Idolatry
Revisiting the quest for a new blasphemy law:
Just hours after Kim Leadbeater took her seat in Parliament, following a campaign dogged by questions about a Batley school teacher forced to go into hiding for showing children a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, [Labour MP Naz] Shah delivered an eyebrow-raising intervention likening such depictions to the vandalism of Winston Churchill’s statue.
This call from a frontbench spokesperson to treat cartoons of Mohammed as equivalent to actual public vandalism has caused something of a belated backlash, amid fears it would mean the restoration of blasphemy laws. Such restrictions were abolished in England, incidentally, by the last Labour government in 2008. Shah told the Commons:
As a Muslim, for me and millions of Muslims across this country and a quarter of the world’s population who are Muslim too, with each day and each breath there is not a single thing in the world that we commemorate and honour more than our beloved Prophet, Mohammed, peace be upon him.
If that’s true it’s tragic. It’s tragic in its narrowness as well as its delusion. All there is in the world to value, and religious zealots focus on just one guy who lived 14 centuries ago. It’s such a waste.
But when bigots and racists defame, slander or abuse our Prophet, peace be upon him, just like some people do the likes of Churchill, the emotional harm caused upon our hearts is unbearable, because for 2 billion Muslims, he is the leader we commemorate in our hearts and honour in our lives, and he forms the basis of our identity and our very existence.
Again: that’s a pathetic thing to admit. It’s a pathetic way to live.
Wait, Britain had blasphemy laws as late as 2008?
Fuck Jesus, fuck Mohammed, fuck Krishna, fuck Buddha, fuck Yahweh, fuck all of them.
I remember when they were abolished.
But not Flying Spaghetti Monster; have him for dinner.
Praise Papa Nurgle, a deity everyone can believe in (worshipped by anti-vaxxers).
Seconding What a Maroon though.
What an incredibly narcissistic way of looking at things. So far as she is concerned, her feelings are more important than other people’s rights. She thinks she has the right to her feelings, and the rest of ours too.
I don’t think it works like that.
There is a lot going on there. How does defaming etc the Prophet (pbuh) constitute ‘racism’? Racism by definition involves assertion that one ‘race’, to the extent that the word has meaning at all, is superior to another ‘race’. But as Mo was the same ‘race’ as me (Caucasoid) and not Mongoloid, Negroid, or Australoid) it can hardly be ‘racism’ on my part to (however unmodestly) criticise him and his teachings (pbuh again.)
[Labour MP Naz] Shah is also playing ‘holier than thou’ not just to non-Muslims, but to Muslims as well; many if not most of whom would incline to let it pass unless given a kick under the table by the likes of her. But her outrage machine is running flat-out, and earning her brownie points all over the place; an inducement to crank it up still further.
This illustrates how faithful Muslims can get caught up in a positive feedback loop, which can all-too-easily end in some outrage like 9/11: a pretty hard-to-beat assertion of holier-than-thou. And with 72 virgins as a promised bonus in the Holy Koran (peace be upon it). Though I am not sure if that applies to ladies like her. (Peace be upon them all anyway.)
Though the British blasphemy laws were abolished, it was first established, repeatedly, that they did not protect non-Christian religions from blasphemy. For example, Rushdie was accused of blasphemy, and in Regina v Metropolitan Magistrate ex parte Choudhury (1991), the court dismissed the charge because blasphemous libel was available only against those who “vilified the Christian religion.” Islam was fair game.
If Shah wants to reestablish British blasphemy laws, they’re likely to affect her folks first, and protect her feelings last.
Also, talk about cheek. Can you imagine someone moving to Pakistan and saying Pakistan must have a law saying Christianity cannot be insulted? Or Judaism?
I am wary of claims of membership numbers in any religion, but especially Islam. After all, just as was the case with Christianity for centuries, where Islam is the state religion it is punishable offence (up to, and including death) to be anything other than a professed Muslim, of the right sect. When (as with Roman Catholicism*) a religion makes it impossible to declare oneself no longer a member, membership numbers are likely to be highly inflated.
*It used to be possible to excommunicate oneself, but no longer. I, and countless fellow ex-Catholics, are still being counted amongst the faithful for propaganda purposes. The only sure way to get kicked out is to have, or assist with, an abortion. I can’t imagine hospitals being too thrilled at a sudden influx of ex-Catholics demanding to be allowed into operating theatres.
@Omar #5
The small number of categories you list are not the only ones people use for claims of racism. Animosity toward ethnic Chinese by ethnic Koreans, just to pick an example, is racism despite both being Mongoloid.
I agree with you that criticism of Muhammad is not, in and off itself, racism. Sometimes, though, it’s used as part of a lashing out at the ethnic group that predominates among Muslims, though, which is a version of racism; little to do with Islam, and everything to do with who follows Islam. Kind of like disparaging rap music as a way of disparaging the largely Black audience and set of artists, then disingenuously claiming one is only talking about the music.
I am reminded of the Arab and other Middle Eastern groups who claim they can’t be antisemitic because they themselves are Semites. That’s playing with the etymology, rather than acknowledging that antisemitism is understood as anti-Jewish, and it misses that people consider the Jews a separate ethnic group rather than just a group of religious adherents.
With each breath? So every two or three seconds, she is honouring and commemorating the guy? She either means this in a banal sense, where simply being alive is honouring him, or she means it as a lie, because she most certainly isn’t thinking of him while buying milk, or while laughing at a friend’s joke, or while cleaning up dog poo, or while doing her tax returns, having sex, or while telling a cold caller to piss off, or or or…
Lying is fine if it is for
JesusMo.#3
https://i.imgur.com/zCXxThE.jpeg
Sackbut:
I dunno. Would we call antagonism of Greeks for Turks or Italians ‘racism’? They are all Caucasoids in the above scheme. History has produced a fair bit of hostility in just that three-cornered contest, never mind any others involved, but I trhink that it would probably finish up with another label: ‘chauvinism’ perhaps.
The Caucasoid-Negroid-Mongolid-Australoid broad division of humanity was I think the creation of 19th C anthropologists, which still allowed for further subdivision: eg Australoids into Carpentarians, Murrayans and Tasmanians, although there was dispute over where the latter fitted in.
@iknklast,,
Does fettuccine count? What about penne?
Holms:
The ‘lost preview function’ upped and left B&W, but can still be found at the Groan, aka the Guardian. (https://www.theguardian.com ). So here’s a suggestion: any comment should first be drafted in a Groan article’s comment box, previewed there in all its glory, then copied out of the Groan’s draft box and pasted here at B&W. (I know, I know. The risks are obvious. But at worst you will only cause the Groan staff to scratch their heads a bit before binning it.)
Please note: I take no responsibility for any disaster or woe which might befall you. My own comments here I check by pasting them into Word first, which picks up any errors I don’t find myself. Then I paste them back here. A bit involved, but hey, it keeps me off the streets and out of trouble in the local pub.
Re the racism question, I just finished reading “The Spanish Holocaust” by Paul Preston, an excellent, distressing read. One of his points was that right wing hatred of workers was expressed in racist terms*–they were subhuman scum. Spain at the time was fairly homogeneous racially, despite the presence of ethnic groups like the Basques and Catalans in the north, and the Roma throughout (but especially in the south). The workers in the south were ethnically Spanish, “racially” white, and religiously Catholic (at least in name). That didn’t stop the fascists from treating them as inferior creatures, fit only for effective slavery or slaughter.
Point being, what we call “racism” isn’t necessarily limited to the racial categories we create; it arises whenever one group considers themselves superior beings.
*With a heavy dose of antisemitism and anti-Masonry as well, even though there were only a handful of Masons in Spain at the time, and no Jewish population to speak of for over 400 years.
@Omar #12:
“We” might not refer to anti-Greek animosity racism. But other people do call it racism. I agree with your implication that the term “racism” is overused and inaccurate, and I generally avoid it, but I think the way the word gets used it mostly refers to ethnicity-based animosity, even if the ethnicity doesn’t really constitute a “race” in any reasonable sense.
Re anti-Muslim “racism”, and the criticism of Muhammad: those of us who criticize religion run into this problem a lot.
Criticism of Judaism = criticism of Jews = ethnicity-based criticism of Jews = antisemitism.
Criticism of Israel = criticism of Judaism = …
Criticism of Islam = criticism of Muslims = ethnicity-based criticism of Muslims = racism.
Criticism of Muhammad = criticism of Islam = …
It’s like nothing has its own attributes, it all collapses into the general case. Nuance is lost.
Holms:
I see your comment @#9 has been repaired. My money says that an angel did it.
Change is a characteristic of reality. “Naught may endure but mutability” and all that. The only basis of our identity and our very existence is probably our innate “sense of self,” the bare fact that we are aware of sensations and, if we’re lucky, thoughts. It’s what we don’t have in a coma, and what we do have when we come out of it. Qualia, whatever that might be.
Which means that if you change your mind about Islam, you’re still you and you still exist. Same as if you believe you’re a woman and realize (or discover) that you’re a man. This whole rigmarole about everyone NEEDING an “identity” which is the “basis of their existence” is just hyperbole for “I don’t want to have to adjust to circumstances I don’t like.” Well, yes. Nobody does. But when we say “I’m not the same person now” it’s a metaphor.
Curtail the outrage; cultivate resilience.
#16
PBUHer
So, once again: Muslims are people, and as such they can be the targets of bigotry and racism. Islam itself is a set of abstract, philosophical ideas about theology, metaphysics, ethics etc. to which concepts like bigotry and racism don’t apply. It’s perfectly possible to be critical* of the ideas and practices of Islam (not to mention the political ideology of Islamism) for reasons that have nothing to do with what people look like, where they’re from, or who their ancestors were. It’s even possible to oppose Islamists and white racists at the same time.
Whatever’s legitimate about the term “Islamophobia” can be expressed better – because more precisely – by terms such as “anti-Muslim bigotry” or, even better, “racism against people of Middle-Eastern / North-African / South-Asian descent” (It’s not in fact “bigotry” to say that all Muslims are proponents of Islam, nor is it necessarily bigotry to see that as a problem in itself. Specifics matter). Failing to make such basic distinctions only devalues the concepts of bigotry and racism, and nobody should be more pissed off by this than anti-racists.
As I have said many times, the battle against Islamism is not a battle between whites and non-whites. What we have are some non-whites against other non-whites, with white, Western apologists on both sides. So the question that white, Western liberals and progressives need to be asking themselves is “Which non-whites do I support? Those who share my values (feminists, gay rights activists, secularists etc.), or a far-right movement that I would be the first to condemn if it were dominated by white people?” You cannot have it both ways.
Which is not to say that racists are not going to grab onto whatever legitimate criticisms they can find to bolster their cause. Of course they will! If you single out the ideas of certain ethnic groups for special criticism, that’s clearly racism, but it’s still ultimately targeted at people and not the ideas themselves. The obvious example being movement atheists who spend every free moment bullying women online and defending every sleazebag, sexual harasser, and rapist out there only to suddenly turn so concerned for the treatment of “Dear Muslima” as soon as the conversation turns to Islam. It still doesn’t mean that the treatment of women in Islamist societies is not a problem, though, let alone that we have to shut up about it. Everything that can be exploited, politicized and weaponized for ideological purposes will be, e.g.:
(a) There are legitimate criticisms to be made of specific ideas and practices associated with the religion of Islam (not to mention the political ideology of Islamism).
(b) The fact that (a) is cynically and opportunistically seized upon by hardcore racists and bigots to portray all Muslims (or even just people from majority “Muslim” countries, whether they are in fact practicing Muslims or not) as dangerous fanatics and extremists.
(c) The fact that (b) is seized upon by Islamists and their apologists on the far Left to portray any criticism of Islam (or even Islamism) as “Islamophobia”, racism, bigotry and hatespeech.
(d) The fact that (c) is seized upon by the far right to portray any talk of racism and bigotry as “witch-hunts”, “thought police” and “political correctness gone insane”.
(e) The fact that (d) is seized upon by the far left to portray any criticism of leftist cancel-culture, no-platforming etc. as a defense of bigotry.
(f) Etc…. etc…
If we have to self-sensor about everything that can be exploited for nefarious ends, we might as well have our lips stitched together right now.
* In full disclosure, I really am quite “phobic” of ideas such as these:
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/cruelty/long.html
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/int/long.html
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/inj/long.html
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/women/long.html
In an attempt to stop Ophelia biting through her keyboard in fury at people mentioning the lost preview issue, I can also suggest an online HTML editor with preview, like this one:
https://www.onlinehtmleditor.net/
Once you’ve composed your post, you can cut and paste into the comment form.
I’m pretty sure the ‘problem’ is that the site uses WordPress’ native commenting system, which is notoriously awful. There are comment plugins available, some hosted elsewhere (I think disqus works like that) and some hosted on-site. I don’t know if any of them are any good or how much they cost, but I’m supposed to be looking into some related issues for a client (and have been putting it off because I hate WordPress). If I come across anything useful while I’m doing that, I’ll share.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on […]
FWIW, and at the risk of further incurring Ophelia’s wrath, I installed a new comment plugin on my WordPress site with a simple WYSIWYG interface (rather than a preview button). It imported previous comments OK and seems to be fairly customisable.
You can have a look at it at https://www.lookatthestateofthat.com/
if you’re really that interested. You can let me know if the comments work. The site is new, so there’s not much content yet.
Sastra @#17:
I agree. But what interests me is this: any organism (animal – I don’t think it would include any plants) which seeks self-preservation in the presence of danger (eg from me when it is a fly and I am after it with a fly-swatter) can be said to have a sense or awareness of its own existence: a sense of self. This would include all vertebrates, and probably invertebrates down the phylogenetic tree as far as the annelid worms and possibly as far down as the protozoans, which will commonly seek darkness if exposed to light, = enhanced probability of danger or death.
On this basis I would suggest that the biosphere includes a large subsection, which I would call the ‘gnostisphere’ from the Greek ‘gnosis’, or knowledge.
I believe that the philosopher Peter Singer is a vegitarian on something like this basis. I would not go that far. But I have a friend who does not like her dog eating meat, though how she prevents it from dining on the odd mouse is a mystery to me; especially during a plague of them like the one we have recently had here in Australia.
.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer
Omar, it goes deeper taxonomically than you realize. While plants do not have a brain or a nervous system, they do have self-recognition proteins which are able to identify self from non-self. This is a crucial thing for most organisms. I don’t think a “sense of self” needs to imply thinking of self. Being able to tell the difference between yourself and a chair is basic; being able to tell the difference between yourself and a virus is life-supporting. Plants require that function, as well.
WAM, absolutely applies to fettuccine. And penne. And rigatoni.
iknklast,
In my book, where animals have senses based in nervous systems, plants have molecular machinery producing tropisms. In that sense, they ‘know’ that they should grow their shoots away from gravity (geotropism) and their roots towards it; their shoots towards the light (phototropism). But while arguably at a molecular level they can distinguish self from non-self, I do not think that plants can be said to have anything like an animal’s consciousness, or awareness of of themselves as individual identities.
Lyall Watson in his book ‘Supernature’ (1973) which New Agers of the day bought by the trainload, made just such a claim. But it was never endorsed by manstream botanists or plant physiologists, which does not mean that it was necessarily wrong. But they based their rejection of it on the fact that plants have no equivalent of a nervous or muscular system. That in turn means that if something starts eating them, they are spared from knowledge of that fact; which is just as well, as being rooted to their nutritious patch of soil, there is never much they can do about it; save let fly automatically with stings, stinks and such.
Thanks to the relatively slow-moving nervous impulses in reptiles when cold, a sneaky carnivore could consume a fair whack of the tail of a brontosaurus before the nervous signals made it from its tail to its brain. Then for a short time, the bronto would have been able to turn its head and watch (no doubt with horror) the further consumption of its tail, without being able to do anything about it. By the time the signal to move travelled from brain to tail, there might be not much left of the latter. Which is why, I suppose, the spinal reflex was invented.
;-)
#16
Last year was the year of our Angel Host.
https://www.evergreenangel.com/online-store/2020-Ophelia-Evergreen-Angel-Pendant-p262101034
Omar, as a botanist, I am well aware of all that you said. No, I was not suggesting that plants have consciousness. However, you mentioned the protozoans, so I presumed you were talking about something similar, since protozoans also do not have that sort of sense of self that you are talking about. There are many scientists who deny that even to dogs, cats, apes, and so forth, but fortunately that is not consensus. Obviously dogs and cats feel that pain.
But spiders for instance. They scuttle away from me (including of course when all I’m doing is moving them from the bathtub to the outside window sill) but that’s not because they have thoughts about it. They don’t have the equipment to have thoughts.
Seems to, but I’m awaiting approval, so can’t be sure.
iknklast,
Orzo? Ramen? Soba?
Homo sapiens = ‘wise man’. Wisdom = ‘just judgement as to action; sagacity, prudence and common sense’. (Macquarie Dictionary)
I would argue that on the above basis, plenty of animal species can be said to have ‘wisdom’, at least sufficient for their survival within whatever ecological niche it is they occupy. But whoever chose to call us all by that Latin moniker was probably seeking to differentiate us from the rest of the humanoids, primates and Kingdom Animales. I am not aware of any member of any other genus which has a species name of ‘sapiens’; though I am possibly wrong on that; if so am happy to be corrected.
One species I find fascinating (a lot of them live around here in Canberra, where I spend a lot of my time) is Iridomyrmex purpureus, otherwise known as the common meat ant. By the above definition, they qualify as wise all right, particularly if their nest is disturbed. Many nests are three metres or so in diameter, and studies by the CSIRO have revealed that they are in some cases as deep into the ground as they are wide. Interestingly, their stinging apparatus is minimal. They rely on numbers instead. The Australian bull ant, or ‘bull-joe, (Myrmecia gulosa) which is regarded by entomologists as being far more primitive, is rever-ready to deliver you an injection of liquid fire, as I discovered many times as a kid mucking round in the bush.
https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/pest-insects/australian-meat-ants
https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Iridomyrmex_purpureus
https://australian.museum/learn/animals/insects/bull-ants/