Category: Articles

In the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, we have (so Internet gurus like to suggest) moved from a top-down, “authoritarian” approach to web content to an interactive, user-generated, kaleidoscopic, and, above all, more “democratic” social experiment. As Elie Ofek, a professor of marketing and expert on business innovation, recently put it, consumers “now want to customize content and products to fit their preferences and personality, get immediate feedback on their actions and opinions, and be rewarded for their contributions.” If the bromide that Internet content wants to be free is actually true, then how much more true is it that people in an open society, those committed to a virtual public sphere as well as to each individual’s right to self-expression, want their voices to be heard? In the Internet Age, an author, we are told, mustn’t feel comfortable with approaching a subject as if from on high; he must be ready and willing to testify on his own behalf and to field all kinds of relevant queries.

We are witnessing, in principle if not exactly or not yet in fact, the death of the august expert; in her place stands the reverent facilitator, the friendly collaborator. Concomitant with the death of the expert is, of course, the demise of the book as a source of ultimate authority. Indeed, the genre of the book whose essential ingredients are single authorship, a reader’s solitary experience, and the transmission of knowledge and understanding from the first to the second—a “triumvirate” that reached full consciousness in the English reading society of the eighteenth century—is slowly being supplanted by the genre of the blog. Here, a writer registers bits of information or nascent lines of thought while a coterie of readers tacks onto the writer’s short entry or engages in cross-comment conversation. Throughout, the exchange among the parties is, in theory, underwritten by a principle of provisional knowledge: I only know so much, and so do you.

During this epochal change in consciousness from the book to the blog, Web 2.0 has made us all into armchair sociologists as well as into skeptics of all kinds of authority. For in the comments section appended to online articles can be found an array of reader opinions ranging from praise to blame, from perplexity to inquisitiveness. An analysis of these comments yields fruitful insights into common values held among American citizens and into the many traditions of thought coursing, often at cross purposes, through many of us. For Aristotle, these data would have been regarded as being roughly equivalent to doxa, or common opinions, the starting point of philosophical investigation whose end point was the best account of the topic under consideration. Additionally, he might have noted, in the current climate, how unwilling people are to budge from their original views and how much they dislike unbidden authority as though all authority came by way of fiat and lacked ultimate justification.

In a period which Mark Lilla, in a recent The New York Review of Books article, has aptly characterized as one of “radical individualism,” there is such a resistance to institutional authority—that of the state, above all—that the only power seems to reside in each individual’s desires, preferences, and ambitions. For this reason, I am particularly struck by The New York Times editors’ bold experiment called “The Stone,” the aim of which is to do philosophy in the public sphere with professional philosophers being charged with the task of writing about issues of ultimate importance for a general audience. As a litmus test of success, we might say that these blogs, which in most cases conform more to the genre of the philosophical pamphlet than to the conversation starter, can be deemed successful if and only if they are written in lucid, jargon-free prose, they are relevant in some basic, ultimate sense, and they are illuminating—more illuminating than punditry, straight-up news, or garden-variety op-ed pieces.  

Since “The Stone” was kicked off in May, the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer has raised the question of whether this should be the last generation to inhabit the earth, the Hegelian social theorist J.M. Bernstein has analyzed the role of anger in the Tea Party movement, and the applied ethicist Nancy Sherman has written about the value of Stoicism in the lives of veterans seeking to make sense of their time at war. More recently, in a blog entitled “Authority and Arrogance: A Response,” Nancy Bauer, a feminist philosopher at Tufts University, replied to comments posted regarding the relevance of treating Lady Gaga in her original entry, “Lady Power,” in a philosophical manner as well as to those questioning the authority that philosophers like to arrogate to themselves. As one reader indignantly claimed upon reading the original post about Lady Gaga, “That such intellectual consideration would be given to ‘Lady’ Gaga in the New York Times astounds” as if to suggest both that some topics are so commonsensical or self-evident as to not warrant any philosophical consideration whatsoever and that The New York Times fails to live up to a standard of cultural decency when it permits someone (here, Bauer) to write in a serious vein about something intrinsically ridiculous.

Put aside for the moment the question of whether Lady Gaga merits the attention of feminist philosophers, cultural critics, or any educated person, really. The larger question this reader raises—indeed one of the most prescient questions aimed at any self-respecting apologist for the philosophical life —can be recast as a challenge: Why, this reader demands, should I listen to you? What gives you as a philosopher the authority to speak?

In order to clarify the nature of the challenge, we need to distinguish between freedom of expression and the question of legitimacy. We are not concerned here (nor, to be sure, is the reader I cite) with whether the philosopher can speak and be heard in the public sphere; she is so capable and so entitled—capable insofar as she has the opportunity to enter the public sphere and entitled just to the extent that she can carry on about serious topics worthy of all our consideration or, if she prefers, about silly things that scarcely merit a moment’s notice: she is free to waste our time. Rather, we are seeking to draw attention to the question concerning whether philosophers have any special insight into the world, whether those who make no special claims to being philosophers ought to listen to those who do, and whether philosophers should have any influence over non-philosophers in the matter of how the latter make up or change their minds.

Bauer is right to frame her response in terms of authority and arrogance. On the one hand, philosophers, certainly since the time in which Socrates was living, have appeared to be arrogant, audacious, brazen, and, most of all, shameless, speaking in a manner that others might (and did) find appalling, objectionable, and, in some cases, obviously false. What, after all, do they know that others do not? What special knowledge do they have at their fingertips, what secret funds of understanding, what access to divine wisdom or to supernatural entities beyond the reach of common sense that non-philosophers lack? And how can they be so certain that what they claim to be true is, as a matter of fact, true? To be arrogant, it can be inferred, is to make loud, unjustified claims to authority.

On the other hand, philosophers have donned the garb, real or feigned, of humility since the turn from the natural philosophy of the Presocratics to Socrates’s examination of the good life. For it is philosophers such as Socrates, Aquinas, and Kant who have declared that they lack wisdom because sophia is beyond the realm of human comprehension. Human beings, tender as the night, are creatures of finitude: limited in their cognitive capacities to grasp only what appears, they cannot ascend to some final position beyond the here and now. Reason enough, for philosophers of this ilk, to acknowledge their own ignorance and, they thought, to enjoin us to live modestly. 

How can philosophers be seen as arrogant in one breath while regarding themselves as humble in the next? This is but another formulation of the challenge to the public philosopher’s peculiar claim to authority, a formulation that can be parsed in one of three ways. Either the public philosopher’s claims to esoteric knowledge remain incommunicable to the uninitiated (he speaks in tongues or, in an updated version, in academic jargon), or he speaks against what is so commonsensical and self-evident that his statements have to be untrue (in some sense, he is no more than a court jester or fop), or his utterances, in virtue of their being unverifiable, can, at best, neither be confirmed nor rejected (he is closer to a theologian than he is to a rigorous scientist). In a sense that is as of yet unclear, he can be heard, but he can’t be understood.

What would count, therefore, as a legitimate claim to authority is the very question that issue to be considered. There are six such sources that come almost immediately to mind (three come straight out of Max Weber’s work) but that a public philosopher cannot reasonably hope to reference in his writing.

First, there is the claim to specialized expertise. Unlike an economist, a medical doctor, or a policy analyst whose expertise is such that we are apt to listen to her conclusions, to take seriously her recommendations, and to trust that she will help us to make well-informed decisions, a public philosopher cannot, in good conscience, appeal to some bit of well-researched knowledge that falls within her ken. Recall that as a public philosopher she is not donning the hat of the professional philosopher whose intensive study of philosophy of language might very well dispose us to regard her conclusions about language as ultimately sound. No, insofar as she identifies herself as a public philosopher she is a generalist opining about topics that concern all of us and writing in (though at the limits of) a public language we all share.   

Second, there is the appeal to prestige. To remain true to his calling, a public philosopher, however, cannot (or, in any event, should not) point to his attachment to a prestigious university as granting his claims the proper authority. For one thing, he may be an independent scholar—in Russell Jacoby’s words, a “last intellectual”—working at a distance from powerful institutions. For another, even for one who is employed by a well-recognized and highly esteemed university, his statements should be rendered independent of the institution’s official policies so that the university that pays him is not impelled to put its imprimatur on his arguments or proposals. In both cases, then, when a public philosopher comes before us, he does so alone, on our terms, of his own volition, and, in a sense, in full anonymity. In his lectures, interviews, and writings, he presents himself to us in the light of day.

Third, there is the ultimate appeal to divine authority. In the present case, though, it should be clear that no transcendent being can underwrite the public philosopher’s discourses and this, not unsurprisingly, because he cannot appear to us in the garb of a divine messenger, prophet, or medium. It follows that a public philosopher cannot exempt his discourse from examination or rational scrutiny but must submit himself to all forms of reasonable queries, replies, and rebuttals. If God happens to be on his side, then so much the better for God: God’s endorsement of the view of a certain public philosopher must be the result of the latter’s having the right reasons for believing that something is the case and not the consequence of God’s so willing it. 

Fourth, neither can he allude to some analogy between philosophy and science for ultimate support. As regards the question of modern legitimacy, science has no conceptual problem (by which I don’t mean that the science wars of the nineties were somehow unreal or that Americans’ general skepticism toward science will soon vanish) because science has demonstrable utility. Science manifests its power to change the everyday routines that govern our lives through paradigm-shifting technological innovations. What’s more, scientific discoveries have extended the realm of human freedom by means of predictability and control. In the scientific picture inaugurated during the scientific revolution and coming into full view some 400 years later, nature has become less unruly and mysterious and, in consequence, more amenable to human understanding as well as more subject to technological manipulation. Since philosophy has no such practical utility and since it exerts no such power over the physical world, it follows that philosophy cannot draw its reason for being from scientific sources.  

Fifth, nor can the public philosopher bedazzle us with his charisma. For Max Weber, the charismatic figure seems to draw his power and influence from the godhead and to be endowed with magical qualities. The charismatic man, much like the shaman, bewitches us with his incantations, his lilting cadences, the force of his speech. Perhaps, as the beautiful, wayward boy Alcibiades suggests in Plato’s Symposium, there was something of this quality in Socrates. And yet unlike the sophists, Socrates was always plain-spoken and forthright—one reason why his defense failed to incite pity in the Athenian jurors in The Apology—and throughout the dialectical portions of the early and middle Platonic dialogues he sought to refrain from rhetorical flourishes. It is not, of course, as if he was or, by extension, public philosophers themselves are without style or panache or that philosophical substance somehow comes unpackaged, pure, and transparent. It is only that public philosophers do not gain our assent by realizing a common desire in us for mystical oneness.

Finally, public philosophers are by no means justified in claiming that tradition is on their side. To say that this is how things have always been done or to assert that this is how we’ve always gotten along around here and to conclude that this is how things should continue to be is not to make a defensible philosophical assertion. In a full-blown traditionalist appeal, the speaker is grounding his case in a community’s reverence for its past and its elders—that is, in a kind of collective vision that, just insofar as we tacitly or explicitly endorse it, binds us all together. It is true that some philosophers such as Edmund Burke or, in a much different vein, the twentieth-century anti-modern René Guenon have argued on behalf of different versions of traditionalism, and yet their defense of traditionalism was characteristically untraditional. Both adduced reasons and both enjoined us to reach similar conclusions: in the first case, that society was best re-jiggered not at one blow but bit by bit; in the second, that the modern world is a final phase through which we are now passing and that will soon give way once again to mystical harmony.

Since the public philosopher does not have at his disposal the legitimate use of expertise, prestige, divine sanction, scientific truth, charisma, or tradition, he is therefore left with the option of making appeals to Dame Reason. How easy it would be to scoff at this superannuated idea: if the history of the twentieth century has taught us anything, it is that Reason is a rather flimsy guide. Consider Darwin’s, Freud’s, and Nietzsche’s insights that we have considerably less rational control over our lives than we would like to think; or neuroscientists’ experiments that seem to show that conscious free will is an illusion; or the terror brought on by state socialism that seem to indicate that social engineering destroys not only lives but also human freedom; or genocides, world wars, and colonialism that apparently give the lie to absolutism and to the global actualization of human rights. Consider, too, the rise and prevalence of multiculturalism and moral relativism in our time, an integral part of the education of skeptical, authority-rejecting young persons in the US. Arguably, when someone refers to Truth, we should be overly generous in our interpretation, translating Truth into “truths,” “opinion,” or, even worse, “self-interest.” Or perhaps he is simply a figure of fun, and so we should treat him kindly, holding our laughter till he hobbles out of view. 

In two articles that have previously appeared in Butterflies and Wheels, “Taking Relativism Seriously” and “Philosophy in the Popular Imagination,” I considered to a greater or lesser extent the proper use of public reason. Though consistent with the arguments I make there, in what follows I wish to strike out on a somewhat different path, advancing the thesis that the authority of public philosophy can be defended on the grounds either that it furnishes us with conceptual frameworks through which we can grasp modern phenomena or that it invents new concepts which proffer a richer, more adequate understanding of our life-world.

In his book entitled Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Richard Posner recognizes that philosophy has been hampered as much as any other humanistic discipline has by the slow but steady trend toward professionalization: increasing specialization, the prevalence of academic jargon, writing meant for publication in academic journals to be read only by fellow colleagues at work on similar research questions, and, not the least, insulation from the common concerns of lay persons. Still, in his chapter on public philosophers he wonders whether philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty can play a vital role in the public sphere; his conclusion is that they cannot. For Posner, the unit of analysis in public intellectual discourse is the issue, the main target of discourse that nebulous, protean term “public opinion,” and the speech act the policy recommendation. But, he aims to show, neither issues nor policy statements require philosophical thinking about first principles; instead, they are best examined in terms of the calculus of cost-benefit analysis, judgments best reached as a result of carefully weighing the likely consequences.

Suppose we grant this much about the realm of public policy. Still, Posner’s verdict regarding the failure of public philosophers to weigh in meaningfully on issues of the day only follows if one assents to the premise that the public philosopher’s object of study is the issue. To see why Posner’s conclusion doesn’t follow, we need only read J.M. Bernstein’s recent blog entry, “The Very Angry Tea Party,” which, tellingly, appeared in “The Stone” long after the Tea Party Movement had already become a household name. In his philosophical investigation into the metaphysical commitments of the Tea Party Movement, Bernstein does not speak at any length about health care reform, taxes, Wall Street bailouts, big government, state sovereignty, or any other hot button issue about which Posner might expect him to chime in. Rather, he seeks to ask a rather simple question that no pundit, Bernstein notes, has sincerely considered—why are Tea Partiers so angry?—and then to trace the Tea Partiers’ anger back to the false metaphysical view according to which a subject can be absolutely free from all social and institutional attachments.

Their anger, Bernstein wishes to demonstrate, arose in the very moment that they had to acknowledge, while at the same time disavowing, their ultimate dependence on the institutions from which they gained their independence. If we let the name “Hegel” stand for the way that a subject comes into being as a consequence of a set of primitive social attachments and social recognitions and the name “Descartes” designate the subject which is a self-affirming solitary being who has privileged access to his thoughts, then the best way of accounting for Tea Partiers’ anger, Bernstein believes, is to insist that we are primitively Hegelians and only derivatively—which is to say, traumatically—Cartesians. Fragile social beings all, we become angry when our attachments to others are violated. Only then do we recoil into Cartesianism, half-forgetting the past and half-rejecting the very things that give our lives meaning, purpose, and direction. Thus, according to Bernstein we are warranted in holding that the Tea Party Movement is metaphysical, not political, in nature.

The fundamental lesson that Bernstein’s article admirably illustrates is that public philosophy has value just to the extent that it reveals how certain social phenomena actually fit together within some basic conceptual schema. In other words, one of public philosophy’s chief ambitions is to fulfill the speculative demand that social phenomena be categorized according to how they shed light on the conceptual contours of the modern world, on a world, hitherto vague and indistinct, that is all our own and now familiar. The truth is indeed the whole.

Of course, we may feel with good reason that Bernstein has failed to sketch the right metaphysical picture of this social phenomenon, yet it would be uncharitable of us to suppose that such cannot be a legitimate and wholly useful undertaking for public philosophy given that the latter proposes to do nothing less than help us understand some event or set of events in the broadest possible terms—in a word, to give us the right general orientation so that we can see events as falling under the longue dureé, the epochal character of modernity  

I have suggested that this the speculative approach is but one way of conferring authority on public philosophy. Conceptual innovation is another. According to the political philosopher Raymond Geuss, there are political situations in which we are in a deep conceptual muddle: we cannot see our way about and, what’s worse, we cannot identify the root cause or perceive the nature of the problem. Unable to deliberate sensibly about courses of possible actions, we remain mired, unconsciously perhaps, in vagueness and indistinctness. In these sorts of cases, Geuss thinks that conceptual innovation can be “an important contribution to clarifying an obscure situation and to guiding action directed at institutional change.”

The example he cites in his book Philosophy and Real Politics in order to illustrate this point is the concept of the state, which in Weber’s terms signifies the sole instrument of legitimate force within a delimited geographical region. Before the early modern age, the concept did not exist, Geuss holds, and yet Hobbes’s conceptual invention allowed us to see, “aesthetically” as it were, a new social reality that was at once familiar and unfamiliar to us. Afterward, we were able to imagine actions performed in relation to the state as well as take certain stances toward it: we might reasonably hold that its power should be minimized (the liberal stance); that it should be tasked with distributing resources equitably (the socialist stance); that it does not and cannot carry moral legitimacy (the anarchist stance); that, as a result of political struggle, it shall wither away (the Leninist stance); and so on. The state has indeed become such a part of our political experience that it would be difficult to imagine politics apart from the operations of, or resistance to, the state.

Just as the concept of the state clarified the problem for those living in the early modern world and thereafter, so the concept of neoliberalism, we might suggest, directs our attention toward ours. After Margaret Thatcher declared in 1979 that “society does not exist,” a new political reality quickly set in. The invention of the concept of neoliberalism has shown a light on the problem—the state’s reach must be curtailed considerably, the marketplace should be relatively unregulated and unbound, and human freedom should be regarded as being identical both with widespread distrust of institutional authority and, as Lilla sheepishly asserts, with “the divine right to do whatever we damn well please.” Indeed, can we imagine our current economic and political predicament without referring, either explicitly or implicitly, to the neoliberal state?

We have managed to pick out two valuable things that the public philosopher can do and do well. His existence can be vindicated, I believe, provided that he gives us the right perspective with which to see how our world hangs together (the development of a sound conceptual framework) or in those rare instances where he has managed to invent a concept that, after the fact, designates a social phenomenon that is at the heart of our everyday lives, that is, that is integral to our understanding the seemingly self-evident reality that we live and think (timely conceptual innovation). Where once we failed to understand our place in the modern world, now we see it all too clearly; where once things had remained obscure, now they have become clear and distinct.

We can now return, in closing, to the issue of arrogance and humility. The reply to the skeptic’s charge that philosophers are from first to last an arrogant bunch is that the good ones are working at the limits of everyday public discourse: their principal aim is to achieve conceptual clarity, but that aim cannot be reached unless they adopt a certain style of thought that is not entirely familiar to non-philosophers. The rebuke that “I can’t follow you” is symptomatic, I suspect, both of the reader’s unwillingness to give philosophers a decent hearing and of philosophers’ inability to find a mode of expression that adequately balances the need for accessibility with their desire for rigor. Hence philosophers’ humility, an attitude toward life that springs from the feeling that they haven’t arrived at a final view of social reality (after all, they could be wrong, and, in light of new evidence, their conclusions may need to be revised) and from believing that they may not be understood by the neighbors they so wholeheartedly wish to reach. Not to be understood, though, is not the worst fate; that label would have to be reserved for those who lack the courage to write about the ultimate aim that binds us all together: I mean the common good.

Are we still living in a New Age? To judge by the stream of popular texts and movements that mix together self-help and spirituality, we are. But what is it about? And what is the secret of its popularity? Such are the questions this book tries to answer through a survey of recent mystical fads and plenty of references to the hallowed traditions of TV, movie, and comic-book fantasy. Read ‘Karma Chameleon’, the chapter on Deepak Chopra, or ‘A Course in Malarkey’, on Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles, and you’ll long for the days when all we needed to save us from evil was Superman.

Alas, today’s make-believe issues not from heaven, but from personal commitment. Besides money for books, DVDs, candles, and lessons, it requires devotees to grow their own magic powers. In the spirit of contemporary society, it is both commercial and fiercely individualistic. It is faith in the self at a time when the self has to sell its soul and haggle for the best bargain. And it is the mind-over-matter, name-it-and-claim-it illusion that goes with rampant consumerism. You want pizza. You visualize the pizza. You dial the number. You whisper ‘pepperoni’ … and it materializes on your doorstep. The hard labor of workers on farms and in kitchens does not come into the experience.

Naturally, such superstition is shameless. As long as it has a payback, why should it make any further sense? Let Rhonda Byrne assert in her best-selling book The Secret that ‘Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency … they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency’, as quoted in Chapter 1.  Let Eckhart Tolle say that ‘You cannot be free in the future. Presence is the key to freedom, so you can only be free now’, as quoted in Chapter 4. And let James Redfield argue, in The Celestine Prophecy, that ‘We must assume every event has significance and contains a message that somehow pertains to our questions’, as quoted in Chapter 8. Like Joel Osteen’s prosperity gospel, dissected in the final chapter, it all works because it offers believers, at an unbeatable price, a reason to believe in themselves.

The author, a theologian and former Baptist minister, is sometimes too generous about the value of New Age thinking. And while he traces its links to older religious traditions, he does not delve into its contemporary social roots. But he does know it is just a mystification of everyday psychology, blame-the-victim attitudes, and medicine-show fraud. With a foreword by atheist comedian Julia Sweeney, and appendixes discussing what is a cult, why people join them, and the reasons some of them erupt in violence, his book makes a worthwhile introduction to today’s dime-a-dozen spiritualities.

Robert M. Price, Top Secret: The Truth Behind Today’s Pop Mysticisms. New York: Prometheus Books, 2008.

In my life nothing good has ever come of the “what do you do” question. Once off my lips, the line “I work on moral philosophy, on ethics” can lead in only one of two directions. Either my acquaintance unschooled in philosophy will be almost preternaturally interested in what I have to say as if she’s happened upon some sublime creature only thought to exist on blanched parchment, or she’ll be absolutely dumbstruck by the stupidity of a life well-wasted. Though, chances are, her rejoinder could go either way, in this particular case she’s lighted on the latter path. “Philosophy, it doesn’t get you anywhere,” she states, reveling in a truth that she believes is as certain as the claim that now is night.

In instances such as the one above, I’ve yet to come up with a good reply, probably because there’s no such thing. A joke, you think? “Oh, I don’t know, it certainly puts you in debt.” Or a plea for clarification? “I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘get you anywhere.’”

The truth is that neither will do. For if my conversational partner is genuinely interested in my thoughts on philosophy, then it’s likely because she has the wrong conception of philosophy in mind or it’s for the wrong reason. If, however, she’s not at all interested in my reply, then she “can’t be bothered,” as my former English landlady was fond of saying, with listening to a full rebuttal and she won’t brook a sharp counterexample. Like many others, she has already made up her mind—or, better put, her mind has already been made up for her.

To do philosophy in the public sphere today is to be immediately put on the defensive and, in most cases, to stand in the wrong. How we got to the point where philosophy has been put on all fours—either fetishized for not being a part of the real world or vilified for playing no part within it—still needs to be explained. A first, modest step would be to get straight in our minds how lay persons conceive of “philosophy,” “philosophers,” and “doing philosophy” and why this should matter to those of us who believe, somewhat antiquely, in the life of the mind.

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The place to begin is with my interlocutor’s claim that when philosophers discuss something, they only go round in circles. By this formulation, she could mean one of three things: first, that philosophers get mired in endless debate that stymies forward progress, such debate yielding nothing in the way of concrete resolution; second, that they make something out of nothing, causing all parties involved to be brought to a state of mental confusion; or, third, that in the game of philosophy there’s no way to resolve who’s right and who’s wrong. These three doubts, individually and collectively, present considerable challenges to philosophy’s basic self-conception. The first doubt would have it that there can be no valid conclusions drawn from a set of competing claims, the second that no mental tranquility can be gained due to the endless jostling over definitions and the petty squabbling over overnice distinctions, and the third that there can be no certain judgments concerning winners and losers. Once we enter the philosopher’s world, the lay person believes, we’re bound to soon find ourselves in a muddle.

Rather than respond to each of the three doubts in turn (we’re not going to play that game, are we?), it occurs to me that it would be wiser to ask about what assumption lies behind my interlocutor’s worries. I suspect that she feels deep within herself the loss of faith in the power of reason to help us understand ourselves and our world. She needn’t be a relativist or a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic to believe this. She may simply believe that some hodgepodge of emotions, instincts, past experiences, hunches, friends’ advice, and expectations is better than reason at determining how we should act. By contrast, the philosopher’s belief that reason has its own set of powers (as well as its own inherent limitations) requires an attitudinal shift so profound that where once there was impatience now there is humility. The light of reason can only shine after we’ve discovered how to quiet our minds and distance ourselves from our “empirical self.” There is a long education of the soul, an itinerary of sorts, that leads ultimately to this state of mind, a path that the uninitiated hasn’t known or hasn’t taken and, in consequence, can’t find value in.

Still, my interlocutor might concede that if philosophy means anything, it means that everyone has his own personal philosophy. A personal philosophy, she might insist, is a fundamental set of beliefs that one lives by. Think of the book subtitle of the popular radio program “This I Believe,” “The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women,” as giving credence to this definition. In this vein, we would be justified in saying that a coach has her own coaching philosophy, a company its corporate philosophy, a party its governing philosophy.

I’m not so sure that this notion of personal philosophy gets us very far, for three reasons. One is that it’s not clear to me that the person espousing a personal philosophy is ultimately committed to this set of beliefs and not to some other. How do we know that she sets her course so that it lines up with her ownmost beliefs, or that, when the chips are down, she won’t jump ship, or that—to change metaphors—it’s not sometimes better to bend like a reed, as Haemon advises his father Creon to do, than it is to remain as rooted as an oak tree? In the end, how her beliefs line up with her actions has yet to be fully investigated. Another is that we would need to know whether the beliefs she stands by are worth standing by. Merely saying “this I believe” can’t be the end of the discussion but must be the starting point to any probing inquiry. And the last, already more than hinted at in my remarks above, is that philosophy, whatever it is and however it sets about its ultimate task of self-transformation, must be more than a doctrine; it must be a certain style of thought, a way of examining one’s life with the goal of determining whether the life I’m leading amounts to anything. The question concerning whether (and why) it’s a good thing to have a personal philosophy still remains unasked and unconsidered as if it were enough just to purport to have one.

“All right. But if you’re going to dismiss talk of personal philosophy as hopelessly ‘unphilosophical,’ then you’ll have to come round to agreeing with me that philosophy is otherwise useless. After all, it has no bearing on the real world, and it’s mostly an academic pursuit full of puzzles, word games, and the kind of thing that’s done in universities: up in the clouds, I mean, not done here on earth, and nowhere else.”

“Granted, contemporary professional philosophy has, in general, become unhinged from the concerns common to all of us. And, yes, the worst of it has degenerated into logical puzzles and the search for ingenious counterexamples and knockdown arguments. But, beyond these worries, I can hear in your voice the more potent criticism that philosophy is worthless on the grounds that acting is more important than thinking. ‘Getting things done,’ you seem to imply, should be ranked much higher than ‘pie-in-the-sky thoughts.’”

Suppose for a moment that my interlocutor is right. But then aren’t there times when we don’t know how to act and, what’s worse, times when we’re completely at a loss concerning how to go on and how we got to where we are, to a place we would prefer not to be? When we’re in a crisis over which we seem to have no control? When our lives seem no longer to make any sense? At such times, wouldn’t it be wise for us to try to think our way through it in order to come to some deeper, more complete understanding of ourselves and of our place in the order of things?

It is, I want to say, at such tragic moments that the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s question concerning what we care most about and what (and who) is worthy of our care can’t but ring in our ears. At its best, philosophy asks us to be honest with ourselves. It teaches us how to look closely at the hand we’ve been dealt, to determine the extent to which we’ve helped or harmed ourselves and others, to figure out what ultimately matters to us, and to assess, in the most basic terms we can fathom, how we’ve lived.

Reason, it turns out, is neither omnipotent nor impotent in matters of the head and heart, philosophy neither so rare as to be entirely extinct from the world we inhabit nor so common as to be readily purchasable in the marketplace. Yet thanks to our mature recognition that things aren’tas they ought to be and thanks also to our desire to reconcile ourselves with the world, self-examination will continue to have a reason for being because it promises to bring us peace of mind.

Justice John Paul Stevens has been a historic champion of our constitutional separation of church and state. He has consistently sought to strike down special privileges for religion and its impositions on the rights of others. President Obama’s choice to replace him, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, does not appear to embrace the fundamental American principle of church-state separation with the vigor and force of Justice John Paul Stevens. This conclusion is based on the evidence that has come to light since her nomination to the United States Supreme Court.

Indeed, in at least one instance, Ms. Kagan appears to directly rebuff the church-state jurisprudence of Justice Stevens.

Thus, Secular Coalition for America opposes Ms. Kagan’s nomination until she makes her support for church-state separation much more clear and emphatic. Five instances raise grave concern that Ms. Kagan does not share the judicial philosophy of Justice Stevens:

1) As an attorney for the Clinton White House in 1996, Ms. Kagan advocated that the administration intervene in a case in which the California Supreme Court ruled that a landlord could not discriminate against prospective tenants-an unmarried couple-because her religion condemned sex out of wedlock. The California court ruled that it is not a “substantial burden” for those who choose to enter the marketplace to treat customers equally. Ms. Kagan argued that the court’s ruling was “quite outrageous.” Kagan’s exact same reasoning would apply against gay couples who sleep together-and potentially to people of particular races (as many religions have historically condemned as inferior those of differing races or ethnicities).

Is Elena Kagan prejudiced? Of course not. But Ms. Kagan’s legal reasoning opens the door to dressing up prejudice against any number of groups as a “burden” on those who would impose their prejudice on others. The California Supreme Court ruled correctly that someone who elects to enter into the business market place is not “burdened” by a requirement of equal treatment.

2) In 1999, Congress attempted to pass the Religious Liberty Protection Act (RLPA). Had this law passed, applicants for employment or housing might have had no legal protection from being forced to answer religiously motivated questions concerning their marital status, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, or whether they are pregnant or HIV-positive. Ms. Kagan, disappointingly, described herself as “the biggest fan” in the Clinton White House of RLPA, and, though one would hope to find proof to the contrary, there is no evidence that Kagan expressed outrage at the thought of undermining the enforcement of state and local civil rights laws on the basis of religious bias.

3) During her Senate confirmation hearings for the office of Solicitor General, Ms. Kagan commented on a memo she authored while a clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall pertaining to Bowen v. Kendrick which asserted that religious groups should not be able to receive public funding even for secular activities, as those funds would inevitably find their way to serving explicitly sectarian purposes. But Ms. Kagan told the Senate her reasoning in this memo had been “deeply mistaken” and “utterly wrong,” calling it, “the dumbest thing [she] had ever read.” Yet Kagan’s reasoning in the memo was entirely consistent with the reasoning in the Bowen dissent, supported by both Justice Marshall-and Justice John Paul Stevens.

4) When charitable choice provisions were initially inserted into Welfare Reform legislation in 1996, the Clinton Justice Department advocated that “charitable choice” organizations should not be pervasively religious, as would be required by sound constitutional principles. Ms. Kagan, while employed as White House Counsel, seems to have de-emphasized the Justice Department’s concern and may indeed have not supported the Department position. Regardless, this was another instance in which Ms. Kagan was not a strong, vocal and forceful advocate for separation of church and state in the spirit of Justice John Paul Stevens.

5) In notes from a speech given at Princeton University in 2003, Ms. Kagan seemed to imply that the courts could cede to Congress the power to have politicians decide how fundamental American rights could be interpreted in some important instances. If this is her opinion, this is an unsettling viewpoint that goes far beyond separation of church and state. But as to church-state issues, it might, in violation of long-standing jurisprudence, allow a political majority to interpret the constitutional rights of a minority. This seems inconsistent with the jurisprudence of Justice Stevens and raises serious questions regarding the liberties of every American, particularly Secular Americans. Perhaps Ms. Kagan can clarify her position, but the indications from her notes are a valid and significant concern.

It is possible that during her confirmation hearings, Ms. Kagan will expand upon her positions, and emerge a more acceptable nominee. But for now the evidence points in an unfavorable direction. The Secular Coalition for America has composed a series of questions addressed to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that will hopefully clarify where Solicitor General Kagan stands on a series of church-state related issues which we strongly urge the committee to ask. These questions are available at www.secular.org/kaganquestions.

We urge those Senators to honor the true intent of our nation’s Founders and their belief in church-state separation, and to question Ms. Kagan carefully on these matters. Given what is currently known, the Secular Coalition for America respectfully asks that the Senate reject her nomination and that President Obama choose a nominee who will clearly stand up for church-state separation and against religious discrimination with the boldness and courage worthy of Justice John Paul Stevens.

Several hundred people joined One Law for All on 20 June at Downing Street to show their opposition to Sharia and religious-based laws in Britain and elsewhere and to demand universal rights and secularism.

A new report “Sharia Law in Britain: A Threat to One Law for All and Equal Rights” was published on the day to coincide with the rally. Human rights activist Gita Sahgal said of the report: “I think it is highly significant that in Britain there has been silence where there should have been condemnation. There is active support for ‘Sharia laws’ precisely because it is limited to denying women rights in the family. No hands are being cut off, so there can’t be a problem. Unfortunately for us, senior law officers will find that human rights expert bodies often have a similar attitude. They have done little research on the impact of family laws and the denial of justice caused by parallel systems of justice. That is why the findings of this report are so important. It is such dedicated work that changes the thinking of the experts.”

She went on to say: “This campaign stands at the heart of a debate over the future of Britain. It also stands at the heart of global attempts to destroy the most basic rights, to invade liberty and to crush equality and to do this in the name of upholding and promoting human rights. We stand here today facing down forces of racism and fundamentalism as we struggle for secularism.”

The pro-Sharia Al-Muhajiroun organised a counter-demonstration to the One Law for All rally. One of their members said: “We find many of these people who call for human rights and one law. They come and they say that they want equality. But what equality do you get when one man legislates over another?” In response, One Law for All Spokesperson, Maryam Namazie, said: “The fight against Sharia law is a fight against Islamism not Muslims, immigrants and people living under Sharia here or elsewhere. So it is very apt for the Islamists to hold a counter-demonstration against our rally. This is where the real battleground lies. With a few members of the far Right English Defence League also there to showcase their bigotry, it became abundantly clear to everyone why our Campaign is fast becoming the banner carrier for universal rights, equality, and one secular law for all in this country and beyond.”

MC Fariborz Pooya of the Iranian Secular Society said: “The One Law for All Campaign has brought to centre stage an important debate about the kind of society we want to live in whilst defending the rights of everyone irrespective of religion, race, nationality…; this Campaign is truly the voice of the voiceless.”

Women’s rights campaigner Yasmin Rehman said: “We Muslims have been a part of the UK for many, many years but the generations before me did not feel the need for or call for segregation in the way that is being demanded now. At the beginning of my career as a women’s rights advocate there was no need to apply for a certificate of Khula in divorce cases. Muslim women are now being told that divorces under the English legal system are not valued or recognised without a certificate of Khula – and should they remarry without this they will be committing Zina – a ‘crime’ punishable by death in many Muslim countries. This is not a view shared by all Islamic scholars but a view that is being pushed through the Islamic councils and tribunals across the UK.”

Anna Waters of One Law for All’s Legal Team said: “Any reasonable interpretation of the Human Rights Act shows us that there are certain things that it doesn’t allow – and one of the things it doesn’t allow is for a woman to have an inferior or second class status when she stands before a judge in a court of law. This is exactly what is happening…”

Sue Robson of the Gay And Lesbian Humanist Association said: “This is a human rights issue. Here in the UK, it’s an egalitarian issue; it’s a feminist issue. Elsewhere in our world, the issue is life – and death.”

Gerard Phillips of the National Secular Society said that Sharia Law was “nothing less than an attack on human rights and on equality.” He went on to say: “It undermines our democracy. It must be opposed.”
The rally also heard from others including Naomi Phillips of the British Humanist Association, poets from the Anti-Injustice Movement and singer Adam Barnett.

Protestors then joined a march organised by Iran Solidarity to the embassy of the Islamic regime of Iran. Patty Debonitas of Iran Solidarity UK said: “By coming today you are showing your solidarity with the people here who are victimised under Sharia law and people in Iran who are being victimised under the state power of Sharia.” The rally was held on 20 June to mark the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan at a protest in Tehran last year and link the fight against Sharia here with that in Iran and elsewhere.

On the day, Maryam Namazie was interviewed on BBC 1 TV’s Breakfast Programme, and some other media outlets.

Notes:

1. The new One Law for All report “Sharia Law in Britain: A Threat to One Law for All and Equal Rights” can be downloaded free of charge or a paperback copy purchased from One Law for All for £5.00 plus £2.00 Shipping and Handling. To purchase the book or donate to the work of One Law for All, please either send a cheque to our address below or pay via Paypal by visiting donate. One Law for All wants to send the report to MPs, the Archbishop of Canterbury and others. It would be very helpful if you could buy extra copies for us to send on to others free of charge.

2. Full speeches of speakers will be available on the website soon as will video footage of the day. Photos can be found here.

3. The One Law for All Campaign was launched on 10 December 2008, International Human Rights Day, to call on the UK Government to recognise that Sharia and religious courts are arbitrary and discriminatory against women and children in particular and that citizenship and human rights are non-negotiable.

4. For further information contact:
Maryam Namazie
Spokesperson
One Law for All
BM Box 2387
London WC1N 3XX, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 7719166731
onelawforall@gmail.com
www.onelawforall.org.uk

This time last week, all of the United Kingdom seemed to be up in arms because Obama called BP by its former name, British Petroleum. As ludicrous as it sounds to American ears, droves of British people, from established journalists down to the chap on the next stool at the pub, took this as an anti-British remark—several bloggers going so far as to call it racism—and soon some journalists were reporting an anti-British backlash among Americans generally. Some of my friends and neighbors here in England insist that there’s no other way to interpret the remark: Obama has revealed himself to be anti-British, plain and simple.

I’m a dual national, but I’ve been an American for far longer than I’ve been a Brit, and this reaction baffles me. I’m certain that few Americans outside the oil industry or oil investment circles would have known before this week that BP no longer stands for British Petroleum, but most British people don’t believe me. And while it’s clear that we expect more of Obama, who after all isn’t just any American, he is briefed by ordinary Americans on his staff, and I can’t imagine any staffer would—in a Please Don’t Eat the Daisies sort of way—anticipate any need to warn him that the British would be insulted by use of an outdated household name. I simply don’t believe that’s how most Americans think.

In fact, not all British people are entirely up to speed on this; Tony Blankley, right-wing British-born broadcaster on the American radio network NPR, called the company British Petroleum, even in a broadcast during which he spoke of Britain’s fury. In a different take on the situation, Scottish stand-up comic Susan Calman suggested that Obama was using BP’s “Sunday name”; that’s what they called it at her house when she was in trouble and her father would sing out “Susan Grace Calman, what do you think you’re doing?” She has a point. It may very well be that the message Obama intended was one of distance and formality, signaling that we’re not on nickname terms with BP any more, we’re angry enough to use its full name.

Here’s a test for the British people who are so up in arms: Do you know whether the legal name of the ubiquitous purveyor of chicken-by-the-bucket is Kentucky Fried Chicken or KFC? Do you think your Prime Minister knows? If the company is now officially called KFC, and if a British river were to be contaminated by frying-oil runoff, and if the Prime Minister should slip up and use the wrong name, do you think the people of Kentucky would take it as an insult?

Be that as it may, when I ask people who insist Obama made an anti-British slur if they would please consider alternative interpretations, I’m asking them to go against what a goodly portion of the media here is telling them.

When I lived in the USA, people liked to think of the press as unbiased, and even though we knew this to be unattainable perfection, we liked to think it remained the goal, at least. My hometown had a Republican paper and a Democratic paper, owned by the same people and virtually identical in their coverage. Only fairly recently have American media outlets begun to differentiate themselves so strongly by political outlook (when I left the US, Fox wasn’t yet the force for conservatism that it is today, for example).

The UK press is and has always been more overtly political, with each newspaper happily skewing the reporting for its audience. In the US, we associate newspapers with their locations; in the UK, they’re associated with political views and social classes. Everyone knows which newspapers are left, right or centrist, and everyone knows which are read by working class people and which by the middle class (though I don’t hobnob enough with titled toffs to know what members of the aristocracy read).

When I moved to the UK, I started buying the Times, not realizing I was making a political choice, and I’ve kept buying it because I grew used to the columnists (though I skip the most conservative ones). I’ve seen the reporting change in a way that some people have called “dumbing down”; the Sunday Times didn’t always feature colored page-one banners, such as the one that took up half the real estate above the fold last Sunday (June 13), carrying the vital information that a certain singer-actress is “a fatalist about love”.

Down at the bottom, though, I found the smallest headline and the smallest item on the page, the only headline not in bold, and it read “Obama: I’m not anti-British”.

Having minimized coverage of what Obama actually said, the Sunday Times didn’t understate its accusations about what Obama meant. The article continued inside, where garish graphics covering almost half of a two-page spread showed a stern-faced Obama pointing directly at the reader, next to one of the largest headlines I’ve ever seen: “You Brits Are Gonna Pay”. The six-inch letters of “Pay” dissolved into a pool of oil that dripped a further six inches down to break up columns of text below.

The message was clear: Obama has said “You Brits are gonna pay”, pointing directly, menacingly, into the camera. But he did and said no such things. They’ve put words in his mouth, and indicated the tone of those words with a photo that’s well over a year old and taken entirely out of context. Obama did not threaten “you Brits” in any way, but the article—written by Jonathan Oliver with further reporting by Danny Fortson if you are reading the newspaper itself, but credited to Tony Allen-Mills if you read the same article at the Times web site—does nothing to counter the message of the headline and graphics.

The author—I’ll assume it to be Jonathan Oliver for simplicity’s sake—began by describing anti-BP reaction from Americans, which is fair enough. Some self-described grannies, it seems, have recorded an anti-BP song for YouTube; fine. But he goes on to say the “formerly special relationship between Washington and London was one of several potential casualties of America’s search for culprits”. And that’s not reporting; that’s opinion.

First, you have to know about this special relationship. The British are big on it; most Americans have never heard of it. Churchill coined the term in 1946 for US-UK cooperation that went beyond that of allies to involve intelligence sharing and economic cooperation.

The morning after Obama was elected, the press here, most notably BBC Radio 4’s Martha Kearny, asked repeatedly whether Obama would maintain the special relationship. But why on earth wouldn’t he? Because, Kearny said, the British colonial powers in Kenya mistreated Obama’s grandfather; surely Obama must hate the British.

Jonathan Oliver’s is not the only article to revive this story in the context of the BP/British Petroleum flap. But Obama barely knew his father and never even met his father’s father. A new president of the United States, taking his place on the world stage during a financial crisis, with the armed forces fighting two wars, dealing with the country’s worst environmental disaster, has more things to think about than what a colonial power did half a century ago to a relative he never knew.

In addition to the Kenyan grandfather, you can tell that Obama doesn’t like the British, we’re told by Oliver and others, because “one of his first acts as president was to remove a bust of Winston Churchill from the White House”. Yes, he did that. Reports at the time said that the UK loaned the bust to George W. Bush, who’d asked to borrow one. Each new president redecorates the Oval Office; Obama decided to display only art commemorating Americans, replacing the bust of Churchill with one of Lincoln. The Churchill bust at last report graced the Washington residence of the British Ambassador. It’s hardly anti-British to return a borrowed statue the previous occupant left behind or to prefer the politics, or even just the face, of Lincoln.

Oliver referred to the “former” special relationship but provides no evidence that the relationship has broken down. He then speculates on the “potential” for the relationship to break down; this sounds threatening, but is not news. And he says Obama is “desperate to placate America’s concerns that BP might run out of money” to pay for clean-up and compensation. How does Oliver know this? When did No-Drama Obama ever appear desperate? This isn’t even speculation; it’s fantasy.

There’s a big sidebar to Oliver’s article (no byline) headed “US silent over a disaster of its own that killed thousands”. Yes, in Bhopal in 1984, during Reagan’s presidency, a Union Carbide cyanide leak killed thousands, and yes, it was a horrendous disaster. No, Americans haven’t been talking about it; it didn’t occur to me to mention it, because it has nothing to do with the current crisis. If the Sunday Times really thinks that now is the time for US breast-beating over disasters perpetrated by American companies, it would at least make more sense for them to suggest the 1976 disaster in which the Torrey Canyon, an American-built tanker owned by a subsidiary of Union Oil of California, perpetrated an Exxon Valdez-type spill off the coast of Cornwall—but perhaps the British press doesn’t mention that one because the Torrey Canyon was at the time chartered by BP and the oil spilled was presumably BP’s (which was at the time called British Petroleum).

The Times also didn’t mention the 2005 explosion at a BP refinery in Texas, or BP’s leaky pipeline in Alaska, or BP’s safety record, including as we now know their 760 recent “egregious, wilful” violations of American safety regulations (versus Sunoco’s 8 and Exxon’s 1). Any of these is more relevant to the current situation; that a US company caused horrific tragedy in Bhopal 25 years ago has no bearing on Americans’ current beef with BP.

And the beef is with BP, not with Britain, no matter what the British press would like us to think. Many, many Britons have broadcast, published, or posted accusations that America holding BP to account is unfair because American firms built and operated the Deepwater Horizon. But surely the US government’s legal relationship is with BP; BP holds the drilling concession. If subcontractors let them down, BP can take legal action against those firms and recoup some of the money it needs to put things right. In any case, Americans simply aren’t angry with BP because of its British roots, but are angry at BP because of the environmental and economic damage; that companies down the food chain happen to be American is as irrelevant as the fact that BP is historically associated with and still headquartered in the UK.

British journalists have no compunction about reaching far back in time for evidence that Americans—not just Obama—are anti-British. Peter Hitchens’s article in the Mail on Sunday under the headline “Special Relationship: America’s still itching to bash us in the snoot” cited ancient history. Many Americans don’t even know the “Star-Spangled Banner” has multiple verses, and few indeed could tell you the lyrics describe the British bombardment of Baltimore in 1812—or that there’s any connection to Britain there at all—yet Hitchens drilled down into the third verse to find a line about war having washed away “foul footsteps’ pollution” left by, presumably, British feet. He offered this as evidence of Americans’ animosity to Britain. (At least he stopped short—as I do not—of punning that if written today it would be the “Tar-Spangled Banner”.)

Americans could remind him that Britain torched the White House in that war, a rather more definitive act than writing a poem about footsteps, but why would they bother? Can he really think many Americans carry a grudge against the UK because of the War of 1812? The evidence Hitchens presents for anti-British sentiment today consists of second-hand reports of Americans calling the British—or perhaps some individual Britons, he isn’t clear—arrogant or snobbish, and that Hollywood uses British actors to play the baddies from Hitler on down.

If the special relationship has broken down, it would seem to be because journalists stopped giving the USA the benefit of the doubt, and instead scraped the bottom of the history barrel to find evidence of anti-British feeling, presumably because they can’t present more recent evidence. The closest I’ve come to seeing such evidence is the single remark from NY congressman Anthony Weiner to the effect that anyone from BP with a British accent speaking to the press is “not telling the truth”, apparently referring to Tony Hayward, the gaff-prone CEO of BP who’s been withdrawn from the clean-up effort, replaced by a native of Mississippi.

The British government, by the way, has consistently played down the nationalist angle. Foreign Secretary William Haig said he’s seen no anti-Britishism, and Business Secretary Vince Cable wrote in the Mail on Sunday that American anger is justified, that British flag-wavers on this issue should know better, and that if the shoe were on the other foot, there’d be anti-Americanism from the British.

Of course journalists must look for new angles. They can’t keep reporting that oil is still leaking, that fishing boats are still idle, or that wildlife is still dying. Broadcasts would sound like Saturday Night Live’s satirical anchorman reporting “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead”. And it must be said that at least one non-British journalist is pushing the anti-British line. In a clip on YouTube, Canadian-born Mark Phillips, a CBS correspondent based 25 years in London, seemed to put words in the mouth of London Mayor Boris Johnson; after a voice-over by Phillips claiming Johnson views American reaction as “bordering on Brit-bashing”, we see Johnson saying it’s unfair to start “beating up…on a company—” only to have Phillips interrupt him with “a British company”. Johnson parrots the phrase in what seems an obvious attempt to pacify Phillips so that Johnson can finish his sentence.

Throughout the report, Phillips talks about Americans’ anti-British sentiment without producing any evidence of a single American who’s anti-British, much less evidence of the “backlash” claimed. The print accompanying the clip refers to “…anti-British sentiment in the U.S. over British Petroleum’s handling of the oil spill”. So not only does Phillips (or CBS) use the old name for BP—a crime when Obama did it—but their reporter in London feels qualified to brief us on current American opinion.

The bottom line is that some media outlets have encouraged ill-feeling. Even some mainstream journalists report that Americans are turning anti-British when they can show us no evidence, certainly no evidence that this was the case before their reports. While British newspapers filled more and more column-inches with defensive bile, dredging up Bhopal and Churchillian busts, 19th-century battles and 1950s Kenyan uprisings, and accusations of anti-Britishness, more and more Britons complained in pubs and on radio call-ins that Obama definitely was, and most Americans probably were, anti-British. If there is animosity between the British and the Americans over the BP leak, surely the press had a hand in it.

The good news is that the storm of misinformation is already passing, although the Sunday Times of June 20th claimed “Obama harms special relationship”. Their evidence, from a YouGov poll of “nearly 1500 people in Britain” and “almost 600 Americans”, hardly seems to justify the headline. And there’s also an opinion piece—“America’s bogeyman isn’t Britain, it’s Big Oil”—by Dominic Lawson, with a very welcome perspective I hope will act as a corrective to last week’s extravaganza. He, too, finds the stories of America’s Brit-bashing false: “Sections of the media in this country have tried to make this a story about America persecuting BP simply because of its Britishness” which is “a profoundly parochial misrepresentation of events”.

He points to BBC correspondent Mark Mardell’s diary in The Spectator on Wednesday, which is refreshing since Mardell actually visited the Louisiana coast four times to get the story firsthand. Mardell says Americans’ fury is directed at BP, not at Britain, but that “the British media desperately wants to write the ‘anti-Britain’ story”; his attempts to say there is no such story have been futile. He’s heard one American talk about being anti-British on account of something that happened 300 years ago, but unlike Peter Hitchens and his War of 1812 complaints, the American was joking.

The Observer found no need to be inflammatory; one of its headlines last week read “Obama moves to end growing rift with Britain over BP’s part in Gulf oil disaster”. It presented several perspectives including that of Lord Tebbit, who claimed that since the “wealth and technology” of the US couldn’t stop the oil, nothing was “more natural than a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan political presidential petulance”. While some newspapers called for the UK government to “protect BP” because so many British people have their pensions invested there, The Observer was the only paper I found reporting Greenpeace’s efforts over the past few months to persuade local government bodies to get their pension funds out of BP, calling it “wrong to invest public money in the company because of its involvement in risky projects”.

On the basis of this comparison, I think I might have to switch my allegiance to The Observer. It has been unsettling to see how quickly some press outlets can direct public opinion onto a tangent that seems ludicrous to the point of freakishness to my US-adapted eye, but at least there’s reason to hope that the whole affair is dying down. Until the next time.

And the answer to the KFC quiz? Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to KFC in 1991, and then changed back to Kentucky Fried Chicken in 2006. I’m betting you didn’t know that, and neither does David Cameron or Barack Obama.

Hundreds will be demonstrating in London against Sharia and religious laws and in support of secularism and universal rights on Sunday 20 June 2010. The rally organised by the One Law for All Campaign will be held from 1400-1600 hours at Richmond Terrace junction with Whitehall opposite Downing Street (SW1A 2). (Please note venue change from Trafalgar Square made by police; closest underground: Westminster.)

On the day, the Campaign will make public its new report entitled: Sharia Law in Britain: A Threat to One Law for All and Equal Rights. In the report One Law for All outlines what Sharia law is, how it is practised in Britain and exposes the way in which Sharia Councils and Muslim Arbitration Tribunals are circumventing British law and human rights legislation. The report also reveals the gross injustices to women and children in particular and reiterates the need to end Sharia and all religious courts on the basis that they work against, and not for, equality and human rights.

After the One Law for All rally, there will be a march organised by Iran Solidarity from 1600-1700 hours. The march will move from Richmond Terrace Junction to a protest at the embassy of the Islamic regime of Iran. According to Spokesperson, Maryam Namazie, “whilst racist and far Right groups like the English Defence League and the British Nationalist Party blame ‘Muslim immigration’ for Sharia law in order to further their inhuman agenda, it is people living under Islamic laws or the many who have fled Sharia and sought refuge here who are the principal victims of Islamism, and in the forefront of the struggle against it. Within this context, the One Law for All Campaign and the fight against Sharia law in Britain is an important front in the ongoing battle of people in Iran and everywhere against Islamism and for freedom, equality and secularism.”

The march will culminate in a protest rally in front of the embassy of the Islamic regime of Iran (16 Prince’s Gate, London SW7 1PT; closest underground: Knightsbridge). The event will end at 1730 hours.

Notes:

1. Confirmed speakers and performers at the London rally include: AK47 (Street Poet); Asad Abbas (Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain); R Y Alam (Poet); Adam Barnett (Musician); David Fisher (Singer/ Songwriter); Lilith (Street Poet); Lyrical Agent (Emcee); Rony Miah (Lawyers’ Secular Society); Maryam Namazie (One Law for All and Iran Solidarity); Gerard Phillips (National Secular Society); Naomi Phillips (British Humanist Association); Fariborz Pooya (Iranian Secular Society); Brent Lee Regan (Emcee); Yasmin Rehman (Women’s Rights Campaigner); Gita Sahgal (Activist); Muriel Seltman (Activist); Sohaila Sharifi (Equal Rights Now); Peter Tatchell (Human Rights Campaigner); and others. We will also screen a segment of a major new film for HBO called For Neda by director Anthony Thomas.

2. June 20 marks the day when 27-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan was shot dead by the Islamic regime of Iran’s security forces at a protest in Tehran. Her demand for freedom in the face of all-out repression has made her a symbol of people everywhere. According to Maryam Namazie, “It is very apt for us to remember Neda in our battle for equal rights in Britain or wherever we happen to live. Neda’s murder and Sharia law in Britain are intrinsically linked; both are the result of the rise of the political Islamic movement of which the Islamic regime of Iran is a cornerstone.”

3. To read responses to Frequently Asked Questions, go to:

http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/about/faq/. The responses are entitled:

The affinity between the far right and the Islamists; Islam matters because of political Islam; Secularism is an important vehicle to protect society; We will have nothing to do with the English Defence League; Criticising Islam is not racist; Laws should safeguard rights not violate them; There’s no place for Sharia law in Britain; The right to asylum is a basic human right; and many more.

4. To donate to the crucial work of One Law for All, please either send a cheque to our address below or pay via Paypal by visiting: http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/donate/. We need regular support that we can rely on and are asking for supporters to commit to giving at least £5-10 a month via direct debit. You can find out more about how to join the 100 Club at the above link.

5. For more information, contact:

Maryam Namazie

One Law for All and Iran Solidarity

BM Box 2387

London WC1N 3XX, UK

Tel: +44 (0) 7719166731

onelawforall@gmail.com

iransolidaritynow@gmail.com

www.onelawforall.org.uk

www.iransolidarity.org.uk

http://iransolidarity.blogspot.com

Press conference on the kidnapping and assassination of journalist Sardasht Osman in Iraqi Kurdistan
6.00-6.40pm, Tuesday 15 June
Abrar Foundation, 45 Crawford Place, W1H 4LP
(Nearest Tube: Edgware Road)
Political activists, academics and writers from Iraqi Kurdistan are holding a press conference to expose the kidnapping and murder of Sardasht Osman and demand justice.
Sardasht Osman, 23, was a journalist and final year university student when he was abducted on 4 May in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Erbil. His body was found on 6 May in the city of Mosul. Sardasht had written articles criticising the Kurdish government, particularly the Barzani family.
This press conference will address violations against freedom of expression and political activism, and attacks on journalists and critical voices. We will address the media in three languages – English, Kurdish and Arabic.
Speakers:
Dr. Kamal Mirawdeli: political personality and writer
Houzan Mahmoud: political activist
Dashti Jamal: president of International Federation of Iraqi Refugees
Khalil Karda: Writer
For further information, contact Houzan Mahmoud and Peshawa Majid
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Nigerian Pentecostal preacher Helen Ukpabio claims that Satan possesses children, who thereby become witches with evil magical powers. While this claim may be appalling superstitious nonsense on the face of it, traditional African beliefs about spirits and witchcraft and curses mean that far too many Nigerians take such nonsense seriously, with predictably horrible consequences: Some parents have abandoned their “accursed” and “possessed” children. Others have spent money better used to feed themselves and their other children to pay preachers like Ukpabio outrageous fees to perform exorcisms. On occasion, holy-rolling believers – sometimes, appallingly, including the child’s parents – have taken the task of exorcism on themselves, torch-wielding mob style: Exorcism rites have included splashing or bathing children in acid, burning them at the stake, and burying them alive. Such is the sorry state in which Nigeria finds itself – not in some deep dark past, but today, a decade into the 21st century. Fortunately, more enlightened Nigerians oppose Ukpabio and her ilk, and thanks to their efforts a law that forbids accusing children of witchcraft (adults are still vulnerable to such accusations, note) has been enacted in the home state of her church.

In response, Helen Ukpabio is suing the state, and those who campaigned for the bill, for encroaching on her freedom of religion.

That sentence deserved its own paragraph, just to savor the sheer audacity of it. Whether Ukpabio is an amoral con artist with astonishing chutzpah or a spectacularly delusional true believer or something in between is quite beside the point, at least with respect to her claimed right to practice her religion as she sees fit. In the prevailing social context of Nigeria today, Ukpabio’s accusations of witchcraft are clear incitements to violence: That is, such accusations are are likely to cause violence, and in the past demonstrably have caused violence, and so are defensible on neither freedom of religion nor freedom of speech grounds. One person’s rights do not and cannot extend to limiting the rights of others – and they certainly cannot be extended so far as inciting one’s excitable, superstitious fellow citizens to abandon, torture, and murder children. That is, one hopes, an obvious truth that all sensible people can agree on.

However, if I were to point out the equally obvious truth that the actions of Ukpabio and her followers are directly attributable to their relying on faith as a way of determining their beliefs about the world (or at least the followers, even if Ukpabio herself is a completely unbelieving con artist), many otherwise sensible people – people who not only agree with the above contention that religious rights have proper limits, but who are every bit as appalled by Ukpabio’s actions as I am – not only wouldn’t agree with me, they would begin to sputter and fume like a kettle come to boil. They would immediately start manufacturing excuses for faith and emphasizing how wonderful and inspiring faith can be and insisting that there are all sorts of important distinctions between “moderate” or “liberal” religious persons and “extremists” like Ukpabio and that her faith doesn’t represent the “true nature” of religion and on and on. The truth I have pointed out becomes no less obvious in the face of such protestations, which hulks there unmoving, the proverbial elephant in the room of religion: It is impossible to understand or explain the words and deeds of Ukpabio and her followers without acknowledging that important beliefs right at the center of their collective world-view, beliefs which shape their morally reprehensible actions, are determined without any significant input from reason or evidence (or even passing acquaintance with anything that looks like reason and evidence), and in fact are directly contrary to reason and evidence – that is, they are faith beliefs.

And if I really want to see the sputterers’ metaphorical kettle boil over – and I do – I can continue on to the following generalization, based on the above-noted observation and a few equally evident facts: Because faith beliefs are not based on reason and evidence, and because faith as a way of establishing beliefs need not and often does not accept any limitations or feedback from reason and evidence which might alter those beliefs, faith by its very nature can always be used to determine morally and epistemically indefensible beliefs like those of Ukpabio and her followers. Moreover, faith historically has been and currently is being used to ground many morally and epistemically indefensible beliefs – many, many more than the beliefs which inspired this essay: the Nigerian Pentecostals’ belief in the factual existence of child-possessing demons, and their belief that it is morally permissible (and possibly even obligatory) to torture those demons out of the children. Faith, due to properties that are intrinsic to it being what it is (which I will expand on below), has always inspired and supported harmful beliefs, and will always do so. Faith is a vice, not a virtue.

Defenders of faith, naturally, contend that faith is not as I have characterized it: The Karen Armstrongs and Tenzin Gyatsos of the world perpetually assert that “real” faith does not lead to such morally indefensible beliefs. (They frequently fail to emphasize epistemically indefensible beliefs when leaping to the defense of faith, for obvious reasons.) By declaring that “the true essence of faith is compassion” or some variation thereupon, they must necessarily mean that people like Ukpabio and her followers, whose faith leads them to immoral actions – using the definition at hand, actions that demonstrably lack compassion, or actions directly contrary to the actions compassion ought to motivate – are in some sense “doing faith wrong.” But such defenders of faith offer no convincing arguments that faith can be “done wrong” in this or any sense, that faith has any norms or standards which intrinsically belong to it that ought to prevent such actions: At best, they cite multiple examples of faith motivating compassionate actions and simply ignore all examples of faith motivating the opposite of compassion – or worse, declare that the latter are inconsistent with the “true essence” of faith/religion without offering any plausible argument why that is so or how they know what this purported “true essence” is. Such cherry-picking, question-begging non-arguments would offer no support whatsoever for their view of faith even if examples of morally reprehensible faith beliefs were relatively rare – and such beliefs are manifestly not few and far between.

Not only do the Armstrongs and Gyatsos of the world consistently fail to make a convincing positive case that faith has an intrinsic tendency to encourage or instill beliefs that support/endorse/lead to compassion or other generally good consequences, their view of faith conveniently ignores or defines out of existence the unavoidable connection between faith and beliefs like those of Ukpabio and her followers. Moreover, the particular nature of their failed efforts are enlightening: After all, any and all of the good things that faith’s defenders (unconvincingly) attempt to associate with or attach to faith beliefs are perfectly possible for those of us who lack faith. For example, despite the many misrepresentations and outright slurs heaped on atheists by defenders of faith, I don’t think most of them would argue that non-believers categorically, universally, or by their very nature lack compassion. Nor do non-believers generally or necessarily lack qualities such as gratitude, or a sense of awe and wonder, or any of the other wonderful properties which I’ve read various people extolling as virtues of faith, or falsely decrying as absent in non-believers. So if the defenders of faith make no good case that faith generates or generally supports beliefs with good consequences, and also fail to acknowledge or account for faith underpinning beliefs with bad consequences, and if beliefs with all the good consequences (or bad consequences) of faith can be arrived at without faith in any case, how exactly is faith related to beliefs and their consequences?

People generally accept that they ought to believe only claims that are justified (i.e. determined by or grounded in reason and evidence), or at least beliefs that are plausibly justifiable – except where religious claims are concerned, where they frequently eschew justification.* But even in the religious sphere, many people assume that their beliefs are or can be justified, and moreover that they ought to be justifiable: Otherwise, why would religious believers, religious texts, and religious leaders put so much time and energy into arguing that their claims are indeed supported by evidence and reason? I refer here not only to apologetics and theology, but also claims of purported miracles and proselytization and all other attempts to persuade non-believers. While I am quite convinced that their justifications either use inadequate standards of evidence and reason or simply fail to meet adequate standards, that’s beside the point: The very existence of such attempted justifications demonstrate that those producing and consuming these persuasive efforts generally grant the need to justify beliefs – except when they don’t.

Contrary to their own customary operating assumption regarding all other beliefs, some religious believers do give up on (or never get into) the business of attempting to justify their religious convictions and simply admit that their beliefs are determined by faith without justification; sometimes they even forthrightly declare that reason is absolutely the enemy of faith, and vice versa (q.v. Martin Luther). But even when they do so, they don’t abandon the customary operating assumption that justification is required for their beliefs outside the scope of religion. I would further argue that no human being could successfully operate in the world if a great proportion of their beliefs about the world were wholly unjustified, so not only is the need for justification a general operating assumption and an integral part of how people conceive of beliefs, it’s a practical necessity – but justifying that position would lead me far afield from the argument at hand.

The key idea here is that people generally accept that beliefs are by definition something that one ought to be able to justify – as opposed to, say, desires and tastes and preferences, which people can simply have without necessarily thinking they ought to be justified or justifiable – except that many people carve out a sub-set of beliefs and ignore this otherwise universally acknowledged standard with respect to those beliefs. Empirically, then, faith consists in carving out of some sub-set of beliefs and suspending, rejecting, or ignoring the expectation of justification for those beliefs, even though that expectation is built into the believers’ own everyday conception of the character of beliefs.

Not just any beliefs get this special treatment: People may not actually be able to justify their political convictions, for example, but they still tend to think that their political convictions are justified, and that political beliefs are the sorts of things that one ought in principle be able to justify – and they continue to think so no matter how difficult justifying any given political belief turns out to be when they are pressed to do so. Matters of faith, however, are different: What unifies beliefs about a purported immaterial and unknowable afterlife; beliefs about the existence, nature, behavior, and moral opinions of imperceptible supernatural entities; and beliefs about the legitimacy and authority of some texts or persons or institutions to speak on behalf of those undetectable entities? They are all beliefs so outré that not only is it impossible in principle to provide any plausible, publicly available evidence for them, it is equally impossible to provide evidence against them.** However, there is no logical necessity that faith-motivated beliefs must be so radically different from ordinary beliefs: Rather, that consequence follows from how centrally important and universally accepted the assumption that beliefs require justification is in the first place. Such a basic principle cannot easily be denied, and its denial would be difficult (but not impossible) to maintain for pedestrian beliefs amenable to easy disproof by readily available counter-evidence. Thus, faith is not best characterized in terms of its content. Indeed, faith cannot be characterized by any standards or limitations or constraints on belief: The defining characteristic of faith is its rejection of the usual constraints that everyone, even the faithful themselves most of the time, accepts as intrinsic to the nature of beliefs – the presumption that beliefs ought to be justified, or at least justifiable.

Even believers who claim that reason and faith always necessarily lead to the same beliefs – which is itself an indefensible faith-based claim, because Aquinas’ “truth cannot conflict with truth” doctrine presumes without evidence that (his particular) faith beliefs are true – start from the basic conception of beliefs as something that ought to be justifiable: Furthermore, the idea that faith and reason each separately lead to beliefs, even if they are purported to be the same beliefs, logically implies that faith is not the same thing as justification. That is, such believers agree that faith as such does not justify beliefs.

If faith does not justify beliefs, what exactly does faith do? Ask anyone why they hold some particular belief, and they will give some account of what motivates them to believe it. I use the terminology of “motivations” for belief deliberately, because people don’t always give “reasons” to believe in the justificatory sense I’ve been using the word in this essay, as in the phrase “reason and evidence.” Sometimes, people cite motivations anyone would recognize as legitimate (or at least potentially legitimate) justifications for adopting or maintaining a belief, like publicly available and verifiable empirical evidence, or the consensus opinion of recognized experts in a relevant field. Sometimes people offer shakier motivations for adopting beliefs which one might reasonably doubt constitute genuine justifications, such as isolated subjective experiences unverifiable by any outside observer, or citation of an authority figure whom there is no particular reason to think is reliable. Sometimes people offer transparently non-justifying motivations for adopting a particular (usually religious) belief, such as “I know God in my heart.” But for any given belief one might ask them about, people can almost always cite at least part of what motivated them to adopt the belief in the first place, or what motivates them to maintain the belief now: And if for some reason someone were unable to say why they believe X when asked, one would expect them to subsequently wonder why they believe X, and whether they should continue to do so – unless, of course, X is a religious belief.

If faith consists in suspending, rejecting, or ignoring the otherwise universally acknowledged standard that beliefs ought to be justifiable for some sub-set of beliefs, what is accomplished by this abandonment of justification? Faith motivates people to adopt and maintain beliefs that are not or cannot in principle be justified. Faith not only permits people to adopt and maintain indefensible beliefs, but endorses and encourages it by insisting that some set of beliefs – almost always beliefs about imperceptible, immaterial, supernatural entities and forces – simply need not be supported or defended by evidence and reason, in direct contradiction to the otherwise-universal presumption that beliefs ought to be justified, or at least justifiable. Moreover, since faith consists in no more than this suspension of the ordinary assumption that beliefs should be justifiable, endorsing and encouraging the adoption of unjustifiable beliefs would seem to be faith’s primary purpose: Faith might encourage some people to sometimes adopt justifiable beliefs, but that could hardly be the goal of setting aside the presumption that beliefs ought to be justified!

Once one abandons justification and accepts any belief purely as an article of faith – that is, once one gives up even attempting to constrain some of one’s beliefs within bounds defined by evidence and reason – literally anything goes. Why would and how could one even attempt to justify any limitation or constraint on a belief grounded in faith when the defining characteristic of faith is rejection of the presumption that beliefs ought to be justifiable? Since faith in itself lacks any constraints or norms which might circumscribe the content of the beliefs it endorses, any constraints on faith beliefs which prevent the adoption of indefensible beliefs or encourage the adoption of defensible must be external to faith.

I will grant that the defenders of faith are right to distinguish religious liberals and moderates from religious fundamentalists and extremists, but they give entirely the wrong basis for such distinctions. It is simply not the case that faith is inherently a positive feature of human life and some people “twist” it to serve pernicious social or political agendas. Rather, faith is pernicious by its very nature: Because faith consists in rejecting ordinary standards of justification for some beliefs, and because the whole purpose of adopting such beliefs as a matter of faith would seem to be freeing the believer from those standards of justification, faith not only permits but encourages people to embrace morally and epistemically indefensible beliefs, i.e. beliefs which are not and cannot be justified. People of faith avoid morally and epistemically indefensible beliefs only to the extent that their faith beliefs are circumscribed within the bounds of reason and evidence, strictures that are external to faith by definition.

Moreover, since the nature of faith is to abandon or ignore the standards by which beliefs are justified, faith can motivate someone to adopt a justifiable belief only by accident, not by nature: That is, faith can never motivate someone to adopt a belief because of the reasons and evidence which support that belief, or because of any other feature of the belief itself that would constitute a genuine justification for adopting it (as opposed to a motivation for adopting it, like wanting to believe that it’s true, or a pseudo-justification for believing it based on intuition or feeling). The extent to which a believer is motivated to adopt of a belief by virtue of its justification is exactly the extent to which the adoption of the belief is not and cannot be motivated by faith. Thus, if it does turn out that any given belief motivated by faith happens to be supported (or plausibly supportable) by reason and evidence, faith cannot be given any credit for the fact that the belief happens to be justifiable. Since faith not only permits but encourages people to adopt morally and epistemically indefensible beliefs, and since faith deserves no positive credit for motivating any defensible beliefs it happens to encourage in spite of its natural trend towards the indefensible, the consequences of faith as faith can only be pernicious, never positive.

Note, however, the limits of this claim: Faith is intrinsically pernicious, but that does not mean that faith cannot accidentally or extrinsically motivate non-pernicious beliefs, or even beliefs that have genuinely and universally positive consequences. Consider, for example, a hypothetical random woman whose faith motivates her to adopt both defensible and indefensible beliefs: This woman might even be Helen Ukpabio, who probably has at least one morally defensible Christian belief – a belief in the basic goodness of feeding the hungry, perhaps – amongst the manifestly many morally and epistemically indefensible doctrines she embraces.

Because faith consists in rejecting or ignoring the standards by which beliefs might be defended and indefensible beliefs might be avoided or abandoned, it must be a merely contingent, coincidental fact that our hypothetical believer’s faith just happens to motivate her to adopt defensible beliefs. To any extent that her adoption of those beliefs was motivated by their defensibility, it could not have been motivated by her faith, because faith consists in rejecting or ignoring the standards by which beliefs might be defended. In stark contrast, it is not a merely a contingent fact that our hypothetical believer’s faith just happens to motivate her to adopt indefensible beliefs: Rather, it is precisely because she is motivated by justification-abandoning faith that she has adopted indefensible, unjustifiable beliefs. This does not mean, however, that we can automatically attribute all of her indefensible beliefs to faith: I’ve stipulated that faith motivates our hypothetical believer to adopt some indefensible beliefs, but she might also have adopted other, non-faith-based indefensible beliefs via some other unspecified motivation which has caused her to elide or misconstrue or ignore standards of reason and evidence; or perhaps she has simply failed to correctly apply sound standards of reason and evidence, or has a poor grasp of those standards to begin with (even though she presumes, like everyone else in the world, that most of her beliefs are not only potentially justifiable, but actually justified). I have nowhere said nor assumed that all indefensible beliefs are motivated by faith, nor that no defensible beliefs can be motivated by faith.

This hypothetical example illustrates that, although faith permits and encourages people to adopt morally and epistemically indefensible claims, and indeed it seems that the only conceivable purpose of suspending standards of justification is permitting and encouraging people to adopt otherwise indefensible claims, faith does not necessarily or always lead to indefensible beliefs: However, faith deserves the blame for any indefensible claims it motivates believers to adopt, and deserves no credit for any defensible claims it happens to motivate believers to adopt. Consequently, even if some of the faithful do manage to avoid morally and epistemically indefensible beliefs for the most part (and some do), that does not obviate the perniciousness of faith as such: Faith is still pernicious for the reasons given above even if some believers do deliberately try to limit their faith beliefs within the bounds of justification, or if some believers are motivated to adopt justifiable claims by factors other than faith (not necessarily because they are justified) which they mistakenly attribute to faith***).

It is also worth noting that, given my analysis above, faith as such is not primarily characterized by dogmatism. Defenders of faith frequently make much hay out of dogmatism, claiming that there’s a fundamental difference between the dogmatic “blind faith” of those other religious believers – the “bad” faith of extremists and fundamentalists like Helen Ukpabio – and the presumptively “good” variety of faith embraced by moderate or liberal religious believers. But what’s primarily wrong with faith isn’t the strength with which a person clings to their faith beliefs, it’s that those beliefs are embraced by rejecting or ignoring the standards of evidence by which we can (and often do) exclude or abandon completely indefensible beliefs. Yes, the rigidity and emotional defensiveness characteristic of dogmatism may be a fairly predictable consequence of faith, because such psychological mechanisms can help preserve faith beliefs against the natural inclination to view them as inherently unconvincing and implausible in light of their unjustifiable character. One might also make the case that extremist/fundamentalist religion and dogmatism are positively correlated, because those faith beliefs which are more transparently indefensible violate the presumption of justification in a more obvious way, thus more strongly depend on the psychological mechanisms of dogmatism for their preservation. By parallel reasoning, one might even make a plausible case that moderate religion is inversely correlated with dogmatism. But none of that saves faith from the criticisms I have made here: Faith is pernicious by its very nature because it encourages people to adopt and maintain indefensible beliefs. While dogmatism can exacerbate this problem by making indefensible beliefs more entrenched, it is also quite possible (although not as common) for people to hold justified or potentially justifiable beliefs in a dogmatic fashion. Thus, dogmatism is somewhat tangential to faith and the problematic nature thereof.

Having said all that, I will readily grant that not all religious people are as utterly toxic in beliefs and character as Helen Ukpabio. Moreover, I will even grant that ex-nun Karen Armstrong (whom I have admittedly picked on from time to time), is probably a fairly pleasant and generally virtuous person, however irritating I may find the postmodernism-infused flibbertygibbet she writes. Similarly, Tenzin Gyatso seems like a very intelligent, generally rational, and genuinely compassionate person on the whole, despite embracing some appallingly narrow-minded sexual mores. But good people can and sometimes do have horrible ideas. And while the character of the beliefs motivated by faith can vary dramatically from one believer to the next, faith is intrinsically pernicious and therefore leads to bad consequences more often than good: Faith by its very nature rejects justification, the only means we have to separate truth from illusion in matters of fact and morality, and in doing so it licenses and promotes the adoption of wildly unjustified and unjustifiable beliefs – beliefs which inform how people understand and act in the world, all too often with horrific consequences. Decent people like Karen Armstrong and the Dalai Lama may not incite violence against defenseless children, but by defending and promoting the false assertion that faith is a virtue rather than a vice, they aid and abet the Helen Ukpabios of the world. And the orphan-abusing nuns, pedophile-priest-shielding cardinals, suicide-bombing terrorists, “dishonored” daughter-murdering fathers, gay-hating preachers, and all the other true believers in the world whose perverse, indefensible beliefs and actions are first and foremost – and no matter how strenuously religion’s defenders attempt to deny it – matters of faith.

————–
*And no, it doesn’t matter one bit that humans frequently fail to ground even their non-religious beliefs in reason and evidence. Failing to satisfy epistemic standards for adopting or adhering to beliefs is quite different from willfully rejecting or ignoring such standards when adopting or adhering to beliefs. Being mistaken is one thing: Abandoning the standards by which mistakes are (sometimes, ideally) avoided is another. (back)

**Not that anyone is obligated to provide evidence against such beliefs: Existence claims generally ought to bear the burden of proof, especially claims that imperceptible, immaterial, and/or supernatural entities exist. (back)

***Such false attributions are especially common with regard to moral beliefs: Many religious believers will attribute their each and every moral belief to their religion, and will even argue that there can be no morality without religion. Moreover, they will maintain such assertions no matter how clearly they themselves demonstrate otherwise when they are asked why they pick out this moral principle from their holy text and ignore that one, or why they pick and choose for themselves which moral pronouncements from their religious tradition’s authority figures to embrace and which to ignore. The level of cognitive dissonance on display in this regard can be truly astonishing. (back)

Shirin Alam Holi, born in 1981 in a small village near Maku, was executed in Evin Prison on May 9th 2010 after passing one year and nine months in prison. She was charged with cooperating with Pajak (the Iranian branch of PKK) on Nov. 29th 2009 and sentenced to death. Her lawyer and family had no information about her execution.

Shirin was arrested in June 2008 in Tehran by Sepah Pasdaran and transferred to Evin Prison after 21 days interrogation and torture in an unknown place. She described what happened to her completely in a letter which she gave to her family. In this letter she related many physical as well as mental pressures she endured during the interrogation and wrote to her interrogators that what they did to her has become part of her nightmares and caused many disorders both physically and mentally. Shirin Alam Holi had written, in her last letter, that she even couldn’t speak Farsi fluently when she was taken to the court.

Now she has been executed along with 4 other political prisoners while the Supreme Court has notified no specific decree in order to confirm her execution to her lawyers and family and executed her without informing them, which is totally against the Executive Principal of the Prisons.

She had her last contact with her family on Friday 7th of May and said nothing about notifying the decree from the Supreme Court. Her family had described her physical and mental situation as appropriate; however they said that she has been under pressure to do some TV interviews and confession.

Shirin Alam Holi is one of the victims of the violence in Iran’s judicial system who has been treated unfairly from the beginning of her arrest and ultimately executed without any advance notification and against all the legitimate measurements.

Change for Equality

A letter from prison

I was arrested in April 2008 in Tehran. The arrest was made by uniformed and plain clothed members of Sepah who started beating me as soon as we arrived at their headquarters without even asking one question. In total I spent twenty five days at Sepah. I was on hunger strike for twenty two of those days during which time I endured all forms of physical and psychological torture. My interrogators were men and I was tied to the bed with handcuffs. They would hit and kick my face and head, my body and the soles of my feet and use electric batons and cables in their beatings. At the time I didn’t even speak or understand Farsi properly. When their questions were left unanswered they would hit me until I pass out. They would stop as soon as they would hear the call for prayers and would give me time until their return for as they said to come to my senses only to start their beatings as soon as they returned – again beatings, passing out, iced water …

When they realised I was insistent on my hunger strike, they tried to break it by inserting tubes through my nose to my stomach and intravenous feeding; they tried to break my [hunger] strike by force. I would resist and pull out the tubes which resulted in bleeding and a great deal of pain and now after two years I’m still suffering the consequences and am in pain.

One day while interrogating me they kicked me so hard in the stomach that it resulted in immediate haemorrhaging. Another day, one of the interrogators came to me – the only one whose face I saw, I was blindfolded all other times – and asked irrelevant questions. When he heard no reply he slapped me and took out his pistol from his belt and put it to my head, “You will answer the questions I ask of you. I already know you are a member of PJAK, that you are a terrorist. See girl, talking or not talking makes no difference. We’re happy to have a member of PJAK in our captivity”.

On one of the occasions that the doctor was brought to see to my injuries I was only half conscious because of all the beatings. The doctor asked my interrogator to transfer me to the hospital. The interrogator asked, “why should she be treated in hospital, can’t she be treated here?” The doctor said, “I don’t mean for treatment. In hospital I will do something for you to make her sing like a canary.” The next day they took me to hospital in handcuffs and blindfold. The doctor put me on a bed and injected me. I lost my will and answered everything they asked in the manner they wanted and they filmed the whole thing. When I came to I asked them where I was and realised I was still on a hospital bed and then they transferred me back to my cell.

But it was as if this was not enough for my interrogators and they wanted me to suffer more. They kept me standing up on my injured feet until they would swell completely and then they would give me ice. From night till morning I would hear screams, moans, people crying out loud and these voices upset me and me nervous. Later, I realised these were recordings played to make me suffer. Or for hours on end cold water would be dripped slowly on my head and they would return me to the cell at night.

One day I was sitting blindfold and was being interrogated. The interrogator put out his cigarette on my hand; or one day he pressed and stood on my toes for so long that my nails turned black and fell off; or they would make me stand all day in the interrogation room without asking me any questions while they filled in crossword puzzles. In short they did everything possible.

When they returned me from hospital they decided I should be transferred to 209. But because of my physical condition and that I couldn’t even walk 209 refused to accept me. They kept me for a whole day in that condition by the door of 209 until I was transferred to the clinic.

What else? I couldn’t tell night from day anymore. I don’t know how many days I was kept at Evin Clinic until my wounds were a little improved and was transferred to 209 and interrogations started. The interrogators at 209 had their own methods and techniques – what they called hot and cold policy. First of all, the brutal interrogator would come in. He would intimidate me threaten and torture me. he would tell me that he cared for no law and that he would do what he wanted with me and … then the kind interrogator would come in and ask him to stop treating me in this way. He would offer me a cigarette and then the questions would be repeated and the futile cycle would start all over again.

While I was at 209 especially at the beginning when I was interrogated, when I wasn’t well or had a nose bleed they would inject me with a pain killer and keep me in the cell. I would sleep the whole day. They wouldn’t take me out of the cell or take me to the clinic…

Shirin Alam Hoolo
Nesvan Wing, Evin
28/10/88 (18 January 2010)

The Islamic state of Iran today, May 9th, 2010, hanged five more activists to further their goal of terrorizing the people in Iran. We are well aware that the regime’s crimes will not end until people in Iran, along with concerned citizens globally, put these murderers and all those who have helped this regime on trial in an international court.

We demand an immediate expulsion of the Islamic Republic of Iran from all international agencies, and prosecution of the regime’s leaders for their daily heinous state crimes.

Homa Arjomand, Coordinator of the International Campaign to Close Down Iranian Embassies, is calling a press conference where she and other activists will demand that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and all members of the Canadian parliament support the people of Iran and break all diplomatic relations with the Iranian Regime.

“We declare that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the head of state terrorism and controls the state terrorism machinery in Iran. He is responsible for summary trials, Islamic retribution, execution and torture.

“We further declare that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the principal sponsor of the Political Islamic Movement, not only in the region but also globally,” said Homa Arjomand.

The protestors claim the entire regime of Iran is responsible for terrorizing people globally and sustaining terrorism in every way Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his government can. They further declare the recent hanging of five activists and defenders of human rights is an expansion of the 150,000 executions done by this regime.

Human Rights Activists will gather at the following locations:

Location: Mel Lastman Square, 5100 Yonge Street
Date: Sunday, May 9,2010, at 5:00 pm

Location: Queen’s Park, Toronto
Date: Monday, May 10, 2010, at 12:00 Noon

An open microphone will also be available for other concerned individuals attending the protest. They will be able to expose the crimes and human rights abuses of the Iranian regime and the leading terrorist – President Ahmadinejad.

About the Campaign

Media Contact: Ms. Homa Arjomand 416-737-9500.

For more info visit :

www.closedowniranianembassies.com

www.nosharia.com

A few weeks ago, I sat in a meeting in Vancouver. During a boring bit, I was fooling around with Google, and I stumbled upon a paper entitled, “The (Re)production of Afghan Women” by one Melanie Butler. I recognized the name as I had been interviewed by Butler for this paper, which was published in 2008. Melanie had not really explained the actual topic of what became her graduate thesis in political science at the University of British Columbia, nor sent me a final copy of her paper, nor used any of my statements from the interview in her final paper, which might have interfered inconveniently with the narrative she was weaving. She knew what she would say before she even began to write.

Here is her paper’s abstract:

Canadian women have been at the forefront of the international movement for women’s rights in Afghanistan since the rise of the Taliban in the late 1990s. Focusing on the prominent group Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan), this paper looks at the role its advocacy assumes in the context of the “War on Terror”. In Canada as in the United States, government agencies have justified the military invasion of Afghanistan by revitalizing the oppressed Muslim woman as a medium through which narratives of East versus West are performed. While CW4WAfghan attempt to challenge dominant narratives of Afghan women, they ultimately reinforce and naturalize the Orientalist logic on which the War on Terror operates, even helping to disseminate it through the Canadian school system. Drawing on post-colonial feminist theory, this paper highlights the implications of CW4WAfghan’s Orientalist discourse on women’s rights, and tackles the difficult question of how feminists can show solidarity with Afghan women without adhering to the oppressive narratives that permeate today’s political climate. It is only by employing alternative models that contextualize the situation of Afghan women in relation, rather than in opposition, to our own, that feminists can begin to subvert the mutually reinforcing narratives that sustain imperialist violence and women’s subordination.

You get the idea, but if you can stomach more, some of the best bits are highlighted here.

Butler contends that the organization where I work, Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, is in fact not a network of women from all walks of life who came together, united only in the insistence that Afghan women and girls deserved the same basic human rights that we enjoy and expect for ourselves here in Canada. What we really are, she claims, are orientalists-in-disguise, who desire the imposition of our own western worldview over unwilling, innately different Muslim women. Butler vilifies the likes of Sally Armstrong, the Canadian writer and journalist who has tirelessly exposed atrocities committed against women and girls in every corner of the planet, even when no one else was paying attention. It was an article by Sally Armstrong in 1997, in Homemaker’s magazine of all places, that incited thousands of Canadian women to action, to speak up against the Taliban’s bizarre governance based on codified misogyny. Many of those women first alerted by Armstrong’s article are today the volunteers, board members, or chapter leaders with CW4WAfghan.

Butler goes on to suggest that I am a mouthpiece for Canada’s ruling conservative government (based on the evidence of a photo taken with the prime minister on International Women’s Day in 2008). She paints CW4WAfghan as a colonialist enterprise. All of her arguments drip with cultural relativism, and with a feminism that is unrecognizable to me.

While much in the paper appears to have been generated by the Random Post-Modernist Essay generator, and is frequently hilarious, the painful part is that this woman asked herself at some point, “I am going to write about Afghan women. What’s the number one most important issue therein I should research?”

Was it the fact that Afghanistan may have the highest levels of domestic violence in the world? That Afghanistan is one of the only countries in the world where the suicide rate is higher among women than among men? That barely 40% of girls are in primary school? That there is a teachers’ shortage of tens of thousands? That women in public life are sometimes murdered? That Afghan women are struggling in the uphill process of building a new legal system that will protect their rights and entrench the rule of law for all Afghans?

No, it was none of these things.

And no one articulated the upside-downness of this more than 13-year-old Alaina Podmorow, the founder of the Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan. Podmorow waded through terms she was confronting for the first time: the idea of labeling intervention in outside tragedies “orientalism”, “colonialism” or “imperialism”. She was flummoxed, and her reaction to Butler is a raw, gut response of rage.

Not long after it was first published at B&W, Podmorow’s article had been picked up by more than 30 blogs, stretching from Canada to India. Nick Cohen wrote about her in Standpoint magazine. She was on philosophy blogs, political blogs, news blogs. One commenter suggested she run for prime minister. Many readers left comments saying that Podmorow was “smarter than a graduate student”. Over and over, readers pointed out the extraordinariness of Podmorow’s response being that such a young person had so clearly grasped the problems, and the danger, in Butler’s line of argument.

I would suggest that Podmorow’s ability to capture the issue isn’t in spite of her age, but precisely because of it.

But as we grow up, and go out into the world and make choices- about how to respond to the pain of others- we face a menu of options. We can pretend we didn’t feel anything and block it out. We can feel anger. We can respond with empathy and action. Or we can dig around for ways of justifying why this pain is acceptable to others, though not to us, and why we are not obliged to respond. Cultural relativism is this kind of response: one that is now out of control- because it has become institutionalized, embedded increasingly in academic disciplines. More and more, we see it as an acceptable response. I have found a culture of cultural relativism in Canada in our universities, public schools, and teachers’ unions. Cultural relativism has gone mainstream. It’s become so pervasive, we don’t even see it anymore. It’s simply surrounding us, and if we’re not careful, we become a part of it.

But Podmorow and other young people haven’t yet found themselves inside the bowels of institutional and political cultures that insist in their subtle whispers, it’s easier to pretend that ethnic communities outside our own are fundamentally different, and that the expectations of respect for human dignity are not equal across societies.

Children have that biological instinct for empathy, intact. It’s a precious thing, and we have much to learn from it.

But we adults sometimes relate too, despite ourselves and the cloud of relativism often fogging our thinking. You may have once seen a video smuggled out of Afghanistan during Taliban rule there, filmed from underneath a burqa, showing a woman shrouded and buried to her waist, accused of adultery or prostitution, slowly pelted with small stones until her lifeless body keels over in its hole on the grounds of Kabul’s sports stadium in front of thousands of spectators. If you saw it, you probably felt a surge of pain jolt you, and found it wasn’t easy to merely block this out or justify somehow that this atrocity had occurred.

You probably felt the pain of that stranger, just as an Afghan woman would also recognize a violation of human dignity if she saw a video of a Canadian woman being stoned to death. The Afghan viewer would likely be unconvinced by excuses of cultural diversity or a legal system based on holy writ. The capacity to feel the pain of others is part of being human and shouldn’t be suppressed. We need choose action and empathy when presented with that menu of options of how to react.

But this can be hard for grown-ups. It’s long been fashionable in the halls of western arts faculties to view all the world through the lens of post-colonialism. In undergraduate classrooms across the country, political science, anthropology, literature and students of other disciplines learn to see the developing world as unflinchingly hostile to foreign interference, as the wounds of conquest by imperial powers continue to heal. Young Canadians, as they evolve into their university lives, are taught to challenge their own western perceptions and to be culturally sensitive. Fingers point at critics of “the other” as buzzwords like “ethnocentrism” echo around the halls. All kinds of activities take on the metaphor of colonialism, from international development projects to scientific research.

There is nothing wrong with seeking intercultural competence, except when our desire to be tolerant erodes our internal instincts that tell us when something is simply wrong.

Another problem arises when a desire to preserve some exoticism in the world makes us ignore the evidence that above all else, we are human first, and most societies hold more in common with each other than they hold apart. In romanticizing societies outside our own, we can pretend that poverty, inequity and a denial of basic human rights are quaint tribal characteristics that make the world a more colourful place. Anthropologists document abusive practices against women as intriguing cultural rituals and western backpackers can frame on their walls photos of snotty-nosed, grimy kids in rags with swollen bellies, from their jaunts through places like Calcutta or Guatemala City. As we delight in the differences between them and us, we often drown out their voices that tell us, inconveniently, I want the very same things as you do.

Afghanistan is a useful example of how disabling an unhindered post-colonial lens can be to our sense of the truth when it obscures all other views.

While women in Afghanistan under the Taliban spent five years surviving (or in many cases, dying) through a hellish reality that stripped them of every basic right and attempted to beat into them the notion that they were fundamentally inferior to men, many in the West shuddered when reading the rare media account of the horror and suffering: women’s fingernails torn out for being caught with nail polish on, 8-year-old girls married to 40 year-old men, and other accounts of gruesome abuse, torture, murder and degradation. Deep down, that little instinct that lies buried within us was going off with resounding alarm when we came across these stories, that biological reaction kicked in, akin to the emotional reaction of empathy upon hearing about the suffering of other humans, because we instinctually imagine the feelings of pain inflicted on ourselves.

Then 9/11 happened, and at the end of 2001 the Taliban fell and Afghanistan was free. The International Security Assistance Force arrived and donor governments committed to stand by a country that had been forced to its knees. An enormous window swung open for women.

At that point, many of those same people who shuddered when reading individual accounts of the Taliban’s treatment of women seized up in an enveloping discomfort, over all the talk of rights for Afghan women. Journalists and academics started publishing stories of the unrealistic expectations, the danger in trying to “recreate” our own society in Afghanistan and going against nature by “imposing” human rights. Another popular criticism was that countries like the US and Canada had no right to make this “a war about women”. For example, in 2002, York University’s Krista Hunt wrote that, “the primary reason for this coverage of women in Afghanistan is that it provides further evidence that vilifies the Taliban and justifies the Bush administration’s goal of ‘hunting down the terrorists and those that harbour them’.” Or there was Katharine Viner, who wrote in The Guardian in September 2002 that feminism was being used as imperialism in Afghanistan.

It continues to this day. Human rights for Afghan women are being called cultural imperialism, and other such nonsense. Many in the far left anti-war movement want nothing more than for Afghanistan to be left to fend for itself, accepting (if not actually visualizing) that this may very well mean a Taliban return to power. Oh well, that’s the culture, the thinking goes. Afghan women probably like being oppressed!

But if you care to look, Afghan women are telling a different story. As Canadians like Jack Layton, the leader of a Canadian opposition party, the New Democrats, advocate negotiating with the Taliban, and donor governments put forward half-baked ideas like the establishment of a fund to pay off Taliban fighters, the 200 women’s organizations who came together to sign a declaration on January 25, 2010 in Kabul opened their declaration with this:

On January 28, 2010 a conference will be held in London, where a plan for negotiating with the Taliban will be discussed. We, women’s rights and Afghan civil society organizations participating in the abovementioned historic meeting, herewith declare the following:

1. Based on the persistent violation of the rights of women and men by the Taliban, whether when in power or after, objections were clearly and strongly expressed by all parties participating in this meeting regarding any negotiation with the Taliban.

2. We desire peace and stability in Afghanistan, but we reaffirm that the Afghan Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are non-negotiable (my emphasis).”

These 200 groups further oppose the program to pay off Taliban fighters, they oppose the removal of Taliban leaders from the U.N.’s blacklist, and remind the international community of their “responsibility and obligation to support and protect freedom of expression, the rights of women and men and other elements of democracy in Afghanistan. Achieving these goals can in no respect be achieved by negotiation with Taliban.”

Perhaps because statements like these do not jibe well with the western image of meek Afghan women, and well, this frankly just isn’t exotic at all, this meeting and declaration received virtually no coverage in the western media. It turns out that Afghan women expect and want, why, what most Canadians want: human rights, democracy and the protection of their basic freedoms.

While canvassing opinion across a broad spectrum of Afghan thinkers, politicians, activists and government officials for the Canada Afghanistan Solidarity Committee’s recently released report on Canada in Afghanistan post-2011, there was a striking consensus among these Afghan respondents that Canada should be interfering in their country more, not less. They pointed out that they need Canada to demand accountability from the Afghan government, to keep extremism at bay, and to insist on and support the growth of democratic institutions like elections. They told us, without mincing words, that we in the West need to get over our distress of being seen as some kind of neo-colonizers. The accusation of colonization or imperialism existed only in the political science faculties of western universities, the conversations of young white people who fancy themselves peace activists, and in the diatribes of armchair commentators safely tucked away in wealthy, democratic countries.

I have found this trend echoed again and again. When I interviewed Afghan MPs, rights activists, civil servants and others about the Shia Personal Status Law (the “rape law” dreamed up by an Iran-backed cleric in Kabul, instructing women how often they should have sex with their husbands and that they needed permission go outside, among 247 some other articles) in 2009 for research by the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, I found widespread fury against the UN mission, UNAMA, and the international community for their passivity in the face of human rights issues. Over and over again, Afghans pointed out to me that human rights issues are the prerogative of the international community, as the financers and co-architects of Afghanistan’s democratization effort. They asked, if the international community won’t speak up for our rights, then why are they here?

What an affront to our sensibilities! It is so much easier not to have to speak out in their defense, thinking that Afghan women are perfectly content to be bought and sold like cattle, and kept out of public life altogether; or the Taliban ideology is acceptable to them.

Confronting the idea that others also feel, innately, that they deserve the same privileges and rights we casually enjoy every day in Canada, will take courage. But the blinders must come off, now. We can duly recognize the legacy of colonialism without it disabling any kind of intervention to protect the basic human rights we are all entitled to, regardless of what kind of passport we hold. We can similarly celebrate the multitude of cultures in the world, while acknowledging that they are all united by the genetic coding all humans have to reject pain and suffering, and to mourn the pain and suffering of others (even when we deny that we do). We can also call it for what it is, when we see human beings maltreated, tortured, murdered for “honour” or subjected to other atrocities. It’s fascism, it should be long dead by 2010, and instead it flourishes. To try to soften the edges of fascism by citing cultural tradition or religious practice is a disgrace to the first cultural community to which we belong: humanity.

Crimes against human dignity have no place in any culture – they belong only to the culture of inhumanity.

When I was four, I was an angel in the school nativity play. I had wanted to be the angel Gabriel, but my teacher had gently informed me that Gabriel was a boy. Mary had already been cast, so the only parts left for other girls were generic angels. I was disappointed but then I realised, what did Mary do exactly? It seemed to my young mind that all she did was have a baby; it was the baby that everyone was interested in, and the baby was a boy. I soon learned that all the good parts to play in this story belonged to the boys, and with every passing school year and corresponding nativity play, I felt more and more put out. There were also other things about my C of E school that bothered me — when we prayed, we said ‘our father’, but there was no mention of a mother. There was a son, but no daughter. And when we learned Bible stories, female characters were almost non-existent.

I’m not sure whether that first nativity was the moment that sowed the seed for my atheism, but as I got older, and became a feminist when I was at high school, I found the existence of an all-powerful male supernatural entity impossible to believe, and I felt that those who expected me to believe it were insulting my intelligence. I had questioned the existence of God, and found no satisfactory answers; in the same sense, I had questioned patriarchy and found it similarly wanting. To me, religion and patriarchy were inextricably linked in their natures, and I decided both were a con. As an adult, I find reinforcement for this conclusion every day; however, as I’ve become more involved with feminism, I’ve seen less criticism of religion than I expected, given the wealth of evidence concerning its negative impact on women’s lives.

Should a rape victim be expected to marry her attacker, as long as he pays her father some money? According to the Old Testament’s book of Deuteronomy (Chapter 22, Verse 29), the creator of the universe thinks so. This charming verse is not an isolated piece of divinely inspired sexism; the holy books of the main monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) all contain shocking misogynist material, including many verses specifically instructing violence against women for the breach of harsh rules about sexual activity.

This fact has been commented on before, and it should be well known among feminists; rather than waste space quoting verses, I will direct you to the website ‘The Sceptic’s Annotated Bible’, which contains lists of the verses relating to women in the Koran, the Bible, and the Book of Mormon. More about Islam can be found at the blog of Kafir Girl, whose article ‘Swimmin’ in Women’ is an irreverent and detailed analysis of the behaviour of Islam’s prophet Mohammed towards women and girls. While there is simply not enough space to fully analyse each religion’s treatment of women, there is some information about the inconsistency of the Hindu texts in relation to women’s rights here, an analysis of misogyny and Buddhism here, and this page shows that even the non-violent Jains apparently can’t handle a little bit of menstrual blood.

Religious ideas harm women and restrict their lives on a daily basis. The only reason that on-demand abortion is not available to women worldwide is the prevalence of religious (most notably Catholic) beliefs that a fertilised egg is a human being. The rise of unwanted pregnancies and STDs including Aids in many countries can be directly blamed on religiously-funded abstinence programmes which are based on beliefs that contraception and sex before marriage are evil. Strong beliefs about the sanctity of a girl’s virginity and the wickedness of female sexual behaviour lead to predictable, sometimes appalling and horrific results, such as girls being buried alive, lashed and stoned to death. Former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes eloquently in her book ‘The Caged Virgin’ about how Islamic beliefs concerning sexual desire lead to women being restricted in what they wear and how much of a life they can lead outside the home, and blamed for sexual attacks (she has received death threats for her trouble). And even as women are being harmed by such religious beliefs, they are told that the originator of these ideas, God, loves them. I assume the same kind of love is behind the Church of England being exempt from the provisions of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, and the laws allowing faith schools to teach girls that abortion and contraception are sinful.

Feminists know all this, or at least they ought to – the surprise is that many tolerate or even seek to apologise for it. At the very least, there seems to be much less outspoken criticism of religion from feminists than one would reasonably expect. Last year, the US website Feministing asked the question: “Can you love God and feminism?” I thought it was a no-brainer, but several people commented about how their religious faith and their feminism coexist in harmony. The moderator of the site declared these confessionals “amazing”, even though she herself had admitted that she was not religious. Atheism was the minority view, and no such gushing praise was forthcoming for the unbeliever. A quick Google search reveals many websites dedicated to faith and feminism, but comparatively few taking the opposite stance.

It is as though mainstream feminism has a ‘blind spot’ when it comes to religion, but it is not alone in this. Religion has managed to carve itself a very nice niche in society whereby any questioning of religious faith is seen to be extremely bad form. Religion seems to have a monopoly on hurt feelings, entirely unfairly in my opinion. It seems to me that some feminists are afraid of a critical discussion about religious faith, because of the ever-looming label of ‘intolerant’, ‘prejudiced’, or, when it comes to any religion besides Christianity, ‘racist’. When in fact, there is a big difference between questioning an idea (in this case: faith in the existence of a specific supernatural entity in spite of a complete lack of evidence) and hating a person or group of people. Saying that critics of religion are prejudiced is as moronic as calling feminists ‘man-haters’.

I personally do not understand how anyone can be religious and a feminist; some of the verses I read in the various holy books while researching this article made me feel sick to my stomach, and I don’t know how any feminist wouldn’t want to run as fast as they could away from such hateful nonsense. But many feminists have apparently reconciled their feminism with a religious faith, and some of the arguments used to defend this decision can be roughly summarised thus: there are other verses/texts in the religion which actually promote equality and women’s rights; the holy texts have been misinterpreted by misogynists and if interpreted correctly they actually promote equality; the texts are irrelevant to the practice of the religion itself (this article is an example of some of the arguments used from a religious feminist’s perspective).

The first argument, that some verses are more egalitarian and cancel out the nasty stuff, doesn’t hold water. It means that the best you can say about the books is that they are inconsistent. Does feminism tolerate such inconsistency in other institutions? From contemporary figures and organisations? While Tory politician Theresa May champions Conservative policies as woman-friendly, the party’s voting record says otherwise, and Tory leader David Cameron was caught out this month regarding his party’s stance on women’s rights when he opined that the abortion time limit should be reduced to 20 or 22 weeks. No feminist would be taken in by this behaviour. Why can feminism see very plainly when a political party is merely paying lip service to women’s rights, but some feminists cannot see when centuries-old books are doing exactly the same thing, only not as well?

The second argument, that the holy texts have in fact been misinterpreted and so need reinterpreting, is also rather puzzling. If a person reinterprets a holy book to give it a meaning consistent with feminism, then that person is using their own sense of equality to decide on the new interpretation. They have not got their sense of equality from the book itself; if they had, they would not be able to reinterpret it. Which begs the question, what use is the book? Even if a person managed to so creatively interpret verses in the Bible (for example) that they could allow themselves to believe that when God said “If tokens of virginity [i.e. blood on the sheets] be not found for the damsel… then the men of the city shall stone her with stones that she die” (Deut 22:21), he actually meant the exact opposite, then this is indeed ingenious, but there is no way of proving which interpretation is what the writers intended in any case, as time machines have yet to be invented.

The third argument, that the texts are not necessary to practice the religion, is the most perplexing of all. I was under the impression that holy books are supposed to contain the exact words or at least the paraphrased opinions of their god – i.e. they are the product of a man or men having had a conversation with the supposed creator and writing this down as ‘proof’ for everyone else. Without the books, where are the religions? For example, Ibn Warraq, author of ‘Why I Am Not A Muslim’, writes that one of the central tenets of Islam is that the Koran is the word of Allah as dictated to Mohammed. Is he wrong?

Next usually comes the assertion that as many people derive ‘comfort’ from religion, it must therefore be a positive thing. But religion doesn’t comfort everyone. Sometimes religion offers people a confusing cocktail of comfort and harm; sometimes, it is outright damaging. Those who are comforted shouldn’t be able to silence those who are harmed. Secondly, I agree with AC Grayling when he says: “Would we tolerate the government telling us comforting lies about, say, an accident at a nuclear plant, or a spillage of deadly viruses form a laboratory? No? Then comforting lies have their limits.” I also feel that the ‘comforting’ aspects of religion are nothing more than a sweetener to keep people believing (and filling up the collection plate).

When Karl Marx called religions “the opiate of the masses” he was referring to the way a belief in an afterlife distracted the poor from their position in Earthly society and discouraged revolutionary action. The same sentiment can be applied to women (who are more likely to be poor, in any case). If religions were replaced by real opiates (whose comforting, pain-relieving qualities are not in any doubt), to encourage conformity and discourage questioning, would any feminist defend their use? Lastly, any feminist seeking to use the ‘comfort’ argument should remember that the status quo is always comforting for someone – you could argue that many people, largely men, derive much comfort from patriarchy.

Given all of the above, I anticipate in reaction: what business is it of yours what people believe? A person’s private religious faith is none of anyone’s business and you should tolerate it. You’ve got no right to tell people what to think! And so on. These are arguments atheists come across often. Indeed this seems to be the tack that many feminists take. It appears quite difficult to argue against, but here goes. First of all, as Sam Harris points out in his book ‘The End Of Faith’, belief almost always leads to action, therefore, beliefs are very rarely truly private. Believe that it’s going to rain, and you’ll take an umbrella out with you. Believe that a clump of cells is a sacred human life, and you will join a pro-life group and lobby the government to ban abortion; you may even be successful, in which case you will contribute to the suffering and even deaths of large numbers of women. As Harris says, “Some beliefs are intrinsically dangerous.” Indeed feminists do not tolerate every belief. We reject many commonly-held beliefs, most notably the belief that males are fundamentally different from, and superior to, females.

Also, people’s religious beliefs aren’t necessarily freely chosen. The vast majority of religious people are so because they have been brought up to be religious; it has been impressed upon them from an early age that there is a divine creator, and that he should be worshipped in the following ways, and so on. In this way, ‘telling people what to believe’ is really the preserve of religion. All atheists do, if anything, is ask people to question what they believe. If children were allowed to grow up without religious influence and then asked to evaluate the evidence and decide for themselves as adults if there is a god, then it would be a different matter entirely. But this doesn’t happen.

Even in the light of all of the above, there are some who will still insist that merely believing in a loving god – having ignored or ‘reinterpreted’ all the misogynist trappings of their faith – is harmless. I don’t agree. This belief is still based on blind faith, not on evidence, and such a mindset, while promoted by religions as a virtue, is in fact damaging to society.

Just think for a moment about the patriarchal society feminists, including myself, are fighting against: what is it based on? Facts? Evidence? Reason? None of the above. Rather, it relies on faith, namely, faith that there are two distinct genders, with fundamental differences between them and that the male is the superior of the two. We are expected to believe this, even though there is no evidence for it. Actual evidence shows that there are intersex, androgynous and genderqueer people, and that the differences between the sexes are very small, with huge variation within groups (this subject is covered in depth by Deborah Cameron, in her book, ‘The Myth of Mars and Venus’). And our reason tells us that out of two human beings, one cannot be automatically superior; it tells us that if female children are showing intelligence and leaving school with excellent grades, then they ought to hold 50% of the positions of power and influence in the world. It also tells us that for the same work done, the same money ought to be paid. The continuation of patriarchy depends on the suppression of this type of evidence and reasoning, and the continued mythmaking of the media and the population. Some myths, such as those surrounding rape for example, can be very dangerous.

What is the difference between a person who simply ‘feels’ that there is a god, and a person who simply ‘feels’ that males are superior to females? Answer: nothing. Both ideas are uncontaminated by evidence. But the difference, for some feminists, seems to be that the latter view is to be fought against and the former to be tolerated and even praised. But belief in a god is a tacit approval for belief without evidence, and this mindset is frequently used in justifying prejudice and discrimination, and does nothing to combat stereotyping and harmful myths. A religious feminist might want to consider the question: how can you argue against a person who has faith in patriarchy, when you yourself cannot turn a critical eye on your own faith in a supernatural creator? And from what stance can a religious feminist argue against fellow members of the faithful who insist that God made the man the head of the family (nuclear and heterosexual, of course) and that his wife should serve him? Such a discussion would end up in a futile back-and-forth about what God thinks of women and could never be resolved (seeing as presumably, God would never actually step in and settle it himself).

Conversely, feminists can use reason to great effect when fighting against patriarchy. I’ve already mentioned above how evidence and reasoning are on our side. Learning a critical attitude, from the earliest possible age, is vital. Children naturally question things, but what is saddening is that this tendency is quashed by religious instruction that insists faith is a virtue. Laws in the UK still require ‘daily worship’ to take place in all schools; this means that the vast majority of children are learning at school (if not at home too) that there is a male creator of the universe and he had a supremely virtuous male representative on Earth – doesn’t this teach young children something damaging about gender? Doesn’t it teach developing minds to associate power with maleness, and inculcate them with the supposed virtue of ‘worshipping’? At the very least, religious instruction and assertions to ‘have faith’ discourage a questioning attitude, lessening the likelihood that children will question the many levels of unfairness in our society.

Feminists can all perhaps agree on one thing: that the status quo in the majority (if not all) of the world’s societies is harmful in many ways towards women and girls. A large part of the harm is done by religion, both directly by influencing laws, attitudes and behaviour, and indirectly by promoting the idea that faith is a virtue and thus discouraging the questioning attitude that is so vital for debunking sexism and promoting equality. It is time for feminism to be brave and have a discussion about the real effects of religious faith on women’s place in societies worldwide, not placing the blame on a few extremists but critically examining the whole institution. Religious feminists ought to be able to handle this and not rely on religion’s unfair taboo status as a defence; after all, it is about criticising ideas, not hating people. When we embrace reasoning we not only use the most effective tool, we also handily explode the irritating stereotype that women are ‘irrational’ and ‘emotional’. Perhaps one day all feminists will end up at the same conclusion I came to many years ago: it is not just that the emperor has no clothes, it is that there is no emperor at all.

The Pentagon should respect the constitutional separation of church and state and cancel a planned National Day of Prayer event, particularly in light of its recent labeling as a “Christian-themed event” by an Army spokesman, the Secular Coalition for America said today. The Pentagon should also sever all operational ties to the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a radical right wing organization headed by the wife of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, and housed in Focus on the Family’s headquarters.

“It is bad enough that the administration is going ahead with an observance of the National Day of Prayer, correctly ruled unconstitutional by the courts only last week. But for the Pentagon to hold an explicitly ‘Christian-themed event’ around the day of prayer is brazenly out of all reasonable bounds, and explicitly exclusionary to U.S. service members of all non-Christian faiths and of no faith,” said Secular Coalition for America Executive Director Sean Faircloth, referring to a characterization of the event by Army spokesman Col. Tom Collins, as reported by the Associated Press yesterday. “This event should be cancelled, and the Department of Defense should apologize to all non-Christians who are being rendered second-class by this ill-advised program.”

Faircloth also called upon the Pentagon’s chaplain’s office to end its working relationship with the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a right-wing, theocratic group headed by Shirley Dobson, wife of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson. “It is difficult to imagine a less wise alliance than one between Pentagon officials and anyone working under the Dobson umbrella. The already-dubious military chaplaincy should end once and for all its connections to Mrs. Dobson’s radical group.”

On Fox News on April 4, Chaplain Terry Brewly asserted that it was “very true” that there is “no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole,” a direct affront to the brave men and women of the military who identify as nontheists. The Secular Coalition for America has advocated strongly for an end to religious proselytizing and coercion in the U.S. military. The group pressed its case for equal rights for nontheist military personnel in its historic meeting with administration officials in February, and its founding director, Lori Lipman Brown, appears in a new documentary on the military chaplaincy, Chaplains Under Fire, premiering at the Newseum in D.C. on April 30.

If you walk at random in a Muslim district in the West, especially in Western Europe, you will certainly find somewhere, at least in one corner, an Islamic butcher’s shop with the word “halal” written on its shop-window. For the products of meat, the word “halal” is a badge of Islamic quality.

Muslims believe that since blood is not ritually a pure substance, slaughter is necessary to promote the thorough draining of all of the animal’s blood. Furthermore, the verse “Bismillah al Rahman Al Rahim”, in the name of Allah the Beneficent the Merciful, is necessary to render the meat halal or lawful to eat.

The word halal refers, here, to meat killed and prepared in line with Islamic dietary laws. Jewish and Islamic religions require slaughter to be carried out with a cut to the neck or throat, rather than the more widespread method of stunning with a bolt into the head before slaughter.

Generally, halal means anything permissible under Islamic law, in contrast to haram, that which is forbidden. This includes behaviour, speech, dress, conduct. The term halal is also used to judge the right of sexuality after marriage, even temporary marriage, that is a Shiite tradition called “Sigheh,” which is blamed by other sects of Islam as a “legalised” prostitution. Vaginal intercourse or rape by a man of his female slave, a married woman whose husband has been killed by Muslim invaders, and a non-Muslim prisoner of war is halal — in this light, many political female prisoners of the Islamic Republic of Iran who were considered “non-Muslims” were” legally” raped by their guards before being executed.

In an extended sense, halal means fairness of business dealing or other types of transaction or activity. Therefore, it represents values that are held in high regard by Muslims. It contains standards for social norms, morals, foods and other services that meet Islamic regulations. Needless to say, in Islamic countries, these are the only available standards for Muslims and non-Muslim minorities alike.

Slaughter is an old tradition of Jewish and Islamic clan society. As a matter of best practice, the killed animal is supposed to be distributed among the members of the clan right after being slaughtered so that each family can have fresh meat to eat. Like many other traditions, this one was also taken over by Islam.

Halal bloodshed can be also a reason for honour killing in Islamic societies. Honour killing is committed by male family members against female family members who are perceived to have brought dishonour upon the family. A female can be targeted by her family for a variety of reasons, including: refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, having sex outside marriage, or even being the victim of rape.

Halal has nothing to do with prophylactic, hygienic, precautions or medical meaning. To better understand halal, we must see what its opposite term “haram” means. Haram has roots in revulsion which is an old instinct of evolution. Revulsion is a sense of loathing without any logical reason or clear explanation. As an instinct, it was a necessary reaction of early human beings when exposed to an unknown food, unknown object, or an unconventional situation.

The object of revulsion is culturally conditioned. It means whatever is repulsive for the members of a given society do not necessarily provoke the same revulsion for others. In a historical sense, the terms like halal and haram are nothing but the instinctive reflections which were integrated into Islam. In many cases, Islamic commandments and rituals are not only the traditional reflections of desert dwellers of pre-Islamic Arabia, but also based on the Prophet Muhammad’s habits, his sexual preferences, his favourite things, and his dietary habits.

Since sexuality is taboo in Islam, sexual organs, vaginal secretion and sperm are considered as “negis” (loathsome and impure). Therefore, they should not be touched – if they are unintentionally touched, ceremonial washing and rituals must be done. Not only urine and excrement of human and carnivores, but also blood and any slimy substance secreted by a mucous membrane of the body have more or less a similar sense of negis. Needless to say, all these secreted or mucous substances, regardless of their odour and colour, belong to healthy functions of our bodies.

Not only non Muslims, ethnic groups, slaves and women, but even animals in Islam are not free from this discrimination. Dogs and pigs are the most negis animals. Term of “negis” characterises their absolute and unchangeable impurity. Pork meat and alcoholic drinks are absolutely haram. The dog as a “negis” animal can never be proper pet in a Muslim house. Touching a dog, especially a dog’s saliva, requires ritually hygienic procedure to get the hand clean — if a dog eats from a dish, the dish must be ceremonially washed seven times, the first time with sand. The dog, despite all its uses in many ways and its irrefutable faith in its master, is discriminated as a negis creature.

While marriage of Muslim men with women of the Book (Muslims, Christians and Jews), based on Islamic rituals, can be permitted, all other varieties of marriage between Muslim women and non- Muslim men are considered haram. As a patriarchal religion, Islam granted a concession only to Muslim men. Muslim women are not allowed to marry men outside of Islam (unless they convert to Islam). No marriage is permitted between Muslims and “Mushriks” (atheists, polytheists, other members of belief systems which are considered by Muslims negis). The Koran says, “A believing slave woman is better than a mushrik woman”!

As mentioned, terms like halal, haram, and negis are not more than rituals of particular conditions and environment. These terms have no logic and scientific credentials at all. They are only the legacy of per-Islamic values of the Arabian clan- society which still impose themselves on today’s society.

A new study conducted by the Washington based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life says that Africans are among the most religious people on earth. The study titled Tension and Tolerance: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa was based on more than 25,000 interviews conducted in more than 60 languages in 19 countries. According to the study at least half of all Christians in Sub-Saharan Africa believe Jesus will return in their lifetime. One in three Muslims in the region expect to see the re-establishment of the caliphate – the Islamic golden age – before they die. At least three out of ten people across much of Africa said they have experienced divine healing, seen the devil being driven out of a person, or received a direct revelation from God. About a quarter believe that sacrifices to ancestors can protect them from bad things happening. Sizeable percentages believe in charms and amulets. Many consult traditional religious healers, and sizable minorities keep animal skins and skulls in their homes.

The study found that in many countries across the continent roughly nine in ten people say religion is very important in their lives.

Do these findings surprise anyone? Surely they shouldn’t. Unless the person is not familiar with the situation in Africa.

These findings do not surprise me at all. I am an African. I was born in Africa. I live and work in Africa. I am non-religious though I was born into a religious home. I attended religious schools. I had a typical (African) religious upbringing. I do not believe that Jesus will return again. I do not think that the Biblical Jesus existed and even if he did, I think he’s gone and gone forever. I can’t see the world coming under an Islamic caliphate except what we have been experiencing since September 11, 2001. I have never experienced divine healing and I don’t think those who claim to have experienced it are honest to themselves. I have not seen a devil being driven out of any person except some self-induced hysteria by some Pentecostal con artists. I have not received any revelation from God- unless maybe one day some godly people might claim that their god revealed this piece to me. I don’t believe that sacrifice to the ancestors will protect people from harm. Otherwise the ancestors would be alive today. I think charms and amulets are useless and consulting traditional healers and clerics is a waste of time.

The reasons why Africans are the most religious people in the world are not far fetched. Africans go through religious indoctrination from cradle to grave. Africans are not allowed by family, society and the state to think, reason or live outside the religious box. In Africa religion is by force not by choice. Religion is by compulsion and not according to one’s conscience. Africans are brought up to believe that there is NO alternative to religion, when in fact there is. So in Africa, either you are religious or you are nobody – you are not a human being, you are nothing. There is too much social and political pressure on Africans to be religious and to remain religious. The social, political and sometimes economic price of leaving religion, renouncing religion or criticizing religion is so high.

So Africans are religious willy nilly. Africans profess all sorts of religious crap even when they know it is all nonsense.

At home, religious indoctrination is the first form of orientation an African child receives. At a very early and impressionable age, infants are taught to recite meaningless syllables called prayers. Children are brainwashed by parents with various religious and spritiual myths. Their minds are infused with all sorts of religious dogmas. Parents ensure that children are brought up in their faith – the faith of the family and the faith of their parents. Children are taught to believe and follow, and not to question religious teachings even when there is every reason to do so. Some of the findings of the Pew Forum constitute the ‘sacred’ teachings which African kids receive and are told not to challenge, examine, criticize or renounce. African children are brought up to believe them and to swallow them hook , line and sinker. Not to question one’s family religion is seen as virtous and as a mark of a good child. This religious tradition is upheld and handed down unchallenged from one generation to another in Africa.
The religious brainwashing continues in schools. Most African colleges are religious indoctrination centers. Western missionaries and Arab jihadists brought formal education(the model widely used today) to the continent. They established schools to win converts and recruit new members, not really to educate Africans. So schools in Africa are covert churches and mosques. Education is faith based. And this religious tradition is still upheld in most schools across the continent. Some of the findings of the study are what African puplis are taught everyday in schools. They constitute what African students recite and memorize as part of their compulsory morning devotions.

Pupils at one islamic primary school near my house in Ibadan sing this song everyday as part of their morning devotion.

We are soldiers. We are soldiers.
Fighting for Islam. Fighting for Islam
In the name of Allah, we shall conquer, we shall conquer.

Every morning these children are made to recite that they are Muslim children ; that they believe in Allah and Mohammed as his messenger. What do you expect from these children as adults after going through this religious drilling and being brainwashed by superstitious messages? Do you think they will ever grow up to say that religion – in this case Islam – is not important in their lives? As in their homes, African students are taught to blindly accept the so-called divine revelations without question. They are induced to try and have some encounter with God or to have some spiritual experience as a manifestation of faith or piety. Children and youths are made to believe that professing articles of faith is a mark of a good student, and that education is not complete without religion or belief in God. So why should anybody be surprised that most Africans attach so much importance to religion?

This religionizing continues in politics and in the state houses across Africa. State power is used to endorse, promote and privilege religion. In Africa, prayer, piety and politics go together. Religion and politics mix. States are not separate from churches and mosques. So there is very high political pressure on individuals to be religious – and to remain religious and faithful even when they are not convinced of the religious teachings or would prefer to be faithless. Many African countries have adopted a religion or some religions as state or official religions. For instance in Morocco, the King is not only the president of the country, but also the commander of the faithful. So every Moroccan is under political pressure to be a faithful – an Islamic faithful, particularly a Sunni Islamic faithful. The president of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, is addressed as Dr, Alhaji, Sheikh ….. among others. Some years ago he added to the list of his presidential duties praying for the citizens and trying to heal the sick, including those who have HIV/AIDS, using some verses in the Koran. In the self-styled Islamic republics, anyone who is not a Muslim cannot be president. Is there any special value that being a Muslim adds to the post of the president? None. In Gambia, the government erected magnificent mosques in all public schools in the country. Meanwhile these are schools without good classroom blocks, no libraries or laboratories.

In Africa, politicians have made it look as if to be a good citizen one must be religious or expressly pious. African politicians have made it seem as if theocracy, not democracy, is the best form of government, and that the Bible and the Koran are the best constitutions. In fact the Bible and the Koran are the best constitution no country ever had. African politicians strive to ensure that state legislations are based on these‘holy books’ and that any policy, program or proposal that is not in line with the sacred texts are thrown out. Another reason why there is high level of piety in Africa is because most Africans do not think for themselves. They allow clerics to think for them. Africans consult their priests, bishops,sheikhs, marabous, traditional medicine men and women whenever they have problems or when they want to embark on a major project. And they accept whatever they give them including charms like holy water, olive oil as solutions and remedies. They do whatever they recommend they do including carrying out ritual killing and sacrifice.

Lastly Africans are deeply religious due to lack of human rights, particularly religious freedom in Africa. This may sound like a contradiction, but it is not. Some may argue that the high religiosity in Africa should be due to ‘too much religious freedom’. No, it is not so. Rather it is due to no guarantee of religious freedom, no protection of freedom of conscience. Africans do not enjoy or exercise their freedom of religion or belief. Africans are denied this basic human right with impunity by state and non state actors. Africans are forced to be religious or to remain religious. That is why they are ‘too religious’. The mechanisms to protect and defend the full human rights of those who change their religion or renounce or criticize religious beliefs or those do not profess any religion at all are weak or non-existent. Religious believers and non believers are not equal before the law. Many Africans are religious because they don’t want to be in the minority. They don’t want to renounce what the majority upholds. They don’t want to denounce what the state or society reveres. Many Africans are religious because they just want to play along.
Africans are among the most religious people on earth due to failure of family upbringing, failure of human rights and the rule of law, failure of educational system, social and political pressure and bad governance. Africans are religious because they cannot but be religious.