Author: Ophelia Benson

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) begins with a preamble, the first clause of which says

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…

The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI) also begins with a preamble; its first clause is quite different:

Reaffirming the civilizing and historical role of the Islamic Ummah which God made the best nation that has given mankind a universal and well-balanced civilization in which harmony is established between this life and the hereafter and knowledge is combined with faith; and the role that this Ummah should play to guide a humanity confused by competing trends and ideologies and to provide solutions to the chronic problems of this materialistic civilization…

We are in different worlds already. The UDHR, because it is universal and because the universality is the whole point, does not carve up the human family into nations or religions, while the CDHRI does exactly that from the very beginning. The UDHR starts with the rights of all human beings, the CDHRI starts with the superiority of the Islamic Ummah. In short the CDHRI subverts the entire purpose of the UDHR in its very first words.

The UDHR preamble’s second clause makes clear why the universality and equality of rights are so important and why the invocation of the superiority of a particular community is so sharply – so pointedly, even wickedly – at odds with the purpose of the UDHR.

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind…

The UDHR was drawn up in the aftermath of World War II and the Nazi genocide. The human rights in question had to be universal in order to address ‘barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind’; if the human rights are particular then we’re right back where we started, committing barbarous acts against people who are not members of ‘the best nation.’ So with the CDHRI we’re right back where we started.

And then there’s Prince Charles’s surprise colleague.

Captured war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic was living in Serbia’s capital Belgrade and practising alternative medicine, Serb officials say. He was sporting a long white beard…

Good good; glad he looked the part. And so appropriate…’alternative medicine’ – yes that’s one of those ironic euphemisms that murdering bastards go in for, isn’t it, like Sonderbehandlung. Killing people wholesale is special handling all right, and it’s also alternative medicine, very alternative indeed. Very droll, Rado.

“He was involved with alternative medicine, earning his money from practising alternative medicine… he was working in a private practice.”…He even gave public lectures and was a regular contributor to Healthy Life magazine, editor Goran Kojic said.

Okay that’s carrying irony a little too far. There is such a thing as good taste.

Let’s see – fish? Check. Barrel? Check. Shooter? Check.

But what else can I do?

Diners have been flocking to a restaurant in northern Nigeria to see pieces of meat which the owner says are inscribed with the name of Allah. What looks like the Arabic word for God and the name of the prophet Muhammad were discovered in pieces of beef by a diner in Birnin Kebbi. He was about to eat it, when he suddenly noticed the words in the gristle, the restaurant owner said.

Ah, in the gristle – that’s a nice touch. I remember gristle from my childhood – I was always spitting it out, and having to be instructed in the polite way to remove gristle from the mouth and leave it daintily on the edge of the plate. Funny that Allah chose the gristle instead of the nice chewable meat. Maybe it was a precaution against being accidentally or blasphemously eaten. Imagine the horror if some apostate or kafir in Birnin Kebbi spotted the name and just went ‘Ha, Allah’s name, yum yum,’ and gobbled it down with some horseradish. Thinks of everything, that Allah. Well, everything except a slightly more exciting or in the public eye place to do his gristle-signing.

The meat was boiled and then fried before being served, owner Kabiru Haliru told newspaper Weekly Trust. “When the writings were discovered there were some Islamic scholars who come and eat here and they all commented that it was a sign to show that Islam is the only true religion for mankind,” he said.

Ah yes, quite right too. Of course it was! Because what else would Allah do to give a sign to show that Islam is the only true religion for mankind? Write his name in letters of fire across the night sky, high enough and large enough for a whole hemisphere to read? Send his only begotten daughter to be tortured to death? Dictate another really boring book about camels and finance? Pick up the Chrysler building and move it to Ponca City Oklahoma? Issue the 11th commandment, forbidding people to wear their baseball caps backward? Of course not. The only sensible way to give a sign to show that Islam is the only true religion for mankind is to write your name and your prophet’s name on three pieces of meat the gristle thereof in the kitchen of a restaurant in Birnin Kebbi, Nigeria.

A vet told the newspaper the words “defied scientific explanation”. “Supposing only one piece of meat was found then it would be suspicious, but given the circumstances there is no explanation,” Dr Yakubu Dominic said.

Absolutely. You have only to look at the accompanying illustration to see that. There are some random bumps in the meat; that defies scientific explanation all right. I’m thinking of converting. The apostasy thing is a bit of a discourager though; I do like being allowed to change my mind about things.

(It’s thoughtful of the BBC to provide a list of other inexplicable signings and sightings. Message from Allah in tomato; thief steals Nun Bun; miracle chapati. Hours of fun for the whole family.)

That unrepentant one has thought deeply and then pronounced. He has expanded on the elegant brevity of ‘How appropriate that a smug, shitty, rightwing publication like “Butterflies and Wheels” shares the name of a sentence in a book that is key to the plot of an idiotic movie like “Shattered”‘; he has explained what is shitty (smug and rightwing we can figure out for ourselves) about B&W.

[A] fountainhead of Islamophobia…There is the usual defense of the Danish Mohammad cartoons, etc. There are attacks on other religions as well…

So maybe ‘Islamophobia’ is a little inaccurate? Never mind.

In addition to religion, the website mounts attacks on multiculturalism…Kenan Malik, a Spiked Online regular, seems to be a designated hitter when it comes to such matters.

No. Kenan’s an occasional contributor, I’m pleased to say, but there are plenty of other contributors who are skeptical about multiculturalism, as well as plenty of other contributors who write about other things. There are no ‘designated hitters’ around here.

This clever phrase is just the sort of thing you can find on New Criterion, a magazine edited by the neoconservative Hilton Cramer or any other rightwing standard bearer in the “culture wars”.

Ah yes! And therefore they are all the same kind of thing, and no further thought or investigation is required.

It took about five years to figure out that things were not so simple.

Ah did it. Imagine my surprise.

The B&W website is not particularly concerned with such issues, preferring to bash religion rather than environmentalism. There is one exception, however. They do seem to get worked into a lather when it comes to the animal rights movement, which they obviously consider an impudent assault on the absolute rights of Scientific Research. They have taken up the cause of Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), a company that has been the target of the Animal Liberation Front.

Funny the way he makes a plural of everything, as if nothing were signed around here. Who’s this ‘they’? He’s obviously referring to my republished article on the ALF, which wasn’t written by ‘them,’ it was written by me. And it’s not about ‘taking up the cause’ of HLS, it’s about questioning the tactics and morals of the ALF. Different thing. I don’t think there is such a thing as the absolute rights of scientific research, and I certainly don’t think animal research should be beyond question and protest. But it doesn’t follow from that that the ALF is without flaw.

I would not be surprised to discover that B&W gets some funding from Huntington and other such animal torturers.

Oh, wouldn’t you? Well I would! I would be surprised to discover that B&W gets funding from anywhere at all. B&W gets zero funding of any kind, thank you.

I was just going to point this out, but (of course – I should have known) I got intrigued by the absurd claims. Lenny’s at it too but I can’t be bothered to tease that one.

Tom Clark points out that ‘an essential disagreement between secularists and their opponents is epistemological, about how we hold and justify our factual beliefs.’

Are they arrived at empirically, by consideration of public evidence potentially available to any observer (so that the evidence is intersubjective, not merely subjective), or are they more a function of religious tradition or faith? Are beliefs held to be fallible and thus corrigible by open inquiry and empirical testing, or are they held to be the infallible and unquestionable deliverances of authority, whether scriptural or institutional?

Yup; that’s an essential disagreement all right. In fact without that disagreement the others kind of drift away like smoke, because they are at least in principle resolvable through further discussion and inquiry. But with that disagreement, they aren’t.

On what basis do we choose between these opposing epistemologies? Why should we, or anyone, side with Dacey and the secularists, not the Iranians and other fundamentalists in deciding where to place our cognitive bets? To defend secularism, this root issue of our epistemic commitments must be brought into the public square…The beginning of such an argument is obvious but too often left unstated. It is simply that beliefs arrived at via publicly available (thus intersubjective) evidence, science, critical reason, logic, and open debate – what we might call open intersubjective empiricism – are far more reliable than beliefs based in faith and non-empirical modes of justification, such as appeals to scriptural authority.

Just so. And, Clark goes on to say, even fundamentalists know this when dealing with quotidian matters. I’ve pointed this out a few times myself. Nobody mumbles about faith when she wants to know how to get from Buffalo to Skaneateles, or when to plant tomatoes, or what to put on poison ivy. There are double standards in play. When we actually want to know something in the real world, we do what we know we have to do to find out. When we just want to believe something, we use completely different (and noticeably lax) methods.

But of course these same true believers abandon the epistemic commitment to intersubjective empiricism when deciding about matters of god, human nature, human flourishing and ethics – all the traditional domains of religious belief. They have a double standard of justification, falling back on intuition, faith, scripture and authority when it comes to the basic metaphysical and moral content of their worldviews. The fundamentalist/authoritarian proposition is that we are warranted, when considering matters of ultimate import that make up our worldview, in carving out an exception to the basic epistemic norms that rule our everyday lives.

But we’re not warranted in doing that. The world isn’t divided into two parts, one knowable via intersubjective empiricism and the other knowable via guesswork and fantasy and wishes. It’s odd to think it is.

The question that should be raised publicly, while we still have the chance, is whether and why this exemption is warranted. What is its rational basis? Why are we suddenly permitted to abandon the normal empirical constraints on belief when deciding about such things as god, life after death, the soul, free will, and the status of women, homosexuals, and those of other races and creeds? Is it because there are means of deciding the truth of such matters that are superior to logic, science, public evidence, and critical inquiry? If so, what are these and why are they trustworthy?

No, there are no such means. We know what the proposed alternatives are and we know they’re not trustworthy.

The nut of the article:

The future of secularism may depend on using the open public square to expose the epistemic weakness of faith and non-empirical justifications for belief.

Send me in, coach.