available, enabling Saudis to watch programs originating from other Arab-language stations. For 18 months starting in December 2003, the Lebanese “reality television show” Star Academy became available to Saudis, and it was enormously popular: viewers called in on their cellphone and sent text messages and e-mail to vote on the performances of contestants (both male and female).  The Saudi clerics also voted on the show, issuing the following fatwa (i.e., “religious ruling”):

…the Committee [the Permanent Committee for Scientific Research {cough, cough} and the Issuing of Fatwas] thinks that they [the Star Academy shows] should be banned and it is harem [forbidden] to watch them, finance them, take part in them, call them to vote or to express admiration of them…

The clerics were specifically and adamantly against “the free mixing of the sexes”, the “blatant promotion of immorality” (e.g., the display of women’s hair!) – not to dwell on the horror of people voting for what they wanted. These were the same Wahabi kooks that resisted the introduction of the bicycle into Saudi Arabia (calling it “the Horse of Satan”), and still into the 1960s, a special permit was needed to ride one!

Yet, in spite of the clerics’ ruling, the people continued to watch the program and to use their new communication technology to vote their preferences. Thereby, it appeared that humanists might be able to mark down an impressive win for modernization over barbarity.

But now, with this week’s signing of the new “charter” by the Arab Information Ministers, Islamic clerics in cahoots with politicians are obviously committed to pedaling backwards. The AP report by Maggie Michael (referenced above) continues as follows:

Call-in shows in particular are viewed by governments as potentially threatening or embarrassing, broadcasters say.

“Now any single individual can embarrass the government on TV,” said Ahmed Moslemani, host of “The First Edition” on Dream TV. “These talk-shows were like a disaster to the government, because the public doesn’t need opposition parties to voice their demands.”

In the past month, Clock TV – owned by Lebanese and Libyan investors – canceled plans to start a new talk show called “Hour by Hour,” after the Egyptian government objected to it, apparently because it feared it would become a new voice of criticism.

Khairi Ramadan, who was to host “Hour by Hour,” called the charter a “huge step backward.”

“Free speech in Egypt will not be the only victim here, it’s the whole Arab world,” said Ramadan. “There are serious fears of this charter and the bigger danger is to come.”

How, I wonder, could we help Muslims break free from their clerical chains? If we could succeed, we’d simultaneously defeat the Muslim supremacists – with much less drain on our budget and our soldiers’ blood.

Of course it would be best if the Muslims broke their chains by themselves, but the clerics have the poor people brainwashed into believing that their way is the way to a dream world of eternal life in paradise. Illustrative of the people's resulting obedient behavior is the following quotation, which summarizes ideas about government and society promoted in Saudi Arabian schoolbooks:

Western principles of democracy are not part of the Saudi political worldview. The Saudi regime is based on Islamic Law [Shari’ah], one of the basic tenets of which is complete obedience to one’s rulers – even if they are oppressive – as long as they do not order their subjects to do something contradictory to the Shari’ah. The Muslim subject should not only obey his rulers but also love them, whatever their nature, and be patient vis-à-vis their oppressive measures – if these are taken. [No dictator could wish for more!] The reason for this is: an organized government, even an oppressive one, is much better than anarchy. [As if there were no other options!] Within this framework, duties, rather than rights, should be the citizen’s main concern.

Would that there were some Muslim revolutionaries of the caliber of James Madison, who in 1785 said to the Virginia General Assembly:

What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; in many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient allies.

And what a difference between this new Arab “charter” restricting TV and what Jefferson described about the freedom of the press in a 1787 letter to Colonel Carrington:

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

Failing the leadership of a Muslim Madison or Jefferson, could we help?

I expect that bureaucrats in our Departments of State and Defense would be too timid to produce similar (but soon to be eliminated) programs and then beam them to every Muslim household with a TV. I can imagine our bureaucrats and politicians would be too concerned with repercussions (e.g., to their own jobs) if the Saudis retaliated by restricting oil flow, arousing the oil-addicted American public.

As an alternative, could a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) do similar? An NGO, funded by anonymous donors could hire Muslim TV producers, directors, and actors (who will probably lose their jobs because of the new charter), set up shop almost anywhere (from somewhere in the Mediterranean area to somewhere in America), and beam satellite-TV programs to all Arab countries. Thereby, we could help drag the Arab world out of their clerically imposed Dark Ages into enlightenment.

As Jefferson wrote in an 1820 letter to William Jarvis:

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.

But the Arab “Information Ministers” (a euphemism for “Propaganda Ministers”) obviously prefer the assessment of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi’s Propaganda Minister:

Not every item of news should be published. Rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose… It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion.

All of which illustrates the wisdom in the remark by the brave ex-Muslim Salman Rushdie (against whom Muslim clerics issued a fatwa ordering his death for “insulting Islam” in his book The Satanic Verses):

Fundamentalism isn’t about religion; it’s about power.

www.zenofzero.net

I dunno…

For those familiar with the English language but unfamiliar with the way Americans massacre its pronunciation, “I dunno” is the usual way we pronounce: “I don’t know”. It’s sorta [sort of] like [similar to] the way we say “doncha know” or “donchano” [don’t you know]. Anyway, I dunno what this fellow Rowan Williams is up to.

As you probably know, he’s the Archbishop of Canterbury (AB of C), the head of the Church of England (C of E), “leader of the 77 million-strong worldwide Anglican Communion”, and this week, once again managed to stimulate calls for his resignation. Today, according to a BBC news report:

…at least two General Synod members have called for Dr. Rowan Williams to resign… Colonel Edward Aristead told the Daily Telegraph: “I don’t think he is the man for the job… One wants to be charitable, but I sense that he would be far happier in a university where he can kick around these sorts of ideas.”

Alison Ruoff, a Synod member from London, said: “many people, huge numbers of people, would be greatly relieved [if he resigned], because he sits on the fence over all sorts of things, and we need strong, Christian, biblical leadership right now, as opposed to somebody who huffs and puffs around and vacillates from one thing to another.”

Brigadier William Dobbie, a former Synod member, described the Archbishop as “a disaster, a tragic mistake.”

And you think you had a bad day! But then, British tradition seems to be that AB of Cs can’t be fired – by tradition, they execute them!

As you probably know, also (unless your internet connection is down – or you have more important things to do!), Williams got himself in trouble (this time) by stating during an interview on BBC Radio that adopting some (Muslim) Sharia [or Shariah] law in Britain seemed “unavoidable”, adding that “Certain provisions of Shariah are already recognized in our society and under our law, so it’s not as if we’re bringing in alien and rival system” and that Muslims shouldn’t need to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.”

Sensing potential votes (they’re good at that), politicians of all stripes leaped on him. Some examples (all from BBC News reports):

“The prime minister believes British law should apply in this country, based on British values.” [Spokesman for Prime Minister Brown]

“To ask us to fundamentally change the rule of law and to adopt Sharia law, I think, is fundamentally wrong.” [Home Office Minister Tony McNulty]

“[The] implication that British courts should treat people differently based on their faith is divisive and dangerous.” [Trevor Phillips, Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission]

“Dr. Williams seems to be suggesting that there should be two systems of law, running alongside each other, almost parallel, and for people to be offered the choice of opting into one or the other. That is unacceptable.” [Baroness Warsi, “shadow community cohesion minister”]

“Equality before the law is part of the glue that binds our society together. We cannot have a situation where there is one law for one person and different laws for another… There is a huge difference between respecting people’s right to follow their own beliefs and allowing them to excuse themselves from the rule of law.” [Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg]

Quite a tempest brewing in the British teapot! Yet, if you read Williams’ original speech, you might conclude (as did I) that it’s rather mundane and unfortunately quite pedantic. In a nutshell, it’s close to: “Look, if people want to settle their disputes by arbitration without involvement of the courts, then go for it; if they want to settle their disputes with the help of the local Imam, then fine; Jews have a long tradition of doing similar.”

But I can understand the reactions. In his BBC interview, Williams was “just plain stupid” (or better, politically naïve) to have taunted the British bulldog (confined by its own customs, bound by more than a thousand years of its own laws, and recently wounded by Muslim supremacists) with the raw meat of Shariah.

Further, it’s certainly not the first time that Williams has demonstrated that he’s “out of touch” with the people, particularly those in the C of E: approving the ordination of women and gay clergy, opposing the teaching of “intelligent design” in science classes, using Homer Simpson cartoons to get kids to think about morality, describing the Jesus nativity story as “a legend”, and so on. In sum, I rather like the guy!

Yet, what I don’t know – and in the limited time I have to waste on the question, I don’t plan to continue to try to find out – is whether the guy is a nut or a genius. That he’s intelligent seems clear, but it’s equally clear that he isn’t grounded in reality: he’s hooked on speculation; he obviously feels no need to test his ideas against data.

As one of many examples, consider his denial that believing in God is equivalent to believing in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy:

“The thing is, belief in Santa does not generate a moral code, it does not generate art, it does not generate imagination…”

Oh? Really? Care to test your claim against data?

Another example is in his 13 October 2007 speech criticizing Richard Dawkins:

As I’ve said, what we’re saying as religious people, is not that God is the explanation of this or that bit of the universe which we can’t otherwise explain; even the very beginning of the universe. We are saying that the nature of our relationship with the universe, a relation of understanding, thinking and exploring, rational expectation, that that very structure requires some comprehensive energy at another level that sustains it as what it is [Italics added]. And because that comprehensive energy at another level is not the product of other things, doesn’t have a history, isn’t the result of processes going on; it’s perhaps an appropriate object for contemplation, given that we are not going to find successful or comprehensive words for it, but can only gaze into what is undoubtedly mysterious, but not mysterious in a way which simply says this is a puzzle somebody one day might solve.

Really? A “comprehensive energy at another level”? A mystery that he doesn’t want solved? Sure: I can go along with the speculation (for example) that the universe was created by a symmetry-breaking fluctuation in “total nothingness” that “still exists outside our universe” (a speculation I examine in the first chapter of my book), but 1) until we get some data dealing with “total nothingness”, then it’s all speculation, 2) I certainly would like to get some data to try to solve the mystery (which might be possible in the Large Hadron Collider), and 3) I sure as hell ain’t gonna waste my time worshipping “total nothingness”!

As for the mystery of Williams, himself: that he’s a bleedin’ mystic is abundantly clear. For example, read some of his poems; it’s clear that, like a little kid in love with a fantasy hero, he’s madly in love with Jesus:

He is a stranger to them all, great Jesus.
What is there here for me? I know
what I have longed for. Him to hold
me always.

Also, read some of his speeches: it’s clear that he really has convinced himself that he knows God’s purpose – as if an omnipotent, omniscient god could have a purpose!

But I don’t know Williams’ purpose. Yet, maybe there’s a hint of it in the speech (referenced above) in which he criticizes Dawkins. Throughout the speech he refers to a play by Mick Gordon and A.C. Grayling entitled On Religion. Near the end of Williams’ speech he quotes the play, with the young man who’s decided to become a priest saying to his atheist mother:

I’m not trying to pretend it’s not dangerous, sometimes. I think that’s absolutely the case. I just think that one of the things to do in terms of a strategy (and I’m being realistic and pragmatic here OK?) because we have to ask ourselves: what sort of strategy for dealing with nutters are we going to adopt? Do we want an all out culture war between your pure enlightenment thinking and bad religion? Or is there a value, is there… let me put it another way: is the answer to bad religion no religion or better religion? Who’s more likely to defeat bad religion, good religion or atheism? [Italics added] That’s a question, a real question. So stop attacking me, Mum, because I’m your hope. You’re never going to turn the world’s religious into atheists. If that’s what your battle is, if that’s what you’re trying to do, you’re going to lose and so are we all. The best you can hope for is to turn bad violent religion into better religion, that’s what I’m trying to do.

I’d entertain the possibility that such is what Williams is trying to do: trying to turn bad religion into good religion. Perhaps that’s what this latest row (over Shariah law) is about: maybe he’s trying to turn “bad violent religion [as promoted by Muslim supremacists, “the nutters”] into better religion.” If that’s his goal, however, he’s facing a slight problem: as he could determine from readily available data, Muslims have a different opinion about which is the “good religion” and which is the “bad religion”. They’ll think he’s “the nutter”!

Therefore, just as he’s displayed political naiveté in his choice of words and in his apparent conclusion that he can speak as an individual while being head of his church, I think he’s being naïve if he thinks he can change other people’s opinions about their religions – so long as such opinions are based on speculations rather than data. I’d go even further: in my opinion (based on data trends), no religion (including his own) will survive if it’s based on the untestable speculation that the universe is controlled by some invisible lover in the sky. If he desires to turn “bad religion into good religion”, I’d advise him to consider what M.M. Mangasarian wrote almost a century ago:

“Religion is the science of children; science is the religion of adults.”

www.zenofzero.net

Your Most Important Assumption

We all adopt many assumptions or premisses: that our ideas exist, that we exist, that there exists a reality external to our minds, and so on. I doubt that I’d get much argument if I claimed that one of our most important premisses deals with “the nature” of “reality”, for example, if we assume that it’s entirely natural (as do all Brights) or that it contains various “supernatural entities”, such as goblins, ghosts, and gods.

In addition, we all make many important decisions, for example, those dealing with trying to survive, to help our families survive (whatever we consider to be the extent of our “families”), to uphold and promote our values, and so on. I doubt that I’d get much argument if I claimed, also, that one of our most important decisions is how to obtain knowledge about the nature of the reality external to our minds.

But I may cause some controversy with the claim (argued below) that everyone’s most important assumption is one’s decision about how to gain such knowledge.

In philosophical terms, my claim is that epistemology (the study of the grounds and nature of knowledge, itself – from the Greek word for ‘knowledge’, epistēmē) trumps all other branches of philosophy, such as logic, ethics, aesthetics, ontology (existence theory), and so on, including the philosophies of science, religion, politics, law, etc. In all other branches of philosophy, epistemology is fundamental, since it addresses the basic question: How does one “know” what one claims to know?

There’s no doubt that we all possess substantial knowledge: our abilities to keep our hearts beating and to digest food, our innate sense of morality, etc. Yet in general, we don’t need to use our analytical capabilities to make decisions dealing with such innate (or instinctive) knowledge. After a billion-or-so years of experimentation, Nature “programmed” such knowledge in our DNA. As examples, if a projectile is coming at your head, don’t think about it, duck! Similarly, if you see a child in danger, you’ll immediately try to save the child. Those species that didn’t pass on such knowledge to their offspring (to help themselves and their “families” to survive) are extinct. Much of ethics, therefore, is instinctive.

Much of esthetics, too, seems to be instinctive; it may even be inherent in the “nature of nature”, that is, derived from fundamental symmetries contained within reality, itself. But I don’t want to go into that, now. It’s a complicated subject at the frontiers of modern physics and the bases of “the standard model” of elementary particles and of string theory.

In contrast to our possessing such innate and maybe even inherent knowledge, to gain new knowledge about the reality external to our minds we must make a fundamental decision: How is such knowledge gained? Exploring possible answers to that question leads to what I consider to be everyone’s most important assumption. To begin to see why I consider it so important, consider options chosen by people in two different groups.

Theists, those who adopt the premiss that various “supernatural entities” exist in the reality external to their minds, thereby and subsequently decide that knowledge about reality can be gained by “listening to their hearts”, by “just having faith”, or similar. All such “methods” are various versions of the “proof-by-pleasure logical fallacy” (viz., if it feels good, it’s “true”). If theists have enough faith (so it’s claimed), they can move mountains – and if they’re unsuccessful, it demonstrates only that they don’t yet have sufficient “faith”!

Scientific humanists, in contrast, adopt the fundamental premiss that knowledge about reality can best be obtained – or even, can only be obtained – by the scientific method: “guess, test, and reassess.” They learn by experimenting. Oh, they might try the theists’ technique of moving mountains by “thought control” (aka telekinesis), but when that doesn’t work, scientific humanists (aka “practical people”!) use dynamite and earthmovers!

The fundamental mistake made by all religious people is to succumb to wishful thinking. That’s consistent with one meaning of the word ‘belief’, which with ‘lief’ the Anglo-Saxon root word meaning ‘wish’, then one meaning of ‘belief’ is “wish to be”. The farther theists fall into their fundamental error, the more “fundamentalist” they become. In the limit, in the depth of their depraved “thinking”, such fools fly hijacked airplanes loaded with passengers into skyscrapers, convinced in their fantasy that they’ll be instantly transported to a fictitious paradise, where they’ll live eternally with 72 perpetual virgins available to competently relieve them of their sexual frustrations. They “believe” it so – they wish it so – so (so they claim), they “know” it’s so.

Scientific humanists, in contrast, decide to try to gain knowledge about reality not from wishful thinking but via the scientific method – not because it “feels good”, not because they’ve been indoctrinated in the method since childhood (although they have applied it, by themselves, ever since they were babies!), but solely because it seems to work. If it stops working, if it’s found to have fundamental flaws (but it hasn’t yet, as far as I know), then they’ll abandon it – for whatever works better! Using the scientific method (“guess, test, and reassess”), ancient hunters made bows and arrows, ancient farmers planted seeds and domesticated animals, ancient engineers built irrigation canals and developed wheels, ancient doctors learned techniques of healing, and so on it has gone, out to an including building airplanes, skyscrapers, and the internet – which Muslim maniacs use to kill people.

I use the contrast between the behaviors of scientific humanists and theists (aka unscientific antihumans) to defend my claim that everyone’s most important premiss is one’s decision about how to gain knowledge about reality. My reason for this claim is that (as I’ll briefly illustrate below) one’s choice about how to gain such knowledge is more important than one’s choice of worldview, goals, values, principles, policies, plans, practices, etc., because one’s choice of how to gain knowledge dictates the rest.

Ayn Rand wrote something similar in her book Philosophy: Who Needs It?

Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute – and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? The nature of your actions – and of your ambition – will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept. [Italics added]

In fact, if the scientific method of gaining knowledge is adopted, then it can be used even to test our other basic premisses, such as that our thoughts exist, that we exist, and that the universe is entirely natural. Thereby, ontology (the theory of existence) can be seen to be rather silly: existence isn’t a theory to be proven but a hypothesis to be tested – by application of the scientific method.

To illustrate why I consider our most important decision (our most important premiss) to be how to gain knowledge about reality, I’ll list the following abbreviated statements. I go into details elsewhere.

• Whereas one’s claim of knowledge about reality leads directly to one’s worldview, therefore, how one chooses to seek knowledge defines one’s worldview. Thus, on the one hand, if you decide that knowledge about reality can be obtained only via the scientific method, you’ll conclude that the universe is entirely natural, thereby defining your worldview. On the other hand, if you decide that knowledge about reality can be obtained by wishful thinking (by just “believing”), then similar to all theists, you’ll conclude that the universe is filled with “supernatural entities” (from the “sacred spirits” of the shamans to the resulting gods and ghosts and goblins of “modern” mystics, from astrologers to clerics).
• Whereas one’s worldview dictates the purpose (or purposes) one chooses to pursue in life, therefore one’s purpose follows from one’s choice of how to gain knowledge about reality. Thus, if your worldview is that the universe (including all life) is entirely natural, you’ll likely adopt the premiss that a prime purpose is “merely” to help intelligent life to continue (e.g., by attempting to expand knowledge). On the other hand, if you conclude that the universe is populated, for example, with one or more omnipotent and omniscient gods, you’ll likely adopt the premiss that your prime purpose is whatever some sufficiently skilled con-artist cleric dictates to be the god’s (or gods’) desires (e.g., “go forth and multiply”, “kill the unbelievers”, and similar stupidity).
• Whereas values can be measured only against some purpose, then once one’s purposes are adopted, then one’s values can be established; therefore, values also follow from one’s epistemological choice. If, for example, you adopt the purpose to help intelligent life to continue by attempting to expand knowledge, then you would place substantial value on learning as much as you can and on sharing your knowledge. On the other hand, if you adopt the purpose to do as some alleged god desires (as dictated by some con-artist clerics), then you’ll place substantial value on doing whatever your clerics recommend (e.g., giving alms, paying tithes, having more children, etc., out to, in some cases, flying jetliners into skyscrapers).

Thus, a hierarchy of premisses is established, starting with the most important premiss (how knowledge is to be gained) and below which are premisses dealing with (in order): worldview, purposes, values, principles, plans, practices, procedures, and so on.

In his book The End of Faith, Sam Harris summarized well the stupid, fundamental assumption of all theists:

We live in an age in which most people believe that mere words – “Jesus,” “Allah,” “Ram” – can mean the difference between eternal torment and bliss everlasting. Considering the stakes here, it is not surprising that many of us occasionally find it necessary to murder other human beings for using the wrong magic words, or the right ones for the wrong reasons. How can any person presume to know that this is the way the universe works? Because it says so in our holy books. How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world.

As far as I know (based on the scientific method, i.e., relying on experience), the only way to stop the light of the world from draining into such “epistemological black holes” is to do one’s best to enlighten others, not only to help them see that everyone’s most important premiss is how to gain knowledge about reality but also to see that the only sensible ways to gain such knowledge is via the scientific method. And thus this blog and my associated book.

www.zenofzero.net