Girls are things
Religious bastards are not limited to the Vatican, of course.
Saudi Arabia’s most senior cleric was quoted Wednesday as saying it is permissible for 10-year-old girls to marry and those who think they’re too young are doing the girls an injustice. “It is wrong to say it’s not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger,” Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh, the country’s grand mufti, was quoted as saying. “A female who is 10 or 12 is marriageable and those who think she’s too young are wrong and are being unfair to her,” he said…”We hear a lot about the marriage of underage girls in the media, and we should know that Islamic law has not brought injustice to women.” The mufti said a good upbringing will make a girl capable of carrying out her duties as a wife and that those who say women should not marry before the age of 25 are following a “bad path.”
Ah, a good upbringing will make a girl capable of carrying out her duties as a wife; so the important thing in this subject is whether the girl can be useful to the man or not, it’s not what is good for the girl. And how exactly will a good upbringing make a ten year old girl capable of being penetrated by an adult man? Is part of a ‘good upbringing’ for a girl having her vagina mechanically enlarged, say by the slow introduction of cylindrical objects in graduated sizes? And if it is, that doesn’t make a girl of ten or eleven capable of giving birth without damage, so how does a good upbringing help there? It doesn’t – but doubtless the mufti just meant that a good upbringing brings a girl up to know so thoroughly and without question that she is an inferior, a nothing, an object that belongs to whatever man she is handed over to at age ten, that she will not utter a peep about any of this.
“Our mothers and before them, our grandmothers, married when they were barely 12,” said Al Sheikh, according to Al-Hayat.
No doubt, but that is not in itself a reason to go on making girls get married at that age forever, and Al Sheikh’s defensive nostalgia for his mommy and his granny is not a reason to impose slavery on all girls forever. But clerics of course are not expected to think.
And how exactly will a good upbringing make a ten year old girl capable of being penetrated by an adult man?
It is astounding to me how so many apologists who talk about “culture” ignore this basic fact.
Obviously a girl can obey without question and be a good little slave at age 10, Mufti darling, but that really isn’t the point. We’re not concerned about the girl’s ability to be a piece of meat for your enjoyment, you see.
By Jenavir, that’s what he’s concerned about, you see. And the younger they are, the easier they are to intimdate and train. And yet women are not, he says, treated unjustly in Islam.
By the way OB, there is one thing that it worth mentioning, and it happens in your first sentence. “Religious bastards are not limited to the Vatican, of course.” There’s no ‘of course’ here at all, and that seems to me a serious problem. In places like Europe and North America, there is a widespread desire to damage the reputation of the church, and with good reason. But there is a problem. While the church is being lambasted in these places, Islam gets off nearly scot free, and therein lies a serious problem. If there is not equal opportunity criticism of religions, whether religions are minority ones or not, there is going to be a vacuum at the centre of society, and that vacuum is going to be filled by the religion that is left standing. I don’t want to see Islam in that position here. But if Islam is permitted to restrict itself to the margins and insist (with very credible threats) upon respect, then Islam becomes a very big problem, and we should be dealing with that. We aren’t.
“those who think they’re too young are doing the girls an injustice.”
Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh, the country’s grand mufti, condones paedophilia. Period!
Its not paedophilia if its culture, right?
Eric – well I meant of course to readers of Butterflies and Wheels. I realize it’s not of course to everyone, but I think it’s pretty of course around here. And there is this book that Jeremy and I sent to the publishers last month, in case there’s any lingering doubt…
“A female who is 10 or 12 is marriageable and those who think she’s too young are wrong and are being unfair to her”
…are being unfair to HER!! So the horny old goat is protecting her RIGHTS is he?
In a way, the mufti DOES think he is protecting women’s (girls) rights. He, privileged with “knowledge” from god, knows with absolute certainty what women’s true nature is. For them to be happy, they need to live in accordance with their true nature, and, luckily for him and his twisted brethren, the true nature of women happens to be a domestic and sexual slave for men. Why ask a woman or girl what she thinks she wants when god has already told you what is best for her?
(There is a book in the window at a local Islamic shop, and the cover depicts a woman wearing the fully-covering burkha, face cage and all. It’s called “You Can Be the Happiest Woman in the World”. I’ve been tempted to buy it, but so far I have been unable to muster up the courage to go in, because I always get disapproving looks from the men smoking their hookahs at tables in the street when I’m peering in at the window. If I do, I’ll buy two copies and send one to you, Ophelia.)
Here, I googled it, and if you’re interested, I came up with this:
http://islamicbookstore.com/b8573.html
Yes, I know, of course, Ophelia, that what I said doesn’t apply to you! No lingering doubts!:-) Truly!
But there is a big problem, as I see it, and we are creating a vacuum, especially in the light of the fact that our society is generally so anti-intellectual, and, as a result, people tend to read only what they agree with, or what opposes their own particular slant on things. There isn’t a vital tradition of thinking about issues from different viewpoints. Even unbelievers, I find, tend not to think it worthwhile reading what reasonably serious religious thinkers are thinking. I think that’s a mistake, one of the most serious that Dawkins has made and encouraged, to be frank. And I suspect that that is a serious problem, and that, culturally, we could all go merrily along, for example, with our fairly dismissive approach to religious questions, while there is a parallel stream that is developing, all by itself, in isolation, just waiting for its chance.
And if we’re going to avoid that, we have, of course, as you do, to criticise what is going on in that separate place, but we’re going to have to get widespread public criticism going too, and I don’t see that happening, and I am concerned.
If Dawkins wants to take his anti-religion seriously, then he’s going to have to take, say, Terry Eagleton just a little more seriously, and even Duns Scotus (see the paper by Gavin Hyman in the Cambridge Companion to Atheism – I think Hyman is wrong, by the way, but he is not stupid). PZ Myers Courtier’s complaint (or whatever it was called) was funny and incisive, but it misses the important part that, whether you believe in God or no, there are a lot of very very clever theologians around, and unbelievers need to take account of what they are saying, or they become as anti-intellectual as Bush, who didn’t read the papers because he might come across ‘opinions’!
In fact, the main media streams are so careful not to offend Islam in particular, while offering fairly frequent glimpses of anti-Christian thinking, that, coupled with the anti-intellectual pressure to identify with and confine oneself to one media source (which Dawkins only reinforced, I’m afraid), it makes it at least conceivable that Islam will be the religion of note even in the west, given time enough.
There, my tirade is through!
The things people do in the name of preserving culture are unreal to me… Pedophilia, I say, just call it what it is. The idea of ‘training’ a human being, like a dog, is just beyond comprehension.
Mechanically enlarging a ten year-old girl’s vagina was a joke, right Ophelia?
Admitted “Islamaphobe” that I am, I think we ignore Eric’s admonition at our peril. At least Rome no longer envisions a Church Triumphant on earth in “real time”.
I am becoming more misanthropic by the day.
Thanks Rose!
Yup Brian it was a joke.
Eric, I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. There are a lot of clever theologians around (are there, really? clever in what sense?) and the rest of us have to pay attention to them because the parallel stream is just waiting for its chance? Meaning the parallel stream will succeed in taking power because the theologians are so clever? But if that is what you mean…is that true? Will the parallel stream seize power through the cleverness of theologians? Really?
Or am I misunderstanding you.
It pains me to disagree with you Eric, but I must on this point: there is nothing to “take seriously” about the blather of theologians. No Doctor of Divinity, no PhD in theology, no artful, subtle rhetoric, can camouflage the bare truth – there’s just no evidence for God. PZ Myer’s Courtier’s Reply is precisely to the point; it’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Yes, I understand that theologians take themselves very seriously indeed. Yes, I know many non-religious academics do too, though they ought to know better.
It’s not that Dawkins, Dennett, et al, haven’t taken into account what theologians say. I don’t think it’s that they’re not aware of the arguments. They simply dismiss them out of hand, and I think they’re right to do so. Just because someone is convinced of his own gravitas does not oblige us to gratify that vanity. It’s rather parallel to the notion that legit. scientists don’t debate creationists – that gives them undeserved epistemological equality.
Yep, it’s really that plain and simple, as far as I’m concerned. I’d agree with you more if I saw any evidence that the effete wafflings of the top-tier theologians had any real bearing on the beliefs and behaviors of the everyday religious, but I don’t see it. There’s a vast gulf between the pseudo-sophistication of the Alister McGraths and Rowan Williamses, and the everyday pew-sitter.
The idea of the dilators is actually a pretty good one, if you were giving them to a young girl to use at her own discretion the year she starts getting interested in boys. But these people who excuse all manner of cruelties in the name of “oh, but it’s their culture”…yecchh! Whatever culture it is. I had a bellyful, when I was young, of reading about how respectful-to-nature and so on various primitive or non-western cultures were, and then researching deeper and finding these same cultures filled with sexist taboos, slavery, starvation, needless cruelty to animals, etc. etc., not to mention hardly anyone lived past 40. And I know there is sexism, cruelty and hunger in the “civilized” world too, but at least some of us might survive to come up with some cures.
I am going to lean on my library to get your new book.
Well, Josh, I’m not really saying a lot that’s different. I’m not saying, for instance, that theologians should be taken seriously simply because theologians take themselves seriously and speak with apparent gravitas. However, there is a long tradition of religious ‘scholarship’ in the west. Perhaps it is bankrupt now, as I think it is, but there is a sense in which, like it or not, most western atheists are Christian atheists (as the redoubtable Oriana Fallaci characterised herself). In other words, atheists are, for the time being, anyway, atheists within a religious tradition. When there is no longer a religious tradition to be concerned about, there won’t be atheists any more than there are a-Zeus-ists now.
The danger that I see is this. While Christian atheists are hard at work demolishing their religious tradition, there is a parallel religious tradition growing in their midst. All well and good to destroy their own religious tradition. This is the one they’re dissenting from. But if they leave out this parallel tradition, and do not address it specifically, and make loud noises about it, not only do they make it less likely that members of that parallel tradition will be able to ease into nonbelief, as their Christian neighbours can, but they make it much more likely that this parallel tradition will be still standing when the Christian tradition seems more bankrupt than it already does.
I think Sam Harris and Ophelia, for example, are very wise to include Islam in their critique of religion, and I believe it is vital that contemporary atheists in the west begin to take on specific religious traditions other than their own (the one’s they were inducted into as children) as forms of life and thought that they are dissenting from, not only traditions that they are comfortable with. And this means not only knowing something about their own religious tradition – atheists still function within religious traditions – there would be no need of atheism otherwise – but about other traditions as well. Atheists, for example, need to read the Qu’ran, they need to read people like Maudoodi, too, and to absorb much more fully what writers like Ibn Warraq and Hirsi Ali are saying, and include, Hinduism and Sikhism too. And, just to be clear about this, while Christians may not read the Bible very often, many very ordinary Christians take very seriously what people like Alister McGrath say. It may be in watered down versions, and they may not understand it all, but they hear this kind of thing every Sunday. That’s what Grand Muftis and local imams, priests and rabbis are all about.
In principle, of course, Dawkins does dismiss all religions, but in practice he scarcely touches Islam, and, in some respects, not even Christianity. I think of things like Paul Edward’s article on “Professor Tillich’s Confusions,”(Mind, 1965) or Joachim Kahl’s The Misery of Christianity, in the one case a philosopher, and in the other a former Lutheran pastor, who have read and sought to understand what theologians were saying.
Those who are concerned about the effects of religious belief must be able to do things like this, and do it for other religions too, otherwise there will be great swathes of western societies that will be untouched by the critique of religion. Recall the point that the beginning of Enlightenment is the critique of religion. This is not something that should be allowed to happen, and whether we recognise it or not, Islam is now a part of our tradition too, and it is using secular traditions of freedom and dignity to make claims to kinds of respect that it is not owed. If it is not engaged in the tradition of critique and ridicule, I am afraid it may end up holding the high religious ground, when Christianity has been laughed off the stage.
Of course, this fear may be a result of my overheated imagination, but cultural change does not, very often, follow paths of reason. Sorry to go on at such length.
Eric,
You have a valid point, we have (in the UK at least) reached the point where whole-hearted criticism of the church is part of the landscape but where criticism of minority religions is still very circumspect.
In part this is understandable, as far-right parties often use criticism of Islam as a stalking horse for old fashioned racism. Also, as you point out, most atheists are familiar with the bible and the main theological positions (often more so than believers) but are on shakier ground when arguing against belief systems about which they are only sketchily informed.
How then could a ‘christian atheist’ achieve any level of credibility when arguing against the teachings of islam or sikhism? (Although sikhism is a monotheistic religion my conversations with a well-informed sikh friend lead me to think of it as rather more a deistic ethical system, but I could be completely mistaken.)
I agree that it ‘less likely that members of that parallel tradition will be able to ease into nonbelief’. I know three people who could be described as apostates from islam. One is a successful urban professional who describes himself as a Spinozan but who has not informed his wider family of his unbelief and maintains the cultural traditions of dietary restrictions and family celebrations. Just to keep the peace. The other two have more or less broken with their families, but their careers allowed them to do so. Even so, that is a high price to pay for intellectual integrity.
One of them said that he rejected islam around the same time he realised he actually liked women as people rather than possessions, the other when she understood that the teachings about women were meant to apply to her.
In most cases this option is not available. If it were, I suspect we would see a very much higher rate of rejection by young people from islamic backgrounds.
The writers you mention are certainly deserving of support, but ‘loud noises’ by from white, middle-class atheists such as ourselves are unlikely to be productive. The people we would be talking to have no reason to trust us.
I think your concerns are justified, but it will be a long haul. Based on my own (limited) experience and partly on my daughter’s descriptions of her university friends (Leeds) I’m rather more optimistic than you are, but I could be wrong.
Don, my very limited experience is garnered through my brother’s experience at the University of Regina, where, apparently, for a Muslim man to touch the hands of a woman is still tantamount to an act of unchastity, with ungovernable sexual passion the very next step. Muslim men fear women and their power. Why else do you think they keep them in tents? And the numbers of women that I see in my local area wearing hijab is not encouraging.
If Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and others are not willing to join in the critique of religion, then this must be carried out by others. It is a presupposition of enlightenment, and, insofar as western societies are not engaged in this critique of religions which have become, through globalisation, a part of their own cultures, we are letting this failure of critique go by default. We can’t afford this.
In response to OB, yes, there are clever, very intelligent theologians around. Many of the Christian (and Jewish) variety are beginning to move towards forms of unbelief, because that’s the way that the critique of religion is heading. There are all sorts of halfway houses for recovering Christians.
But the same pattern amongst Muslims, Hindus, etc., is not happening. The Quilliam foundation might be a start, but I do not find it encouraging. Almost the only way to critique Islam is to cease to be a Muslim. There is no genuine critique from within. Someone has to point the way. Ibn Warraq and Hirsi Ali, and Rushdie in a small way, and even Naipaul in some respects (for Hinduism), have made little inroads, but there needs to be extensive critique. That’s how unbelief comes about. It’s helpful to be told that there is no god, and given reasons to believe that there isn’t, but gods have a way of disappearing in theology and practice into forms of life, and these are always more persuasive than arguments. And if we don’t foster a critique at this deeper level, these religions will remain medieval. We can’t really think that there will be an easy passage from there to the modern world, because these traditions have developed entirely apart from European Enlightenment.
In the same way that Warren is assumed to be a liberal evangelical (because he’s all smarmy with love talk and ecology), Ramadan is taken to be a Muslim liberal. That’s why Hirsi Ali felt she had to jump completely from belief to unbelief. There needs to be an easier way. And if there is no inner critique, then others are going to have to do it, just as people like Dawkins and Hitchens are doing it for Christianity, but might, I think, have done it better, if they had know more about what Christians are thinking now. They’d find then that, for many Christians, the distance between belief and unbelief is not very far.
Oh, gosh, have I gone on again?! Sorry!
Eric,
‘Muslim men fear women and their power. Why else do you think they keep them in tents?’
No shortage of examples of that, but it’s neither universal nor inevitable. My experience of living in Muslim majority countries was twenty some years ago, but in Indonesia, Malaysia and southern Thailand it did not involve any women in tents or the kind of sexual fear and loathing you describe.
Today, the muslims I know don’t match that description either, but then I only ever (socially) meet educated professionals, some of whom are very uncomfortable with the increasing religiosity among the younger generation. So I admit it’s a selected sample, but I think that ‘Muslim men fear women’ is an over generalisation.
(BTW, are you sure you mean hijab? The often rather fetching and coquettish headscarf frequently matched with tight jeans and a foxy top? The full face niqab is rather more forbidding.)
If you are running a misogynistic and oppressive society then islam is unquestionably the religion of first choice, although christianity and judaisim can work just as well.
‘If Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and others are not willing to join in the critique of religion, then this must be carried out by others.’
How? Are you prepared to spend years learning Sanskrit and classical Arabic and then studying the texts? If not, how would you critique the beliefs? Sure, you could attack them, but how could you plausibly critique them? You and I were both raised with the bible, it’s part of our language. I’d be quite happy to take on an ordained minister or priest in a debate and not be concerned that his subject knowledge would overwhelm mine. How would you do that with a religion with which you were not intimately familiar? It would just be a judgemental attack by an outsider and would be counter-productive.
‘Almost the only way to critique Islam is to cease to be a Muslim.’
Agreed, but the key word is ‘almost’. There are those who are striving for itjihad and who manage to hold liberal, egalitarian views without abandoning their religion.
I apologise for citing wiki, but this link includes a lot of very worthwhile thinkers who are working towards a more humane version of a religion they do not ask people to reject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_movements_within_Islam
“but in Indonesia…[i]t did not involve any women in tents or the kind of sexual fear and loathing you describe.”
Don:they may not be in physical tents – but there are those who are probably in mental and psychological ones – if one is to go by the following article.
“In no instance is a woman considered a human being, an individual, in her own right. In Indonesia, women who deviate from this role as wife and mother, possibly by not marrying at all, or not having children, are viewed as less than whole people, and as a less than a whole ‘woman’”
http://www.acicis.murdoch.edu.au/hi/women.html
I note that only the woman is wearing a veil – why ever not is the man wearing one as well?
Re: Southern Thailand of 2007.
“Muslim militants have been fighting to create a separate state in the region and more than 2,000 people have been killed.”
solace-to-victims-of-violence-pbs-frontline-world/ –
If militant Muslim terrorist groups had their way, life in Southern Thailand.
would be on a par to that of Islamabad: where the Pakistan Taliban as of December 2008, announced that they will enforce Sharia or Islamic law across the Northwestern Aurakzai tribal region and ban women from visiting markets.
Well, we all know another side of Malaysia vis-à-vis: the many Note and Comment posts of OB’s and Mirax’s informative imput.
“The often rather fetching and coquettish headscarf frequently matched with tight jeans and a foxy top? The full face niqab is rather more forbidding.”
The other day I saw a group of young people wearing tight jeans and headscarfs and I did wonder about the contradiction of their attire.
They were obviously, with one half of their torso’s telling all, that they wanted to be part of the western world, they lived in and with the other they were saying, we are not part of it.
Tight jeans are as unhealthy as are headscarves – as in wearing both, one can scarcely let parts of the body breathe properly.
Sorry, OB, to be off topic. The pope is getting off lightly with his wafers.
No, you’re on topic Marie-Therese. This is the thread on ‘girls are things’, not on ‘crackers are more important that people.’
Don, someone’s going to have to learn, because this can’t be allowed to lumber on in this lopsided fashion. (I’ve read a thesis by someone who is trying to learn. Unfortunately, he thinks Ramadan is liberal!) And I have no more confidence in itjihad than I do in Christians being able to learn new tricks. The precise problem with this, unless Hishad Manji hasn’t noticed, is that itjihad only exists, if at all, on sufference. The traditions remain the same. The books are always there to take people careening back into the past, and there will always be someone who will stick fanatically to the book, and sacred books have a way of rousing crowds. People who can really think aren’t too much danger, but people of the book will shrug them off without much noticing.
The growth of Christian fundamentalism is a sign of what can happen. I happen to think that Islam is more dangerous when the pendulum swings, though, honestly, Christianity is dangerous enough. We can’t afford anyone having sacred texts. They screw up the world. Take a look.
I think you image of Islam (as Marie-Therese points out, and as so many of OB’s news postings make very clear) is rose coloured. I am not persuaded.
Aye and crackers are ‘things’ too, besides, girls, are they not, Eric :-o!
There was an order of nuns, who lived near me in Horseferry road, London, who, not only dedicated their lives to the devotion of the blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle, but also to the baking of the crackers.
In my estimation these holy women, like the girls, were just being used, by the church to make it rich.
You wont find the pope and his cardinals making their own crackers – but the former will surely pontificate and make threats of punishment on those who dare to stick rusty nails in them.
Ah, but the crackers are the real real thing (an’ y’have te trill yer rrs here dearie). Girls are just things, objects. That’s why convents have been able to rip them off for so long (although it got you out of the only other option open to you, marriage, which wasn’t all that much better, very often). Tell someone it’s holy and they’ll do most anything, and think they are doing God’s work.
Religions are about concentrations of spiritual power, starting from the highest concentration of spiritual power ((δγναμισ), that’s god of course, and then filtering down through God’s agents and mouthpieces like Jesus and Mohammed, to leaders chosen by the touch of the spirit, to ordinary believers of the line whose job it is to “Look to the front.” The higher ups will tell you what to do, and to sweep a room as for god’s sake makes that and the action fine. (Herbert, I think)
M-T,
I did say I was talking about twenty plus years ago, I appreciate that things are changing and not for the better, in large part due to Saudi money pushing wahabism. My point is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
When I was working in Southern Thailand all those years ago, my department head was a single woman, who had just completed translating Seven Types of Ambiguity into bahasa and was a very good friend to me. At that time, she was not a sidelined figure. I know things have changed, but it hasn’t always been that way, it doesn’t have to be that way.
My daughter’s naming ceremony was assisted by an older colleague who I am still proud to call ‘uncle’. (For obvious reasons we didn’t use the term ‘godfather’, but that is what it was.) Am I supposed to tell him that he fears women and wants to keep them in a tent? That he seeks the destruction of kuffars and the establishment of the ummah, when I know perfectly well that he doesn’t? He knew I was an atheist, but he was proud to hold my child and promise always to be there for her. These are good people.
Eric,
‘We can’t afford anyone having sacred texts. They screw up the world. Take a look.’
You may consider me the choir on that one. But my question remains, how would you or I plausibly critique islam in a way which would be other than a barely informed attack on belief and identity? It isn’t enough to be right.
If we define islam as a monolithic and invariably misogynistic and oppressive world view then we dismiss the very many muslims who are personally neither as, what? Not existing? Deluded fools?
These are neighbours, colleagues, friends, students. If we want to talk to them about this issue then starting from a standpoint of ‘Your central beliefs are pernicious’ is not going to be productive. It is certainly unlikely to get you second dinner invitation.
I read your link, seems reasonable but actually describes my gran’s life and largely my mum’s. In Northumberland, last century. And Java is not Indonesia.
I am not minimising the threat from triumphalist religion or political islam. I know it is real. But I also know the people I know, and – like most people – they are not easily delineated.
Don, I’m not sure it’s as difficult or unreasonable as you say for outsiders to criticize Islam, in part because most Muslims are ‘outsiders’ too in the sense that they too know the Koran either in translation or not at all (that is, most Muslims don’t know Arabic). There’s also the (all too obvious) fact that ‘Islam’ is a free-lance ad hoc affair, with various imams and other self-appointed experts handing out fatwas ad libitum. In other words Islam isn’t molecular biology or accounting – to a large extent it is (locally) whatever someone gets people to believe it is. That means one always has to stipulate what one is talking about (the Koran, a particular fatwa, a page at Islam Online, whatever), but it also means that the subject is open. Other people can always say ‘That’s not my Islam’ and one hopes they’re right, but if it’s anyone’s Islam, then it can be disputed, even by outsiders.
“My point is that it doesn’t have to be that way.”
While we are on the subject of Girls’s
“On Wednesday, March 21, three Islamist individuals who decapitated three Christian schoolgirls in 2005 were given jail sentences.
http://www.westernresistance.com/blog/archives/003659.html
This conflict was part of a wider Muslim insurgency against Christians known as the Moloccan War, which killed 9,000.
My point is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
Exactly, Ophelia. The really bad part of this is that, because the Koran is holy, each iteration of Islam is holy too, and worthwhile killing for or dying for of subordinating women for (if it doesn’t happen to be one of the unrealistic ones that claim that women are equal in the Koran, which is as much nonsense on stilts with respect to the Koran as it is with respect of the Christian Bible or Jewish Torah, or practically any other ‘holy book’ you care to name).
No, it doesn’t have to be that way, but it’ll go on being that way until we get rid or primitive texts that are taken as primers for the modern age.
I’m rather late coming to this discussion, but I can’t help but throw in my two cents. I would say that a general, evidence-driven rational argument against any of the following – (1) the existence of anything like a god or gods, (2) the coherence of supernatural beliefs in general, and/or (3) faith as a way of establishing beliefs in the first place – is as much an argument against Islam as it is against Christianity, or Judaism, or Jainism, or Zoroasterianism, or whatever. PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Law, and many other not-particularly-new atheists have made these sorts of general rational arguments, and made them well. (I’ve even made a few myself.) And as for the responses of so-called “sophisticated” theologians to those arguments, the courtier’s reply is more than adequate response: They’re full of shit, they don’t even do a good job hiding that they’re full of shit, and they deserve nothing but mockery. Moreover, the religious beliefs that such theologians articulate and defend have nothing to do with the religious beliefs of anyone but those theologians: Theologians’ abstruse maunderings have nothing to do with the beliefs and actions of ordinary believers, so even discussing them is nothing but falling for a very old and very tiresome bait-and-switch.
But if one is to have any hope whatsoever of finding a way to make a case that would be persuasive to believers – not a rational argument, but a persuasive/rhetorical argument that aims to undermine the forces which militate against accepting the clear conclusions of rational argument – then yes, one needs to be familiar with and address the specifics of the believers’ various religious & cultural traditions, including theology. But I don’t see how those specifics have much bearing on the general sorts of arguments I mentioned in the first paragraph.
And from a strictly logical standpoint, if one has undermined the bullshit basis on which believers justify some other belief or action – say, the existence of a God (or Allah) who mandates the de-humanizing oppression of women – then one has made a (logical) argument against that belief or action. Again, however, persuasive arguments and battles for actual political change are a completely different animal from rational arguments. It would be good if the discussion here kept the distinction between rational argument and persuasive argument more clearly in view, and I don’t think these calls to take theology seriously or study the Koran or whatever really do if they are aimed at Myers or Dawkins or Harris or whomever, or even if they are aimed at our own beloved Ophelia Benson. They are not in the business of attempting to de-convert Baptist or Islamic fundamentalists, they are engaged in activities like reaching out to rational doubters, and making the world a more congenial and welcoming place for nonbelievers, and… well, and all sorts of things besides attempting persuasive arguments aimed at believers themselves.
Well put, G. I agree, to some degree, and perhaps I wasn’t making the distinctions clear enough.
But there are a number of theologians who use the word ‘god’ in fairly unique ways, not to refer to a being, but to identify a form of life. Perhaps it is only rhetorical, but there is some basis on which, within the guild, they can argue and correct, and state conclusions too. I’m thinking about people like Gordon Kaufmann, Schubert Ogden, Maurice Wiles, Graham Shaw, Lloyd Geering, Don Cupitt.
It’s a bit like art criticism, music criticism, cultural analysis, if you like, and it has a surprisingly large following in the churches, very often like an underground movement.
Think of Don Cupitt and the Sea of Faith Movement. Is it just political? I don’t think so. The options here are not so narrow as they are described by people like Dawkins and Harris, and reason extends further than just evidential types of argumentation.
Of course, at the same time, Dawkins does, as you say, do consciousness raising, and helps nonbelievers have a sense of being connected to a wider movement. But I would suggest that there are religious voices, and fairly sensible ones too, which don’t really speak in terms of gods and spirits, and focus rather upon the idea of what they think of as religious forms of life.
Now, it’s easy to ignore this, and just lump it together with fundamentalists and other odd fauna like that, but the picture is more complicated than I think. I have a kind of residual affection for these ways of understanding religion, and it wouldn’t hurt to encourage them too, because, at root, they are surprisingly responsive to criticism and reason.
Yeah well – if it’s a form of life, I can’t begin to understand what is the point of calling it god. God is a person, and if it’s not a person – then call it something else. I mean I suppose they can all just agree among themselves to have a special code in which god is a form of life and Jane is a pulpy red fruit that other people call ‘tomato’ – but in public, I think god means god, because that’s what most people think when they hear the word. A form of life is a whole different thing, and not what I’m always trying politely but very firmly to reject.
Quite, I see your point. I like that ‘always … politely but very firmly.’ I remember Ted Huges’ poem about Sylvia Plath (A Pink Woll Knitted Dress), where he speaks of Sylvia after their marriage, as naked, ‘brimming with God.’ I don’t know that he meant anything metaphysical by the word, but he need not have been. Ever since Feuerbach, and perhaps before that too, the word ‘god’ has often been used for something uniquely human but uniquely precious. And you can decide how to use words if you like, but in the end, words have a way of taking on meaning from their context. I’m still Wittgensteinian enough for that. So, try as they might Dawkins and co can’t knock all the other uses of the word ‘god’ out of the water. But of course in public, as when Rowan gets up to demand special privileges as part of the establishment, that doesn’t wash, and is to be firmly, and not always politely, to be dismissed. But there are interestingly different language games here. I just wish those who play them would acknowledge right up front that they don’t believe in GOD, but only in using the word ‘god’, as Ted Hughes did, poetically. And that, I suppose, many of them dare not do, yet they be dismissed, and not politely either.
I take it all back. I’m just reading an article on theological ethics, and it’s so full of non-sequiturs and special pleading that I concede. The guy is trying to respond to Alisdair MacIntyre’s challenge: “Theologians still owe it to the rest of us to explain why we should not treat their discipline as we do astrology or phrenology. The distinctiveness and importance of what they have to say, if it is true, make this an urgent responsibility.” I have to say, not only does this writer not succeed, but he has convinced me that not even a liberal approach to religious believes, even ones that bill themselves as unbelieving, will do. It’s all a mass of deception and misleading verbiage. Forget I ever said a thing!
Heeheehee! Okay!
Eric, I already respected you for your erudition and insight. But now I think you are, as the kids say, “da Bomb!” That was the best “I was wrong!” admission I’ve ever read. Really.
Like you, I actually do find *some* of the not-really-God theology sort of interesting in its own right (though apparently not as interesting as you do), but that’s where the bait-and-switch I was complaining about comes in. Even well-meaning and honest theologians who reject claptrap and obfuscation (for the most part) – say John Shelby Spong – give aid and comfort to the forces of theological bullshitting by using that pesky ‘G’ word (or even not-very-oblique substitutes like “the Divine”) when they actually mean something extraordinarily different from what the overwhelming majority of religious believers actually believe. Having read a little Spong, I think he abets that bait-and-switch by even calling what he does “theology,” let alone by using words like “God” and “Divine.”
Mostly, though, I don’t trouble myself with WHAT people believe so much as HOW they come to adopt beliefs. Faith is an fudamentally flawed and completely indefensible basis for adopting or endorsing any belief, period. Some theologians advance sophisticated views of the “immanent divine” (or whatever) and others generate empty sophistries to defend a traditional conception of God behind a wall of willful obfuscation, with plenty of room on the spectrum in between. But nearly all theologians endorse and engage in the epistemological abomination of faith. Faith not only violates ordinary standards of reason and evidence, it stands in direct opposition to the very idea of justification: Thus, theologians’ attempts to justify faith are circle-squaring, self-undermining gibberish on the face of it. Certainly there’s no reason for atheists (or anyone else) to take such arguments seriously.
On the other hand, the few theologians who wholly reject faith are also the ones who muddy the waters by redefining “God” so far out of line with others’ use of the word that they almost always engage in fallacies of equivocation of their own, and always invite others to do so. Such theologians’ definitions of “God” always fall in one of two categories, in my experience: Either the definition is outright incoherent and/or insubstantial, offering a definition so far from being comprehensible that no one could reasonably believe or disbelieve it, or the definition is so shorn of supernatural trappings that that even an atheist has no reason to find it objectionable (except for the equivocation-inviting re-definitions of common vocabulary). Thus, there’s no particular reason for atheists to take those theologians seriously either.
Yes, G, I agree. I just recovered from a computer crash, reformat of hard drive etc., but I was so pissed off, quite frankly, with what I was reading, that I simply had no more patience with this religion stuff. People who are not going to use the word ‘god’ in a referring way should use another word, because it’s confusion otherwise. And we’ve got enough problems as it is trying to understand each other.
But when they star saying things like this – “Dependence [in illness or old age] is an opportunity, a call to let ourselves go, to open up to God, to cling in trust to a power beyond our control, to see more clearly than ever the source and the end of life” – and that’s mild – it’s time to say Basta! This has got to come to an end. Let’s just talk about what we know, and this kind of call and clinging and seeing is simply a way of sweeping the hideousness of some people’s lives under the carpet. Let’s grit our teeths and imagine, shall we? It’s really about something else, really!
Made me sick.