Month: May 2009

And people wonder why atheists get huffy.

Obama is scaling back White House plans for Thursday’s National Day of Prayer even as his administration defends the tradition in federal court in Wisconsin…The Obama administration has asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which claims the day violates the separation of church and state. In a rare alliance, 31 mostly Republican members of Congress and a prominent Christian legal group are joining the administration to fight the lawsuit. Congress established the day in 1952 and in 1988 set the first Thursday in May as the day for presidents to issue proclamations asking Americans to pray.

Okay, it’s a small thing, and we can always just ignore it, but just the same – what business do presidents have asking us to pray? Fuck off! What business do secular heads of secular states have asking us to perform some magical rite? They’re not our priests, they’re not bishops, they’re not clerical officials of any kind; it is none of their business whether we pray or not. None, zip, zero. It’s a highly offensive intrusion for them to make such a request. It also sends that notorious excluding message that atheists are always complaining of and that does a lot to explain our sometimes irritable attitude toward religion, the one that mystifies our friends and acquaintances on the other side of the Atlantic. It sends the message ‘everyone prays and we’re all alike in this and anyone who isn’t is deeply weird and, as Bush I so wisely said, probably not exactly really quite a citizen.’ That’s a stupid and ill-mannered message to send for no good reason – it’s a kind of pro-active rudeness. What the hell do we need such a day for? People who want to pray can pray; why do the rest of us have to be chivvied and hassled?

Well it’s obvious from the initial date what we need it for: to remind us that we’re not like those godless commies. But that’s a bit out of date now, and it’s not, alas, the godless commies who are gathering their forces in Pakistan, getting ready to start slouching towards Manhattan. So it would be nice if we could ditch the gratuitous National Marginalize Atheists Day.

It’s not as if we want to replace the damn thing with National Abolish Prayer Day. It’s not as if we want to set an annual date for presidents to issue proclamations asking Americans not to pray. We just want presidents to shut up about praying, that’s all. We want nobody official governmental political to talk about praying at all, because it’s not their job and it’s emphatically not their business.

Martha Nussbaum says there are liberal Muslims in India – though she doesn’t say how many or what percentage they are or how influential they are. She leaves a lot of details out of her account, which makes it less credible than it might be.

She also starts off with the familiar silly and misleading ‘community’-talk –

India’s Muslim community strongly condemned the terrorist acts and immediately took steps to demonstrate its loyalty to the nation…The world saw a deeply nationalist community, one loyal to the liberal values of a nation that has yet to treat it justly. It was not the first time India’s Muslims have demonstrated a peaceful embrace of the country’s founding values. The personal experience of Mushirul Hasan exemplifies the same commitment. A leader of the community, Hasan has been at the center of controversy for his liberal, secular views…

Come on…she’s a philosopher, so she really ought to do better than that. How can ‘India’s Muslim community’ strongly condemn anything? What does that even mean? To make any sense at all it has to mean that all Indian Muslims strongly condemned and immediately took steps, which is absurd. Perhaps she means all prominent Indian Muslims did that? But no, because she could have said that, and because that’s not what she wants to convey, either – and that’s the problem. She wants to convey, without spelling it out, that the majority of Indian Muslims strongly condemned and immediately took steps – but is that true? I don’t know, but it seems very unlikely just on the face of it, because most people are too busy with other things to do much public condemning and step-taking. But as if she had established that which she wanted to convey, she goes on in the next sentence to say what ‘India’s Muslims’ had demonstrated – when it’s vanishingly unlikely that all of them demonstrated anything. Then she dashes on to claim one person as exemplary of this commitment of ‘India’s Muslims’ and then to call him ‘a leader’ of this notional ‘community’ that all thinks with one mind. It’s all very rhetorical and sentimental and covertly manipulative, and I wish she wouldn’t do it.

It is an interesting piece though – and I hope she’s right. I would be delighted to learn that the situation is just as she describes it and that my suspicions are groundless. I’d be thrilled. I would love to know that India is packed to the rafters with people like Mushirul Hasan.

Stereotypes of the violent Muslim are so prevalent in India—as elsewhere in the world—that it is virtually impossible for Muslim liberals to be taken at their word when they say that they believe in free speech, pluralism, nonviolent persuasion, the rule of law, and the right of each person to a fair trial. ’Oh yes, a screen for darker motives,’ is the typical response, pervasive on Hindu blogs and common even in the mainstream press. You say you are a liberal, and that proves you are a radical Islamist.

Well…are stereotypes really the only reason for that? Does the Koran, and the relationship of Islam to the Koran, have nothing to do with it? Couldn’t it be that at least some people wonder if Muslim liberals still have the Koran to contend with, just as Christian liberals have the Bible, and if there is some tension? Couldn’t some people think that liberalism is just more difficult for Muslims for a lot of reasons (family pressure, customs, the Koran, friends, and so on) and that different people can mean different things by ‘liberal’? I would say it could, and that people who are slow to be convinced are not necessarily simply heeding stereotypes of the violent Muslim. They might be, but they might not.

It is a very interesting article though, and highly informative. Don’t let me put you off.

Let’s see Fish and Eagleton – or should I adopt the latter’s sophisticated witticism and call them Eaglefish? – sneer at progress, liberalism and enlightenment in the context of Delara Derabi’s last minutes, and her parents’ experience of her last minutes. First some Eaglefish sneering –

Progress, liberalism and enlightenment — these are the watchwords of those, like Hitchens, who believe that in a modern world, religion has nothing to offer us…[W]e are where we always were, confronted with a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny.

And then a few minutes in a world where contempt for progress, liberalism and enlightenment is not just a selfish smug I’m all right Jack trope among male literary critics in Florida and Lancashire but the real thing. Let’s see how funny the joke seems in Tehran.

It was 7am when Delara Darabi phoned home. “Oh mother, I see the hangman’s noose in front of me,” she garbled. “They are going to execute me. Please save me.” Moments later a prison official snatched the handset away. “We will easily execute your daughter and there’s nothing you can do about it,” he barked at the parents. Then, with a chilling click, the line went dead. The desperate couple rushed to the Central Prison in Rasht, Iran, wailing at the guards to let them see their 22-year-old. As they prostrated themselves, an ambulance emerged, most probably with Delara’s corpse inside.

There you are – will that do? Is that sufficiently without progress, liberalism and enlightenment? Is that what Feagleton wants? Is that their idea of an excitingly post-enlightenment world rich with ‘flawed but aspiring religious faith’? Is it part of their bill of indictment against atheism that there’s not enough of that kind of thing?

Yes, pretty much. Eagleton at least is pretty explicit about it.

For Eagleton the choice is obvious, although he does not have complete faith in the faith he prefers. “There are no guarantees,” he concedes that a “transfigured future will ever be born.” But we can be sure that it will never be born, he says in his last sentence, “if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals . . . continue to stand in its way.”

But Tel, your transfigured future has already been born; it’s in Tehran, it’s in Kandahar, it’s in Mingora. All those pesky liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals haven’t been able to stop it. What are you complaining about?

Stanley Fish is moved to let us know that he is just as woolly and assertive and bad-mannered and rhetorical as Terry Eagleton and Mark Vernon and Madeleine Bunting and the rest of the ‘new atheists are bad‘ crowd.

[T]he British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed.

Eh? ‘Other candidates’ than what? Other than Eagleton? Those are our choices – Eagleton on the one hand and science, reason, liberalism, capitalism on the other? Why? How? Who says?

Perhaps Fish means ‘other candidates’ than literary criticism, and we’re supposed to be able to figure that out via the word ‘critic’ in front of ‘Terry Eagleton’ – but ‘critic’ could mean restaurant critic, movie critic, dance critic – it could mean a lot of things, and in any case, it’s far from obvious that we’re supposed to understand Terry Eagleton as standing for the entire genre of literary critics. In short, that’s a bit of remarkably slovenly careless lazy writing, and it’s the opener for an attack on – you’ll never guess – the ‘new’ atheists. An opener as sloppy as that doesn’t bode well for the care and intelligence of the rest – and the rest is indeed surprisingly crappy stuff.

Fish goes on to say that Eagleton admits religion is flawed but ‘at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself…”

The other projects, he concedes, provide various comforts and pleasures, but they are finally superficial and tend to the perpetuation of the status quo rather than to meaningful change: “A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth where theological questions can ever be properly raised.”

Again, already, the sloppiness makes it hard to tell exactly what is being claimed, but it seems to be that religion alone is trying for something more than local satisfactions and that religion alone takes the nature of humanity for its subject, and all other projects are finally superficial and are merely about consumerism. That suggestion is so obviously stupid I can’t be bothered to say why it’s stupid – I don’t think anyone who reads this needs to be told.

By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?” The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.

So that is what he’s claiming – on the one hand there are theological questions, which are alone able to ask ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ and related questions, and then there are ‘science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation’ which are all much of a muchness and which can’t ask ‘ ‘why is there something rather than nothing.’ Further, the interpolated ‘never mind answer’ implies that ‘theological questions’ can answer – without of course offering any actual examples of such ‘answers.’

This is lamentable stuff.

On and on it goes – sneers at progress, liberalism and enlightenment, sneers at cures for diseases, sneers at technology, much use of the word ‘Ditchkins,’ and finishing up with a triumphant blast at ‘the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins.’

It is so hard not to wish both of them suddenly transported to a place bereft of progress, liberalism and enlightenment – the Swat valley would be just the ticket – and see how they like it.

That’s not a nice thing to say, it’s even a bit schoolyardy, but I am so sick of smug prosperous safe comfortable pale men urinating all over progress, liberalism and enlightenment while desperate threatened terrified women would weep scalding tears of joy and deliverance to get just a taste of some. I am so sick of safe prosperous men who are never, ever going to be grabbed on the street and whipped, or shot in the back, or locked up in their houses, or married off to some abusive bully, going on and on and on and on about how much they hate progress, liberalism and enlightenment.

Another woman is reminded that she is not allowed to do anything, and so are all the other women in her part of the world.

The murder of Ayman Udas, who was in her early thirties and newly married, has shocked the city’s artistic community because it symbolises a backlash against women and cultural freedom in an area that is increasingly dominated by Islamic fundamentalists. As a singer and song writer in her native Pashto, the language of the tribal areas and the NorthWest Frontier province, Udas frequently performed on PTV, the state-run channel. She won considerable acclaim for her songs but had become a musician in the face of bitter opposition from her family, who believed it was sinful for a woman to perform on television. Ashamed of her growing popularity her two brothers are reported to have entered her flat last week while her husband was out and fired three bullets into her chest.

She’s not popular any more, so they’re not ashamed any more, and that’s what counts.

Fellow performers, many of whom have received death threats from hardline Islamist groups, were stunned by the killing. In recent months several popular artists have been forced to stop performing as singers and comedians. Others have fled the country or moved to other cities.

As some people try to hang onto a somewhat normal happy life with some room for art and pleasure, and others try to grind such a life into powder.