Author: Ophelia Benson

I’m going to disagree with Chris Stedman again. Let me preface my disagreement by saying he’s obviously a good guy, a better one than I am. There that’s out of the way; now let me shred him.

No but seriously. He’s a good guy but being a good guy isn’t enough. One has to learn that people have their own plans and projects and ways of doing things. Chris seems to have a missionary streak that prevents him from understanding that.

the last ten years have seen me change my philosophy in several dramatic ways — from born-again Christian to rejectionist atheist to my current work as a Secular Humanist and interfaith activist —

What’s a rejectionist atheist? It sounds nasty. Is it meant to sound nasty? Yes, I think so, a little. It probably means “an atheist who rejects theism” and is meant to contrast with the kinder, gentler, warmer sort of atheist who is an interfaith activist. And this is where the missionary note creeps in, already – this hint that rejecting atheism is not ok because the right thing to do is “interfaith activism.” Atheists who do interfaith activism are a rare breed, though, so I think Chris is being a little too stringent here.

As the Interfaith and Community Service Fellow for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard, I had the opportunity to collaborate with the Humanist Graduate Community at Harvard to plan and lead a service trip to work at the CRYP last month.

And they did good things there, and that’s nice, but…

But it’s not the only way to make the world a better place, and it’s not something everyone wants to do, and the reasons for that are not just laziness or callousness or worldly ambition. I, for one, am uneasy about the noblesse oblige aspect. I don’t like it; it makes me feel squirmy. That’s just one angle on all this that Chris overlooks. He likes up close and personal stuff; good; but not everyone does, and more to the point, not everyone wants groups of Harvard students moving in.

Just a few days ago, I organized and ran a community service project for the American Humanist Association‘s (AHA) annual conference — the first time the AHA has featured one at its annual conference. After years of attending interfaith conferences and Humanist/atheist conferences but only encountering community service events at the former, I realized that if my community wants to be seen as equally ethical individuals, we will need to make good on our values. That we must actualize our commitments to justice and compassion — for our own sake, if not in respect to how we’re perceived by others.

But community service events aren’t the only way to do that, and maybe they’re not the best way. “Charity” isn’t the best way to deal with social problems. It may be more uplifting for the participants, but that’s a seriously crappy reason for thinking it’s the best way.

This is a call to Humanists and atheists everywhere: Can we set aside intellectualizing and debating, even just for a moment, and start putting our money where other people’s mouths are?

This is a reply from one atheist: Different people have different talents. Division of labor is a good thing. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t really want to be told to stop doing one thing and do another instead.

Oh no he didn’t, did he? Seriously? Again?

Yes, he did. I know it’s hard to believe, but he did. Yet again, the same thing – the self-obsession, the artless confiding of boring trivial details about his precious Self, the pompous kvetching, the wondering why he can’t stop, the repetition, the childish sneering, the bad reasons.

By now you know who “he” is – Michael Ruse, of course. Michael Ruse pitching yet another absurd embarrassing fit about the dreaded nooo atheists and their failure to do what he tells them.

He’s desperate for attention, so I shouldn’t give it to him, but on the other hand, he’s also publicly self-destructing, so if he gets more attention who knows, maybe a mental health professional will intervene.

Now…heeeeeeere’s Rusey.

I keep swearing off talking about the New Atheists, but like quitting smoking it is easier said than done.  It’s not really that I object to their criticizing me non-stop.  I do rather belong to the school of “so long as you spell my name right” – although interestingly, given that I have a name of only four letters, the misspellings are rife.  (Russe, Russo, Rose, Roose, Rooze, Rouse, and many more.)  In fact I take a certain pride in the fact that our blog, Brainstorm, thanks in no small degree to the splendid efforts of my fellow blogger Jacques Berlinerblau, seems now to be even more hated than Biologos, a Templeton Foundation-supported, Christian blog, founded by Francis Collins, now head of the National Institute of Health.

Good mix of self-importance, anger, vanity, and surrealism, isn’t it.

The latest outcry is by one of the junior New Atheists (in other words, not one of the big four of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) writing from Australia – picked up and intensified (especially in the nastiness towards Jacques and me) elsewhere. 

And so on, blah blah blah blah – nearly identical to the ones we’ve seen about five times in the last few months. The New Atheism is playing into the hands of the Religious Right; the only thing to do about the Religious Right is let it have its way in everything, like an angry baby twenty feet high; therefore The New Atheism is the enemy.

That’s all bullshit, frankly. If that were really the reason he would try hard to convince us. He doesn’t do anything remotely like that – he jumps up and down in front of us screeching insults and saying “tryandgetme!” I don’t believe for a second that he does all this McCarthyesque blackguarding because he thinks we’re the stepping stone to theocracy.

What a chump. Honestly.

Robert Winston says the Templeton Prize is just fine, no problem, what’s the big deal, relax, take a chill pill, don’t get your knickers in a twist, why do you have such an attitude. Sam Harris says religious language is unscientific in its claims for what is true. Winston says there’s no such thing as “the truth.” Harris says we can still recognise falsehood. Winston says

I suppose I really wonder why you’re so angry.

Whut?

Yes really; he says that. Maybe not that abruptly and inconsequentially – that may be editing – but those are the words. Harris attempts to laugh off this sudden rudeness, but Winston isn’t having it. “You write angrily, too,” he says. Furthermore,

books like yours and [Richard Dawkins’s] God Delusion balkanise the world a good deal more, because they polarise views. The God Delusion has caused very aggressive reactions from [people who] previously weren’t aggressive.

Got that? The books of Dawkins and Harris caused very aggressive reactions – just as Salman Rushdie’s Naughty Book caused other very aggressive reactions and Theo Van Gogh’s movie caused others and Lars Vilks’s cartoon caused others and the Motoons caused others and so on. We people who offend religious believers in their organs of religiosity are at fault for being so offensive and we are the cause of any aggressive reactions that ensue. It’s not that religious believers are Spoiled by the longstanding custom of treating religion as special and taboo so they now feel entitled to permanent deference; it’s not Privilege; no, it’s that people who try to discuss the subject openly are creators of aggression.

Andrew Gilligan tells us that the Muslim Council of Britain says…well actually I’m not sure what he tells us it says, and I can’t find the statement itself so that I can say what it says as opposed to what Gilligan says. Frankly he could have done a better job with this – he should have included a link and he should have put the crucial bit inside quotation marks so that we would know who said what. As it is it isn’t clear. The words “women,” “niqab,” and “veil” are not inside quotation marks, so I’m left wondering exactly what the MCB said.

Here’s Gilligan’s unhelpful summary:

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) said that not covering the face is a “shortcoming” and suggested that any Muslims who advocate being uncovered could be guilty of rejecting Islam.

In a statement published on its website the MCB, warns: “We advise all Muslims to exercise extreme caution on this issue, since denying any part of Islam may lead to disbelief.

“Not practising something enjoined by Allah and his Messenger… is a shortcoming. Denying it is much more serious.”

See? You can’t tell what the MCB said! Gilligan didn’t even specify “not covering the face” is a “shortcoming” for women, so we can’t tell if the MCB said that. Sloppy; very sloppy.

I can’t find the statement on the MCB site, either; maybe they’ve taken it down now. I can find lots of people quoting Gilligan, but not the primary source. This is annoying.

At any rate – if the MCB did say what Gilligan seems to be saying they did, that’s interesting and worth noting. The quoted passage from the Koran is a flawless bit of theocratic tyranny:

The statement quotes from the Koran: “It is not for a believer, man or woman, that they should have any option in their decision when Allah and his Messenger have decreed a matter.”

In other words, “believers” (who are not allowed to stop being “believers,” don’t forget, on pain of summary execution) have to do whatever clerics tell them to do. Period.

Other signatories of the statement include Imran Waheed, spokesman of the extremist group Hizb ut Tahrir and several other extremists including Haitham al-Haddad, who has denounced music as a “prohibited and fake message of love and peace”. All 27 signatories, who describe themselves as “Islamic groups and scholars,” are male.

Of course they are. God hates women.

Kenan Malik is not bowled over by Sam Harris on morality.

Harris is nothing if not self-confident. There is a voluminous philosophical literature that stretches back almost to the origins of the discipline on the relationship between facts and values. Harris chooses to ignore most of it…It is one thing to want to “start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and can find helpful”, something that many of us, including many of those boring moral philosophers, seek to do. It is quite another to imagine that you can engage in any kind of conversation, with any kind of audience, by wilfully ignoring the relevant scholarship because it is “boring”.

I share that view. (I agree with Polly-O!) The breeziness of the attempt to settle complicated issues while ignoring the existing scholarship is grating.

“How does Harris establish that values are facts?” He describes an utterly crappy life, and an utterly blissful one. See? Facts.

It is a kind of argument that suggests that Harris might have done well to spend a bit more time immersed in all the boring stuff…The insistence that because it seems obvious that rape and murder are bad, and that wealth and security are good, so there must be objective values, seems about as plausible as the argument that because there are gaps in the fossil record, so God must have created Adam and Eve. 

Kenan sums up:

Creating a distinction between facts and values is neither to denigrate science nor to downgrade the importance of empirical evidence. It is, rather, to take both science and evidence seriously. It is precisely out of the facts of the world, and those of human existence, that the distinction between is and ought arises, as does the necessity for humans to take responsibility for moral judgement. 

I did a review of the book myself a few months ago.