Author: Ophelia Benson

Josh Rosenau talks about ‘ways of knowing’ and the non-empirical nature of the claims made by most religions.

It’s certainly true that the Jewish Bible can be read as making a number of empirical claims, for instance about the timing of human origins…But that’s not how Jews have understood the Bible for the last couple thousand years. Maimonides, writing well before any of the modern squabbles over evolution, explained:

“Ignorant and superficial readers take them [certain obscure passages] in a literal, not in a figurative sense. Even well informed persons are bewildered if they understand these passages in their literal signification, but they are entirely relieved of their perplexity when we explain the figure, or merely suggest that the terms are figurative.”

That won’t work – that quotation doesn’t back up the claim that “that’s not how Jews have understood the Bible,” it backs up a different claim, which is that that’s not how Maimonides understood the Bible. Notice that he’s complaining of all those other fools who understand it the other way! Granted he doesn’t give us a demographic breakdown or an opinion poll – but he does say that both ignorant people and well informed people get it wrong, and he doesn’t sound optimistic about it. Rosenau seems to be doing an Armstrong here – pretending that a minority view of religion is in fact all but universal.

To call these “empirical” claims then seems to miss the point. They are certainly truth claims, but not claims about what literally happened. I like to compare this to the non-literal truth claims of good novels, or good stories more broadly. I think we can all agree that literature offers a different “way of knowing” than science does.

Wait, slow down. One, for a great many believers, yes they are claims about what literally happened – that’s exactly what they are. They are for the Archbishop of Canterbury, for instance, as he has said very firmly. They are for Albert Mohler of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. They are for Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church.

Two, yes lots of people like to compare religious truth-claims to the truth-claims of novels, but that doesn’t make the comparison a good one, and it isn’t a good one. Novels aren’t the same kind of thing as religion, and religious truth claims aren’t the same kind of thing as novelistic truth claims, if there even is such a thing.

And three, no actually we can’t all agree that literature offers a different “way of knowing” because I don’t agree that literature offers a way of knowing at all. I think knowledge is the wrong word for what literature offers. I think it offers (sometimes) understanding, including understanding of what it might be like to be a different person, what it might be like to be in a different situation, what other people feel like, and so on – but not really knowledge. Why not knowledge? Because that’s not what it is. It’s speculative. It has to be speculative, and it’s none the worse for that, and it can (sometimes) offer real understanding, but it still amounts to speculation on the part of the author which if good enough is convincing and empathy-inducing in the reader. I don’t think we get to call it knowledge because it’s basically a form of (at best educated) guesswork. It’s imagination. Imagination is a great thing, but what it produces on its own isn’t exactly knowledge(except perhaps knowledge of what the imagination can produce).

This is not to denigrate literature, it’s to attempt to be precise about what is what. I just don’t think literature is a “way of knowing” unless we’re broadening the concept of knowledge to fit, in which case we’re talking about something new.

Vampires don’t exist…But telling stories about vampires is a great way to convey certain truths about the world we all live in. These aren’t truths that science can independently verify, but they are still true in a meaningful way.

Telling stories about anything can be a great way to convey certain truths about the world we all live in, but conveying truths about the world is not the same thing as being a “way of knowing” and religion is not the same thing as either one. Religion includes stories, but a story is not all it is.

I like novels. I like TV. I like art. I like baseball. I think there is truth to be found in such endeavors, and I think any brush that sweeps away the enterprise of religion as a “way of knowing” must also sweep away art and a host of other human activities.

And that’s where I completely fall off the train. I think that’s an absurd claim, and I can’t see how he got himself there. Can you?

Albert Mohler the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is so obliging and has saved us so much trouble – at a stroke he has rid us of the obligation to keep answering the charge that “New” atheists are all wrong because they ignore sophisticated theology and are talking about a crude old version of God that nobody believes in anyway.

Mohler points out that the Wall Street Journal paired articles by Dawkins and Armstrong were not articles by an atheist and a theist but articles by two atheists.

Armstrong insists that Darwin really did God a favor by forcing us to give up our “primitive” belief in his actual existence — thus freeing us to affirm merely a “God beyond God” who exists only as a concept. Along the way, Armstrong offers a superficial and theologically reckless argument that comes down to this: Until the modern age, believers in God were not really believers in a God who was believed to exist…She makes statements that amount to elegant nonsense. Consider this: “In the ancient world, a cosmology was not regarded as factual but was primarily therapeutic…” So she would have us to believe that, in centuries past, cosmology was merely therapy. She simply makes the assertion and moves on. Will anyone believe this nonsense?

Oh yes – lots of people – people of an Armstrongian cast of mind – people who get thrills from talk about an indescribable transcendent. Along with them, people who want religion and science to lie down together like the lion and the kid, and people who want to be able to insist from dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn that science and religion are compatible. But they are not everyone, and they are not even most people. In some places they are outnumbered by people who think ‘God’ is just a dead idea and of no interest, and in other places they are outnumbered by people who think God is a really real person with real attributes who does real things and will really give you a big hug and some ice cream when you die.

Armstrong calls for the emergence of “a more authentic notion of God.” Her preferred concept of God would be about aesthetics, not theology. “Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form,” she intones. Interestingly, it is Dawkins, presented as the unbeliever in this exchange, who understands God better than Armstrong. In fact, Richard Dawkins the atheist rightly insists that Karen Armstrong is actually an atheist as well. “God’s Rotweiller” sees through Armstrong’s embrace of a “God beyond God.”

Exactly! This is what we keep saying! This is what we’ve been saying ever since The God Delusion came out and five minutes later people started saying but Dawkins has such an unsophisticated idea of God and what about Tillich and nobody believes in that silly idea of God any more and what about Terry Eagleton’s toaster and God is just a word for all our best impulses and what about apophatic theology and Karen Armstrong could set Dawkins straight in an instant. We’ve been saying what Mohler says – yes but all that is not what most believers mean by ‘God’ so it’s just deceptive to pretend that it is. It’s so helpful of Mohler to corroborate! From now on we can just quote him.

We should at least give Dawkins credit here for knowing what he rejects. Here we meet an atheist who understands the difference between belief and unbelief. As for those, like Armstrong, who try to tell believers that it does not matter if God exists — Dawkins informs them that believers in God will brand them as atheists. “They’ll be right,” Dawkins concludes. So the exchange in The Wall Street Journal turns out to be a meeting of two atheist minds. The difference, of course, is that one knows he is an atheist when the other presumably claims she is not. Dawkins knows a fellow atheist when he sees one. Careful readers of The Wall Street Journal will come to the same conclusion.

You betcha.

Life in Yemen.

A 12-year-old Yemeni girl, who was forced into marriage, died during a painful childbirth that also killed her baby, a children’s rights group said Monday. Fawziya Ammodi struggled for three days in labor, before dying of severe bleeding at a hospital on Friday, said the Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children…Born into an impoverished family in Hodeidah, Fawziya was forced to drop out of school and married off to a 24-year-old man last year.

Well it was life for awhile and then it was premature death after three days of torture.

The Yemeni parliament tried in February to pass a law, setting the minimum marriage age at 17. But the measure has not reached the president because many parliamentarians argued it violates sharia, or Islamic law, which does not stipulate a minimum age.

And that of course is the important thing, not the health and survival and education and chance for some modicum of happiness of little girls.

Life in Aceh.

Adulterers can be stoned to death and homosexuality is punishable by long prison terms under a new law passed in Indonesia’s devoutly Muslim Aceh province today…The law, which reinforces Aceh’s already strict Islamic laws, is to go into effect within 30 days. Its passage comes two weeks before a new assembly led by the moderate Aceh party is sworn in after a heavy defeat of conservative parties in local elections.

Ah – the conservatives have been voted out, so as a parting gesture, they pass a law saying that ‘adulterers’ can be buried up to the neck and slowly pelted with stones until they are dead – under ‘Islamic’ laws which notoriously have an impossible standard of proof for men but not for women, so that punishments for ‘adultery’ tend to fall exclusively or all but exclusively on women. So that’s life in Indonesia’s devoutly Muslim Aceh province.

So…what’s the Home Office thinking? That now that Pervez Kambaksh is out of prison and safely out of Afghanistan, it’s only right to replace him with another apostate? Or what?

[Anonymous], activist of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB) and One Law for All Campaign, has been detained on September 10, 2009 and is facing imminent deportation back to Afghanistan where he will face the death penalty for ‘apostasy.’ As part of his fight against the Islamists, [Anonymous] has publicly renounced Islam in order to break the taboo that comes with such a renunciation and push for the right to leave religion, particularly crucial given that apostasy is punishable by death under Sharia law. As [Anonymous] has said on the CEMB’s website: ‘I was not born to be a Muslim and be afraid of God and more importantly I did not sign an agreement with him/her /it to worship him. As a child, religion has been forced upon me. I have been forced to pray, fast, etc… In Afghanistan where I was living, questioning the existence of god or religion is deemed blasphemy and punishable by stoning to death. Now in the UK I have the opportunity and courage to declare who I am. I AM A FREE MAN WITHOUT ANY EXTRA BONDAGE ON ME.’

He was, until last Thursday, when he was summoned to the Gillingham police station in Kent.

[H]e was issued a Home Office refusal letter that very afternoon and told he would be deported to Afghanistan in a couple of days. The authorities initially tried to force him to sign his removal order and refused him any calls until he persisted…[Anonymous]’s removal to Afghanistan will create yet another Perwiz Kambakhsh with far worse consequences because of the severity of his ‘crime.’

He didn’t just read some material about women’s rights under Islam, he explicitly rejected Islam. The HO can’t send him to Afghanistan – it’s not their policy to deport people to be executed.

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