Month: November 2010

Something is broken so I can’t post news items in News for the moment, so I’ll post them here.

Peace breaks out

Massimo holds out an olive branch.

Peace consolidates

Jerry returns the olive branch.

Frans De Waal on god-science shouting match

He would love to see a debate among moderates.

Mehdi Hasan is annoyed with Roshonara Choudhry. She doesn’t get it – she doesn’t understand that Islam doesn’t approve of her going to her MP’s surgery for the purpose of stabbing him to death, nor of her actually sticking a knife in his stomach.

She is, for example, ignorant of the specific Quranic verses that she claims inspired her horrific and cowardly attack on Timms – “the main chapters about it are chapter . . . chapter eight and chapter nine, I think,” she says, pathetically. In fact, there are no verses in the Quran which justify such brutal, vigilante attacks on innocent civilians. Suicide bombings for example, are un-Islamic.

Oh tut – isn’t that awful. But if there were such verses in the Quran, would that justify such brutal, vigilante attacks on innocent civilians? If suicide bombings were Islamic, would that make them a good thing?

Mehdi Hasan doesn’t address that question; it doesn’t seem to occur to him. It ought to. It doesn’t matter whether stabbing civilians is in the Quran or not; it matters whether it’s bad or not. Focus.

Those who claim that our mosques are breeding grounds for terrorists and extremists should note the two names Choudhry cites as her influencers: Anwar al-Awlaki and Abdullah Azzam. She discovered both on the internet (on YouTube!), not at her local Islamic centre. Both, I hasten to add, lack the credentials and qualifications of mainstream Islamic scholarship; al-Awlaki has a PhD in human resource development (!) from George Washington University. Why on earth did she think such a person had the “Islamic” or moral authority to instruct her to carry out a murder, one of the greatest sins in Islam?

But why on earth is Hasan so concerned about who has the “Islamic” authority to instruct people to murder? Why is he so worried about credentials and qualifications and mainstream Islamic scholarship? Is he shocked by what Choudhry did, or is he shocked by the association of Islam with brainless brutal violence?

So as Sigmund says, the point is that if there is (what looks like) convincing evidence of ‘God’ we will not be able to tell whether it is simply evidence of an advanced alien technology. My similar point is that we won’t know of any way to distinguish between a natural intelligent agent and a ‘god’ of whatever sort.

I think that observation is hard to get around. We could of course say that it could be a ‘god’ – that we don’t know that it’s not a god, that it has powers that seem to us to be what is called ‘miraculous.’ But could we say ‘this is supernatural for sure’? I don’t think so. It seems like the kind of thing we couldn’t know, in the nature of the case.

Another, and perhaps more relevant, thing we couldn’t know is that the agent/god had legitimate authority over us. Believers take that idea for granted – ‘God’ is great, God is bigger and stronger and better than we are, God made us and the flowers too, therefore God is the boss of us. Non-believers however don’t take that for granted. Lots of people are bigger and stronger than I am, but I don’t consider them to have legitimate authority over me. An agent with miraculous-seeming powers might have the ability to force us to obey it, but that’s not at all the same thing as legitimate authority.

But that’s not it, the devout listeners in the audience murmur to each other; it’s not just superior strength, it’s also infinite wisdom and goodness. That’s what makes the authority legitimate.

Well – I’ll suspend judgment on that point until I meet such an agent…or until someone gives me a good argument. One of those.

The more I think about it, and read what other people have to say about it, the more I think “supernatural” is a meaningless word. That’s just another way of saying I’m a naturalist, I guess. I think the same thing about the word “god” or “gods” – I think that word brings a lot of excess baggage, and warps thinking about it from the outset. I kept stumbling on that in a discussion on a post of Jerry’s yesterday. Sigmund said

I suspect we will be unable to determine whether such evidence indicates a ‘God’ or a ‘God-like alien’.

And I thought, and said, what is the difference anyway?

Really – what is the difference? The idea is: maybe there is something out there, something with a mind, something that can do things. Maybe it has powers that go way beyond any we have. But that could be something natural, and there’s no obvious reason to call it “god.” I find it not at all hard to believe that there could be agents elsewhere in the universe, but if there are, they’re part of nature.

Jen McCreight said what’s wrong with Ms magazine’s blog post asking whether gnu atheism will make room for women. Jen did it, so I don’t need to. But I’ll go over some of the ground anyway, because I feel like it.

If you’ve been following the rise of so-called “New Atheism” movement, you may have noticed that it sure looks a lot like old religion. The individuals most commonly associated with contemporary atheism—Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Victor Stenger—are all male, white and, well, kinda old (69, 61, 68 and 75).

I have been following the rise of gnu atheism; I’ve even been participating in it, in my own small (but noisy) way; I have not noticed that it sure looks a lot like old religion. It takes more than having a lot of people who are male, white, and kinda old to make something look like old religion. It takes quite a lot more. The US Congress also looks like that; so do many corporations, law firms, universities, unions, insurance companies, and other institutions. I’m white and kinda old myself, and I choose not to consider those attributes disqualifiers, or symptoms of religiosity.

The four guys named are all Names; they have published best-selling books. No women have yet published atheist best-sellers of the kind that Dawkins and Hitchens did. That’s not obviously a sign of sexism. Vanishingly few people have published atheist best-sellers of the kind that Dawkins and Hitchens did. The fact that Dawkins and Hitchens did doesn’t mean that women were excluded from a club.

That’s not to say that atheist women are not overlooked; I think they are; I think people who organize atheist conferences don’t invite enough women; but that’s a separate issue.

There’s no official definition of New Atheism, but the general consensus is that while atheists were once content to not believe in God by themselves, “new” atheists are determined to proselytize so that others join their disbelief.

Yes, but you see, the general consensus tends to be based on stupid prejudices and on manufactured consent – it’s not born, it’s created. “The general consensus” is a product of media recycling of hackneyed formulas that everybodyagreeson without bothering to think about it. Any fule kno that noo atheists are rude and strident and militant and intolerant, so that’s “the consensus,” so yet another journalist repeats it, so it becomes even more the consensus, world without end amen. “The consensus” is indistinguishable from the backlash.

We’re not “determined to proselytize” – we’re determined not to be silenced. There’s a difference. I tend to be determined not to let religious truth claims go unquestioned, but that again is not the same as proselytizing. If there were fewer religious truth claims flying around, I would be doing less questioning of them. It is Because They Are There.

Given the immense harm many organized religions inflict on women through outright violence and institutional oppression, it seems women may have more to gain than men from exiting their faith. Yet no women are currently recognized as leaders or even mentioned as a force within the movement.

That just isn’t true. Lots of women are mentioned as a force – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rebecca Watson, Greta Christina, Susan Jacoby, Lori Lipman Brown, and on and on.

PZ, like Jen, points out that Monica Shores didn’t even talk to any atheist women.

So don’t blame the Old White Guys, and don’t regard their gender and age as a debit. What we need to do is promote more equality, and make a positive case for freethought. The Ms article could have explored that by talking to some of the many people involved, and could have even talked to the many prominent female atheists out there, and said something about the direction we’re going, rather than where we come from.

Maybe it will do that as a follow-up.