Month: August 2009

The beauty and compassion of religion:

A new family law in Mali is causing a furore, partly because it no longer stipulates that wives have to obey their husbands…[Article 312] says that, once married, husbands and wives owe each other “loyalty, protection, help and assistance”. Mali’s current law specifically states that a wife must obey her husband, and that is the way things should stay says Mahmud Dicko, president of Mali’s High Islamic Council.

You bet – because that has to be a matter of national law so that if a wife is disobedient she can be arrested, charged, and imprisoned (or do they whip them?).

“We’re not trying to make women slaves. Not at all,” he says. “It’s just the way our society is organised. The head of the family is the man, and everyone in the family has to obey him. It’s like that to create harmony.”

No – it’s like that to create a situation in which everyone in a family has to obey ‘the man’ – which in other contexts is recognized as inequality and tyranny rather than harmony.

Hadja Safiatou Dembele, president of the National Union of Muslim Women’s Associations (NUMWA), says the Koran is clear that a wife has the obligation to listen to her husband. “A man must protect his wife. A wife must obey her husband,” she says. “It’s a tiny minority of woman here who want this new law; the intellectuals. The poor and illiterate women of this country, the real Muslims, are against it.”

And of course laws that illiterate people prefer are obviously much better than laws that intellectuals think are a good idea. God damn intellectuals – they should all be smothered.

But it’s no good complaining, there were giant protests and Mali’s imams made a big fuss and that’s that. No women’s rights for Mali! No pesky secular government for Mali! No sirree. That would be too modern and intellectual and unIslamic.

HE Baber explains something but I’m not exactly sure what.

[L]ike most educated Christians, I do not believe most of the empirical claims associated with Christianity. I do not believe that the universe came into being just a few thousand years ago. I do not believe that humans or other animals were created their current form or even that God had some hand in “guiding” evolution. I do not believe that the Bible provides an accurate account of Middle Eastern history, or that any of the miracles it reports actually occurred, or that the wisdom literature it includes is a suitable guide to life. I do not believe that the existence of God makes any difference to the way the world operates or that religious belief should make any difference to the way we live.

So Baber is saying that most educated Christians don’t believe that God had some hand in “guiding” evolution or that the wisdom literature included in the bible is a suitable guide to life or that the existence of God makes any difference to the way the world operates or that religious belief should make any difference to the way we live? That’s an enormous claim, and on the face of it it looks like an absurd claim. I would think that most educated Christians do believe the last two items at the very least, and in fact that most of them probably believe all but the first two items – at least if they really are Christians as opposed to deists who attend Christian churches. That’s where ‘on the face of it’ comes in – maybe Baber has some such stipulation, or several of them, in mind when making that enormous claim. But then – if she does, she should spell it out. Making enormous claims that are actually not as enormous as they look because of various unstated stipulations is…not respectable.

But maybe she has no such stipulations in mind; maybe she really does think most educated Christians don’t believe all those claims. If that’s the case I think she’s just wrong, and overgeneralizing wildly. We’ve disagreed about this before – I think Baber overgeneralizes about hostility to theists, about what atheists say and do, about what critics of atheists say and do and want, and various other things. I see this pattern in a lot of the critics of the “New” atheists – which is interesting.

Theists, like myself, claim that there is a conscious being, who is omnipotent and omniscient, who is not a part of the natural world and not to be identified with the cosmos in toto, but is incorporeal and transcendent…[E]ven if it is not meaningless to claim that there exists a God who makes no difference to the way in which the natural world works one may ask: what is the point of believing in such a God? Why would anyone even want to believe in a God who makes no difference: a God who does not answer prayers, give our lives “meaning,” or imbue the universe with purpose, reveal moral truths, strengthen us to fight the good fight or, in some sense, ground values. I can only speak for myself, though my answer is hardly original. God is an object of contemplation. It is remarkably hard to discover by introspection what one really thinks about these matters because they are so overlain by conventional pieties. I suppose what I believe is that God is the ultimate aesthetic object, ultimate beauty, glory and power, and that the vision of God embodies the quintessence of every aesthetic experience and every sensual pleasure.

But that’s not theism, it’s deism. That’s certainly not Christianity – and it’s not even theism. So what exactly is being claimed here? I can’t quite tell.

The Telegraph, with slightly cruel mockery, has poor Sebastian Faulkes saying in the headline that he really can’t put down the Koran – giving us the irresistible impression that he can’t put it down because he has been wired to explode if he does.

While we Judaeo-Christians can take a lot of verbal rough-and-tumble about our human-written scriptures, I know that to Muslims the Koran is different; it is by definition beyond criticism. And if anything I said or was quoted as saying (not always the same thing) offended any Muslim sensibility, I do apologise – and without reservation.

Well there you go. Some people (though not all ‘Judaeo-Christians,’ whatever the hell they are) can put up with criticism and joking about their ‘scriptures’ but Muslims have defined the Koran as beyond criticism and so everyone else has to defer to the way Muslims have defined the Koran, or else. Or else what? Faulks of course is careful not to say, but we know he has it in mind, poor bastard. Anyway – however obvious it is, it’s still worth pointing out that the fact that People X have defined something as beyond criticism does not impose an obligation on all people in the world to agree with People X and not ever criticize the thing that has been defined as beyond criticism. It’s also worth pointing out that the whole idea is pathetically childishly stupid and a hindrance to reasonable thinking.

One of the books I read as background to my novel was Islam: A Short History, by Karen Armstrong. She writes movingly of how Arabs in the Peninsula longed for a voice-hearing prophet of their own to match the many Jewish prophets, famed for hearing the voice of God over many generations…

Yeah, that’s very moving – but can we move on now? Fourteen centuries later? We have other forms of entertainment now – we can even hear voices! Arabs in the peninsula have other things to do, we have other things to do, everyone has other things to do – so can we get over it already?