Author: Ophelia Benson

Tarek Fatah posted a photo on Facebook with the comment

Inside Islam’s holiest place of worship, The Kaabah in Mecca. For some a romantic stroll in the park, without the fear of Maya Khan.

Six comments in a guy said, in all seriousness –

Have a close careful look!
This man has only one leg, and is being helped by his wife.
Please think carefully a few times prior to commenting on religious locations and issues.

Hahahahahahahahaha

Frederick Sparks has an incisive post on Be Scofield on “new atheists” and racism.

In referring to Dr King and the civil rights movement, Scofield also falls into the trap of “the Civil Rights Movement, Brought To You By Black Church”…a bit of historical revisionism that ignores, as professor Anthony Pinn points out, the secular philosophical influences, and that King himself complained that most the black churches were not involved and were not supportive.

Didn’t he just. In the much-quoted Letter from Birmingham Jail for instance –

My Dear Fellow Clergymen: While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.”…

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

…

I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

…

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist.

And so on.

Frederick concludes with a stem-winder:

When the Scofields and Karen Armstrongs of the world talk about how the new atheists just aren’t aware of the liberal, tolerant, sativa smoking, feminist, genderqueer god concept, my response is “I don’t believe in that motherfucker, either.” She’s just as poorly evidenced as the old fashioned patriarchal god. She’s also not the predominant god concept impacting the African American community.

I don’t see an either or proposition between advocating for rational thought, where beliefs are based on evidence, and confronting issues of social justice. The idea that black people should be left alone in their clinging to Jesus due to their history of oppression smacks of just as much paternalism as what Scofield accuses the white new atheists of here.

More, actually.

Just in case you missed this – Afghan woman is killed ‘for giving birth to a girl’:

A woman in north-eastern Afghanistan has been arrested for allegedly strangling her daughter-in-law for giving birth to a third daughter.

The murdered woman’s husband, a member of a local militia, is also suspected of involvement but he has since fled.

…

Senior officials told the BBC that the mother-in-law, known as Wali Hazrata, tied the feet of the 22-year old woman, who was known as Stori, while Stori’s husband strangled her.

He is thought to be a fighter with an illegal armed militia which is is believed to have some political support. Local villagers say that Stori often urged her husband to lay down his arms.

“She lived in a hell not a house. But then she also asked her husband to stay home and avoid going out with these thugs,” one neighbour who wished to remain anonymous told the BBC.

Those three girls are in for a nice life.

This is an outstanding observation from Kenan Malik’s talk at Conway Hall:

In recent decades, faith has, in other words, transformed itself into the religious wing of identity politics.  Religion has, ironically, become secularised, driven less by a search for piety and holiness than for identity and belongingness.  The rise of identity politics has transformed the meaning not just of religion but of blasphemy too. Blasphemy used to be regarded as a sin against God. These days it is felt as a sin against the individual believer, an offence against the self and one’s identity. That is why for Sardar, ‘Every word [of The Satanic Verses] was directed at me and I took everything personally’, why he imagined that Rushdie had ‘despoiled the inner sanctum of my identity’. This is also why many laws these days that ostensibly protect faith – such as Britain’s Racial and Religious Hatred Act – are framed primarily in terms of protecting the culture and identity of individuals or communities. In today’s world, identity is God, in more ways than one.

It sums up so much of what is so godawful about these battles – the narcissism, the petulant self-regard, the insistence on taking everything personally, the inflation of arbitrary outrage into some kind of political principle. Ziauddin Sardar had no right to think every word of Rushdie’s novel was directed at him; that’s a stupid, infantile, pre-theory of mind thing to think. It’s His Majesty the Baby thinking.

People make too god damn much of identity and belongingness. It’s the idol of the age. No doubt that goes a long way toward explaining why there is so much hostility to atheists: we prefer freedom from the celestial dictator to endless coddling of our identities.

What, however, defines a community? And who defines which beliefs are essential to a community? Or to the identity of individuals within it?  These, too, are matters not of theology, or even of culture, but of power. The struggle to define certain beliefs or thoughts as offensive or blasphemous is a struggle to establish power within a community and to establish one voice as representative or authentic of that community. What is called offence to a community is in reality usually a debate within a community. – but in viewing that debate as a matter of offence or of blasphemy, one side gets instantly silenced.

As in the serial fusses about Salman Rushdie.

Back in the 1980s Rushdie gave voice to a radical, secular sentiment that in then was deeply entrenched within Asian communities. Rushdie’s critics spoke for some of the most conservative strands. Their campaign against The Satanic Verses was not to protect the Muslim communities from unconscionable attack from anti-Muslim bigots but to protect their own privileged position within those communities from political attack from radical critics, to assert their right to be the true voice of Islam by denying legitimacy to such critics. And they succeeded at least in part because secular liberals embraced them as the ‘authentic’ voice of the Muslim community.

Huge, huge mistake. Mistake any way you look at it – not just for literature but for all the people who got stuck in those “communities” ande have never been able to escape since. More than twenty years stuck being “authentic,” which means being trapped.

Same thing with Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti.

The protestors outside the Birmingham Rep outraged by Kaur Bhatti’s play no more spoke for the Sikh community than did Kaur Bhatti herself. Both spoke for different strands within that community.  But, as in the Rushdie affair, only the protestors were seen as authentically of their community, while Kaur Bhatti, like Rushdie, was regarded as too Westernized, secular and progressive to be authentic or truly of her community.  To be a proper Muslim, in other words, in secular liberal eyes, is to be offended by The Satanic Verses, to be a proper Sikh is to be offended by Behzti.

And that’s where the damn LSE Student Union is stuck now – with the idea that only Muslims who are “offended” by Jesus and Mo are proper Muslims, and all others are inauthentic because secularized instead of theocratic. And they think that’s the more progressive view! It’s tragic.

There’s more great stuff in that article; read it at Kenan’s.

Recognized.

I’m reading Kenan Malik’s talk at the Conway Hall conference on blasphemy, and it corroborates what I was just saying about contemporary religion (that it’s contemporary religion that is seen as “fulfilling people’s needs” and that it’s reading backward to think religion has always been seen that way).

This intensely personal, deeply emotional response marks a shift in the way that believers understood their relationship to belief. Faith has always had an emotional components and for some faiths such emotional spirituality has been  central to their outlook. Nevertheless there has been a fundamental shift in the character of religious belief in recent decades. Sociologists talk of  the rise of the ‘therapy culture’ to describe the growing emotionalism of our age.  Scholars such as the philosopher Charles Taylor and the sociologist Olivier Roy have described how such emotionalism has become central to new forms of ‘expressive’ faiths.  Faith, as Charles Taylor observes in his book A Secular Age, has become disembedded from its historical culture, and reconstituted instead as part of the culture of ‘expressive individualism’, forms of spirituality grounded in the primacy of individual experience and rooted in the social values of what the writer Tom Wolfe has called the ‘me generation’…

In Spiritual Revolution, their study of religious practices in a small town in northern England, the sociologists Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead show that while traditional religious congregations are on the decline, ‘New Age’ forms of spirituality are beginning to fill the gap. But more than this, many once-traditional believers are beginning to adopt New Age attitudes and rituals, developing new forms of faith that celebrate the emotional aspects of spirituality and seek to fulfil the believer’s inner needs.

Toldja.

A couple of ”Really? Is that actually true? Do you really know what you just asserted?” items from a review of three books on god, meaning, what to do without god, emotional needs, and the intersections between them all.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution…

The fundamental tension, however, remained unresolved: between, on the one hand,  the views of an expanding educated class who saw the many holes in Christian  doctrine, and on the other, the people’s need for guidance and meaning that the  Church had long fulfilled.

It had? Really?

I don’t think so. I think Stephen Cave is reading backward, from the way people view religion now, and assuming that’s the way they viewed it then. But I don’t think the 18th century Catholic church in France did fulfill the people’s need for guidance and meaning, any more than a boss does that for the workers now. I think that idea is a very contemporary, cozy view of religion which makes sense at a time when religions have to work to appeal to people, but makes much less sense for a time when religion was pretty much mandatory. I think the 18th century Catholic church in France was a great deal more about telling the people what to do than it was about fulfilling their need for guidance and meaning. (Of course, you can translate “telling them what to do” into “fulfilling their need for guidance” but it’s a considerable cheat. It wasn’t “guidance,” it was orders. Much of it isn’t “guidance” even now.)

The inspiring stories of the world’s holy books are about troubled souls courageously choosing the rugged path of righteousness over wickedness and temptation.

They are? Really?

I don’t think so. A lot of the ones in the bible are about loyalty to the tribe and its god versus other tribes and their gods. True, there are also some stories about chaste, loyal-to-the-tribe young men resisting wickedness and temptation in the form of some whorey slutty woman trying to lure them into whorey slutty sex, but there’s more fighting and plotting and revenge among the men. Righteousness doesn’t really come into it most of the time.

It’s the pious orthodoxy of the moment: that religions have always been what some of them try to be now, and that they are fundamentally about meeting people’s needs as opposed to controlling them.