Author: Ophelia Benson

And then – why is whoever wrote the headline for this article buying into these assumptions?

Anti-Islamic writer stirs hatred, Muslims warn

That’s a really terrible headline. What next? ‘Apostate Islamophobic hoor stirs hatred, Muslims warn’? ‘Evil bitch must be stopped, Muslims warn’?

Well let’s have a look at some of the ‘warnings.’

A visit to Sydney by a controversial Somali writer who calls the prophet Mohammed a pedophile and says Islam is inferior to Western culture has outraged Muslims, who accuse her of inciting hatred.

The usual misleading slippage, that tricks readers into thinking Hirsi Ali’s visit has outraged all Muslims, which is grossly unfair to all the Muslims who are reasonable enough to be not outraged. The usual coercion and confusion and manufacture of outrage via sloppy imprecise careless writing. Now that’s an outrage!

Nada Roude, of the NSW Islamic Council, said Hirsi Ali’s comments on the prophet Mohammed were a “no-go zone”. “They (prophets) are not just like you and me, they have special status – you’re supposed to show respect,” Ms Roude said. “There have to be boundaries in how far you go in respecting other’s beliefs. The reaction from the community is likely to be quite worrying…Anyone who causes harm to our society because they have the right to express their opinion is not welcome.”

Gotcha. Thanks for the warning.

How’s that again?

Malaysia’s highest court has rejected a Muslim convert’s six-year battle to be legally recognised as a Christian. A three-judge panel ruled that only the country’s Sharia Court could let Azlina Jailani, now known as Lina Joy, remove the word Islam from her identity card. Malaysia’s constitution guarantees freedom of worship but says all ethnic Malays are Muslim. Under Sharia law, Muslims are not allowed to convert.

I’m sorry, I must be dense – I don’t understand. Malaysia’s constitution guarantees freedom of worship but says all ethnic Malays are Muslim – but if Malaysia’s constitution says all ethnic Malays are Muslim, then it doesn’t, in fact, guarantee freedom of religion, does it. Perhaps you meant Malaysia’s constitution says it guarantees freedom of worship? Or that it pretends to, or claims to, or pays lip service to the idea that it ought to? You can’t say it does guarantee it when it in fact allots it by ethnic group, though. That doesn’t compute. More to the point, of course, Malaysia can’t say it does guarantee it when it doesn’t. Also of course, that goes double when the religion one is allotted by ethnic group forbids departure and punishes it by death. Religion mandated according to birth and remaining mandatory throughout life is not a good definition of ‘freedom of worship.’

The point of the theist four-step post was to note that theists tend to think the four beliefs are one – that the belief that there is an X we call ‘God’ includes other beliefs, especially the three cited.

My real point was to emphasize that they are separate beliefs, not one and not necessarily or automatically linked; that they all have to be evaluated, not just the first; that there’s no obvious reason to assume that if ‘God’ does exist it is good (in a sense we understand) (or any other either) or wants us to be good or that we reliably know any of that.

It is worth emphasizing that, because it is somewhat remarkable how often it gets overlooked, how often the discussion is just about exist/not exist while goodness is taken for granted. It’s a very strange thing to take for granted, given the realities of animal life. It’s not at all a strange thing to hope for, to long for, to wish for, but it’s a very strange thing to assume. In a way it would make far more sense to believe there is a God and spend all one’s time imploring it to be kinder. It would make more sense for people to sit around in churches shouting up at God ‘Why are you such a bastard? Give us a break! Have a heart!’ Churches and mosques should be full of pictures of mass slaughters, everything from genocides to tsunamis and earthquakes and droughts, all captioned ‘Why? Why, God, why? Why are you such a shit?’ Along with those pictures would be all the others, not mass slaughters but just the plain everyday ones, which don’t hurt any less just because they’re single rather than mass. And that’s before we even start with illnesses and pain and bullying, and non-human animals. Churches and mosques ought (if they consulted reality) to be museums of suffering; holocaust museums in fact.

Of course, in a way it’s understandable that people start from the other end – from the hope and belief that there is Good in the world, which is then identified as God. It’s understandable, but all the same, it muddies the waters later on.

I knew I would be told I was setting too high a standard by talking of reliable knowledge (and meaning by it actually reliable knowledge, rather than credible or rationally defensible or arguable beliefs or guesses or intuitions). I knew that so well that when making a couple of notes on belief and reliable knowledge this morning, that was one of the notes I made – the prediction that I would be told that. But the high standard is exactly the point. Why would we want to set a lower standard? Why would we accept a lower standard? I can see why people want to set a lower standard for their own beliefs, and perhaps for their chosen group’s beliefs; but why everyone is supposed to accept a lower standard for certain kinds of beliefs (and not others) in general, I find more puzzling. Especially because the claims we are supposed to accept a lower standard for – a lower standard for defining what reliable knowledge is, remember – are so very large and detailed (albeit conflicting) and unlikely. It is not obvious that the larger and wilder the claim is, the lower the standard for defining reliable knowledge should be. On the contrary. The larger and wilder the claim is, the more we want to know how the person making the claim knows – except, apparently, when it comes to whether ‘God’ exists and whether it is good and what it wants us to do to be good. But that’s just the kind of claim we need reliable knowledge of, and if we don’t have it, we need to be very damn cautious about heeding claims on the subject.

Notice I’m not saying this rules out belief; it obviously doesn’t. But belief isn’t knowledge, and shouldn’t be treated like knowledge. I maintain that it’s not setting too high a standard for reliable knowledge to say that it should be genuinely reliable knowledge. Otherwise it’s not reliable knowledge, and we should talk about something else; but what I’m talking about here is reliable knowledge, so I’m going to define it accordingly, not in some more relaxed way. That’s why I brought it up in the first place. I wanted to point out that we don’t actually have any reliable knowledge on this subject. (Reliable knowledge is a very scarce commodity. Very scarce indeed. But that’s why it’s as well to be modest when making assertions from incomplete knowledge. Assertions about God and what God wants us to do to be good are not always notably modest.)