Author: Ophelia Benson

Maryam won! Maryam Namazie is Secularist of the Year. Ya-hoooooo. Sorry to be so American, but I’m really really pleased. As a matter of fact, I’m also damn smug. Here I’ve been publishing her articles like mad all this time, which I haven’t noticed the Guardian or the Independent bothering to do. Well? Well??! Wouldn’t you be smug? Wouldn’t you? Who has the better judgment? Eh? Eh? Which would you rather have published – Dilpazier Aslam, or Maryam Namazie?

Well maybe now they’ll start publishing her. Maybe this will be the push they need. Kenan Malik said, you know. Remember that? In the Guardian (she said pointedly). All the way back in January.

It also creates a climate of censorship in which any criticism of Islam can be dismissed as Islamophobic. The people who suffer most from such censorship are those struggling to defend basic rights within Muslim communities. Marayam Namazie is an Iranian refugee who has long campaigned for women’s rights and against Islamic repression. As a result she has been condemned as an Islamophobe, even by anti-racist organisations. “On the one hand,” she says, “you are threatened by the political Islamic movement with assassination or imprisonment or flogging. And on the other you have so-called progressive people who tell you that what you say in defence of humanity, in defence of equal rights for all, is racist. I think it’s nothing short of an outrage.”

I don’t see anything about the award in the papers yet (Maryam told me herself, and Azar Majedi sent a congratulatory message), so I’ll just link to this for now. It wouldn’t do for people not to know.

Some more on that terrific Simon Blackburn article ‘Religion and Respect’. So much of it is so exactly what I think myself, and have been saying here with tedious iteration – naturally I think it’s terrific. But it is, all the same.

But, I argued to myself, why should I
“respect” belief systems that I do not share? I would not be expected to respect the beliefs
of flat earthers or those of the people who believed that the Hale-Bopp comet was a recycling facility for dead Californians, and killed themselves in order to join it. Had my
host stood up and asked me to toast the Hale-Bopp hopefuls, or to break bread or some
such in token of fellowship with them, I would have been just as embarrassed and indeed
angry.

Just so. We’re expected (all but coerced, at times) to ‘respect’ some beliefs, but not others.

‘Respect’, of course is a tricky term…The word seems to span a spectrum from simply not interfering, passing by on
the other side, through admiration, right up to reverence and deference. This makes it
uniquely well-placed for ideological purposes.

Exactly. As do words like faith, and community, and spiritual – words that span a spectrum and mean different things for different purposes. It is necessary to be always, permanently, without fail, tirelessly vigilant about and attentive to words like that. They have designs on us (which is to say, people who resort to them have designs on us). It is essential to foil their knavish tricks.

People may start out by insisting on
respect in the minimal sense, and in a generally liberal world they may not find it too
difficult to obtain it. But then what we might call respect creep sets in, where the request
for minimal toleration turns into a demand for more substantial respect, such as fellowfeeling,
or esteem, and finally deference and reverence.

Bingo. Respect creep – that’s exactly it. (And come to think of it, it also makes a nice nickname for Galloway – but that’s another story.) There’s a huge difference between respect in the sense of leave me alone, and respect in the sense of see me and my beliefs as special and devout and good and superior. The first does not entail the second. Crucial point.

In postmodernist writings on religion, it is the done thing to distinguish between
theology and ‘onto-theology’, or religion and ‘onto-religion’. Onto-theology makes
existence claims. It takes religious language in the same spirit in which people calling
themselves scientific realists take science. It makes claims about what exists, and these
claims are more or less reasonable and convincing, and when they are true they point to
explanation of the way things are in one respect or another…In more sophisticated circles, onto-theology is old hat. Instead we should see
religion in the light of poetry, symbol, myth, practice, emotion and attitude, or in general
a stance towards the ordinary world, the everyday world around us…

Yes. We’ve seen that ‘sophisticated’ line more than once. I’ve been known to call it harsh names. In fact, amusingly, I made a note while reading page 11 that I would put it more strongly than SB does: I would call it a cheat. On page 15, SB does exactly that, which made me laugh a good deal. Snap!

But equally perhaps ‘God exists’ functions largely as a license to demand respect
creep. It turns up an amplifier, and what it amplifies is often the meanest and most
miserable side of human nature. I want your land, and it enables me to throw bigger and
better tantrums, ones that you just have to listen to, if I find myself saying that God wants
me to want your land. A tribe wants to enforce the chastity of its women, and the words
of the supernatural work to terrify them into compliance.

Brilliant image. Tantrum-amplifier, threat-amplifier, enforcement-amplifier.

I think
that the ontological imaginings do their work at a slightly different place. They work to
close off questions and doubts, and in effect to fend off reason. They cement a particular
way of associating ‘ought’ and ‘is’ and insulate it from criticism…By closing its eyes to this bit, expressive
theology in fact repudiates everything that makes religious language the power that it is.

Yet again – just so. But you’re going to get tired of reading me saying ‘Exactly,’ so I’ll stop. That’s only a fraction of the ‘exactly’s in the article. I give it my personal secular award for today.

Yippee!

You know how I’m always asking why people like Azam Kamguian and Maryam Namazie don’t get the kind of attention the MCB gets? How I’m always saying the BBC and the Guardian and, you know, the government, ought to talk to them as well as or in fact damn well instead of a lot of fundamentalists? You know? Well – well you already know what I’m going to say, probably, since I just put it in News. But I want to yell and squeal and dance and hop for a minute anyway. Bear with me. The day didn’t begin well – it began with the horrid shock of going online and finding dear old B&W turned into a mocking advert of some kind. You think you were shocked! (I know you do, and were, because you emailed to tell me so, and I’m glad you did, because you wouldn’t if you didn’t like B&W.) Imagine how I felt! Imagine (this is Homeric vein) a doting mama going to the baby’s crib and finding there a large and very dirty warthog. Imagine a dedicated poet going to the desk and finding there, where the soaring dazzling sonnet was supposed to be, a smelly pile of rotting cabbages. Imagine a moneybags opening a safe deposit box and finding there, instead of the usual piles of stock certificates and diamonds, a heap of used bandages. So that’s how the day began. So it’s good that it’s ending (well the day isn’t ending, but I have to get off the computer, so the computerday is ending) with something better.

I didn’t even know. There I was reading the article – and was surprised and pleased to read this part –

Eight people have been nominated for the inaugural “Secularist of the Year” award, which will be presented at a central London hotel. They include a leading theatre director who has fought religious censorship in the arts, an illusionist who has used his TV shows to debunk spiritualism and several campaigners against Islamic governments in the Middle East.

I thought ‘That’s good,’ and read on.

They also include Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has highlighted violence against Muslim women.

That’s even better, I thought. The NSS has the right idea. Well done NSS.

Among those nominated for Saturday’s prize are Nicholas Hytner, director of Britain’s National Theatre, who came under fire for staging the musical “Jerry Springer — The Opera”, which many Christians regard as blasphemous. Other nominees include Azam Kamguian and Maryam Namazie, Iranian women who have campaigned for women’s rights in the Middle East and against Tehran’s clerical rule.

I have to admit – I kind of shrieked when I read that. In fact no kind of about it: I let out a very loud and vehement exclamation. Yessss! Go Azam, go Maryam, go Ayaan! B&W is bursting with pride for you. Hurrah!

And maybe the Major Media damn well will start phoning them up when they want an opinion now. It’s about stinking time.

But hurrah.

We’ve been hacked, so I’m going to have to take the server down for a while. I’ll get B&W up and running asap.

Bastard Spammers!

Here we go again. I still don’t get it. I don’t understand the basic point.

Unlike many pro-evolution types, however, he agrees with creationists and intelligent-design advocates that evolution often operates as not just a scientific theory about species, but also as a worldview that competes with religion.

One: and? If evolution does ‘operate as’ a worldview that competes with religion – what of it? Why should the worldview of religion not be competed with? Because fundamentalists don’t like it, yes, I get that, but why else? Two, if evolution does provide a better (more coherent, more warranted, less full of holes) explanation of how we got here, then it does. Why is that not part of the science, and why is it to be frowned on? Other than because the fundamentalists don’t like it. We were just talking about not placating fundamentalists – in a different context, but it applies here too, I think.

Huxley, Ruse argues, felt he needed to build a rival “church” to defeat archaic Anglican and Christian beliefs, and put man, not God, at the center of life.Evolution became his “cornerstone.” With the help of philosopher Herbert Spencer, who extended “survival of the fittest” thinking to social theory, Huxley promoted evolutionary thinking as a worldview hostile to sacred religious truths.

And? Why not? There are no sacred religious truths, because they’re not true. Calling them sacred is just a way of declaring them off-limits. Well they can’t be off-limits. I know I’ve said this fourteen thousand times now, but – I’ll just say it again. Religious people don’t get to demand that other people believe (or defer to, or respect, or godalmighty teach) their sacred myths. They can believe whatever they like themselves, but they don’t get to force their beliefs on other people. (On the subject of respect for religion, Stuart told me about this Simon Blackburn pdf article yesterday. SB refuses to respect religion. Does a good job of it, too.)

Both books, however, undermine the notion that the evolution/creation dispute is simply hard science versus mushy religion. Simplistically, it may be, but not simply. As Ruse shows, it’s often more like secular religion versus non-secular religion, even if most of the “professional” science remains on the evolution side.

But that’s just crap. It’s just rhetoric. Evolution isn’t ‘secular religion’ because it isn’t religion. It may be used as an ideology by some people, but that’s not the same thing, and it is not, not, not useful to pretend it is the same thing.

George Johnson asks the pertinent Millean question in the NY Times.

So suppose there is a Great Intender, who mapped out the circuitry of living cells with the care an Intel engineer would bring to a new microchip. Where then did the creator come from? Was he created by another creator? Or did he evolve?

That’s what I’d like to know! And since those pesky creationists never answer, they need to go away and be quiet until they’ve figured it out.