Kenan Malik points out that fundamentalism is an idea, not a biology.

Secularism and fundamentalism are not ideas stitched into people’s DNA. They are not born so. Secularist ideas and religious beliefs are like any values: people absorb them, accept them, reject them. A generation ago there were strong secular movements within Muslim communities and fundamentalism was a marginal force. Today secularism is much weaker, and Islamism much stronger. This shift has been propelled not by demographic trends but by political developments. And political developments can also help reverse the shift.

Kaufmann doesn’t deny any of this. But, he insists, nothing can stop the inevitable demographic triumph of the fundamentalists. Why? Because ‘we inhabit a period of ideological exhaustion’. The ‘great secular religions have lost their allure.’ In their place we have ‘relativism and managerialism’, outlooks that ‘cannot inspire a commitment to generations past and sacrifices for those yet to come.’

This gets us to the heart of the problem. For the real issue at stake is not demography but politics. I do not accept the secular ideologies amount to ‘religions’. But Kaufmann is right to suggest that in our post-ideological age, secularists find it much more difficult to inspire a sense of purpose and collective direction.

Yes, and ironically, fundamentalism itself fills the gap – fundamentalism does a brilliant job of reminding secularists why secularism is worth having and defending.

Not just the obsession with demography but the very fear of Islam expresses the lack of conviction in a progressive, secular, humanist project. The spectre of ‘Eurabia’ is really an admission that the critics of Islam lack the wherewithal to challenge the fundamentalists. Or, as Kaufmann puts it, ‘Dry atheism… can never compete with the rich emotions evoked by religion.’

I’m not so sure about that…But if it is right, then that’s another way “New” atheists are not such a bad thing after all. Part of what the Be Quieters hate about us is precisely our lack of dryness – our energy, our enthusiasm (in the older sense, the one that Hume and Mill senior were so wary of), our heat, our zeal. I can understand all that – enthusiasm and zeal are of course one short step away from more sinister qualities, or to put it another way, like so many things (respect, tolerance, liberty), they are only as good as they are: used for the right purposes they are good but used for bad ones they are a nightmare.

But all the same – I think in fact the current revival (so to speak) of atheism really is useful for altering the perception and perhaps the reality that atheism is dry while religion is full of rich emotions. I think we are doing at least a little to make it clear that atheism is not dry; that it too can evoke rich emotions. Atheism – at least in a context where the alternative is so visible and ambitious and competitive – is not just a negation, not just a no-god shrug. It is a liberation. It is the rejection of authority, tyranny, patriarchy, of bossdom of all kinds. It is the repudiation of the idea that there is a Superbig male Boss squatting at the top of everything and that we have to obey and worship and grovel to it. Freedom from that idea brings a lot of good things with it. Kenan indicates why.

The irony is that, for all their poisonous hostility towards Islam, the Eurabists express considerable admiration for Islamist arguments. Melanie Phillips is militantly opposed to what she sees as the ‘Islamic takeover of the West’ and ‘the drift towards social suicide’ that supposedly comes with accepting Muslim immigration. Yet she is deeply sympathetic to the Islamist rejection of secular humanism, which she thinks has created ‘a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets.’

Phillips is talking idiotic nonsense. What does she think the culture was like before? What does she think 19th century culture was like? Or 16th century, or 11th century? What does she think life was like when the vast majority of people were dirt poor and illiterate and without rights? Does she think the whole world was a drawing room out of Jane Austen? This debauched and disorderly culture is one that is capable of improvement over time, and fairly short time at that; it is flawed but reparable; it comes with freedoms and rights and responsibilities that used to be reserved for one or five or ten percent of the population. Secularism is a big part of the reason for that; secularism makes belief in progress (not perfection, John Gray please note, but progress) more tenable and realistic.

There is nothing like a vivid sense of the alternative for making secularism and atheism seem about as dry as Niagra Falls.

Grayling’s reply to Gray is a much better read.

Anxious to appear original while in fact pushing a familiar counter-Enlightenment line, Gray has often entertained us with his assaults on logic and historical fact, each time repeating the two tenets of his faith, one acquired from Isaiah Berlin and the other from his Sunday school, namely, that we are condemned to live with the conflict between irreconcilable goods, and that we owe everything of significance in human achievement (not, he gloomily adds, that there has been much) to religion.

Concise, sly, cutting, and funny – also accurate. Gray is extraordinarily repetitive and predictable. I knew what his “review” would say before I read it. “Gray has often entertained us” reminds me irresistibly of Mr Bennett’s “You have delighted us long enough” to his middle daughter when she had bored everyone rigid with her relentless piano playing singing.

That Gray endlessly wears his own two old hats does not get in his way here. But I don’t mind this. What I mind is his attributing to me the idea that the scientific and social advances of the post-sixteenth century Western world are the road to perfection, and that if only we could be reasonable, accept pluralism, respect human rights, defend the rule of law, and apply the findings of science to the improvement of mankind’s lot, we would realize Utopia. No: though I do and always will champion these things (“shrilly” and “peevishly,” with “adamantine certainty” and “high-minded silliness” Gray shrilly, peevishly and high-mindedly complains), I don’t confuse Meliorism with Perfectibilism as Gray persists in doing, though I have before now, in print, tried to help him understand the difference.

That’s important. Gray is risible, but he’s also sinister. The idea that we should not be reasonable, accept pluralism, respect human rights, defend the rule of law, and apply the findings of science to the improvement of mankind’s lot is no joke, and Gray’s endless flirtation with it is a lot more repellent and more dangerous than conformity in Hampstead.

If nevertheless it is high-minded silliness to champion the cause of trying to conduct our affairs sensibly, and to free our minds and lives to the greatest extent conformable with our being social animals who owe one another moral regard, I embrace it with enthusiasm. Gray, with his shallow and rather aimless hostility to this view, is the least likely fellow to talk me out of it.

You have delighted us long enough, John Gray.

John Gray makes a familiar point.

SEEING THEMSELVES as fiercely independent thinkers, bien-pensants are remarkable chiefly for the fervor with which they propagate the prevailing beliefs of their time.

Prevailing where? Prevailing among whom?

Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill’s godson and a scion of one of England’s great political dynasties, exemplified this contradiction throughout most of his life. British philosopher A. C. Grayling can now be counted amongst his number.

Okay – he means “prevailing among people who think similar things” – which is a tautology. He’s pointing out that independent thinkers (fierce or otherwise) are not usually so very independent that they think things that no one else anywhere thinks. Right. Well we knew that, actually. If you’re such an independent thinker that no one on the entire planet agrees with you about anything, you’re a paranoid schizophrenic.

He’s letting us know that independent thinkers too form clumps, or groups, at least in the sense that one can point out ideas that they have in common. Yes – that’s true – but who thought it wasn’t?

His point perhaps is that you can’t claim to be an independent thinker if you have ideas in common with other self-proclaimed independent thinkers, because ideas-in-common rules out independent-thinking.

It doesn’t though, because the ideas could be in common and also independent in the sense of examined, thought about, questioned, critically considered, analyzed.

There’s another thing: I don’t actually know anyone who goes around saying “I am a fiercely independent thinker.” How does John Gray know that’s how bien pensants see themselves? I don’t think he does know; I think it’s his interpretation. There may be some truth in it, but his flat-footed announcement is a trifle smug, especially for the purposes of deriding the putative smugness and bien pensantness of other people.

His real point, stated more neutrally and clearly than he managed, is that people can pride themselves on being independent thinkers while still in fact conforming closely to the norms of their own social group. True. It is possible to be critical and skeptical in one direction and conformist and credulous in another, or the former in some directions and the latter in others. It’s as well to be aware of that.

But then again, it’s also as well not to get too hung up about it. Being an independent thinker isn’t the only good, or an absolute good, or the highest good. There are some parts of the bien pensant Book of Rules that are worth conforming to. Sometimes conformity is better than independent thinking. Traffic is one example – but equality is another. That’s at the heart of Gray’s sneer, I think – the terrible bien pensant herds of Hampstead all think alike on the subject of equality; they are all sheeplike in their aversion to racism and sexism and homphobia. Well, good. Independent thinking that takes the form of belief in social subordination is no loss.

As is well known, Stephen Jay Gould offered ‘the principled resolution of supposed “conflict” or “warfare” between science and religion’ in his short book Rocks of Ages.

No such conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap (the principle that I would like to designate as NOMA, or “nonoverlapping magisteria”).

The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).

I’ve always disliked that formula; I disliked the book when it came out. Here’s one reason.

Gould treats the two ‘magisteria’ as if they were equal – ‘the net of science covers’ and ‘the net of religion extends over’ sounds as if they’re doing more or less the same kind of work. But that’s wrong. Science is the best and only way to explore nature, while religion is not the best and only way to explore moral meaning and value.

Religion is actually not a very good way to do either one – it tends to be misleading, it tends to be irrelevant, it’s often just plain wrong. The magisterium isn’t really a magisterium. The church has its ‘teachings,’ as it’s always reminding us when they conflict with equality legislation, but its teachings are…not really teachings.

Okay, I give up – what is the Pentagon doing having a “special Pentagon prayer service”? Even before we ask what is it doing having Franklin Graham appearing at such a thing, what is it doing having such a thing in the first place?

And yet people wonder why atheists “proselytize” to the extent of pointing out that there are no genuinely good reasons to believe the things that make a “National Prayer Day” seem like something that an entity called God expects us to have once a year.

Use the formatting tools at the top of the comment box, willya! Half of you are typing in html, after Josh went to all the trouble of giving us tools, and you’re doing the wrong ones so they’re showing up and it looks stupid and bad. Whatsa matta wichoo?

I don’t mean it; you know I love you; but pull yourselves together.

(No I know, it’s not really half. It’s just a few. But we don’t want to embarrass The Few, so let’s say it’s half.)

“New” atheism is often accused of proselytizing, but I don’t think that’s right.

It’s not really proselytizing. We don’t have the explicit goal of turning everyone atheist. We don’t even really have the implicit goal of doing that. We know it’s vanishingly unlikely, and not necessarily desirable (most of us know that – maybe all of us do – it probably depends on exactly what is meant). Our goals are short of that – speaking broadly.

The most basic is probably to humble the claims somewhat – to chip away at the public assumption that there is nothing dubious about theism – that it’s perfectly reasonable to talk about God as one would talk about Gordon Brown or Sarah Palin. It is to remind everyone that belief is not necessarily the default option – that there are reasons not to believe – that the reasons not to believe are better than the reasons to believe – that it is better to restrict belief to claims that can be tested and investigated and that any claims that are officially beyond the competence of science are thereby rendered at least less reliable.

So, related to that and stemming from it, another goal is to push back against all this incessant public goddy talk and “faith”-mongering. It is, frankly, to discredit public goddy talk – to make it more obvious that it is not likely to be true – in an effort to reduce it. It is an effort to get all this god stuff out of our faces.

Now that perhaps does look like proselytizing in the sense meant. But I don’t care. We’ve had years of this nonsense, and we’re tired of it. We’re not raiding churches – but we’re arguing with the Washington Post and the BBC and the Guardian and National Prayer Day. Should we stop doing that because it may be true that on average religion makes people happy? No.

Another, overlapping goal is to make more space for atheists – to de-delegitimize atheism – to de-other it – to point out there are lots of us and we have the better case so stop trying to bully us. It is also to point out and rebuke the lies people tell about us – unblushing brazen hardened lies.

The very presence and energy of the lies is a sign that this goal, at the very least, is hard to gainsay. Atheism is neither criminal nor immoral, yet it is steadily and noisily demonized. That points to something poisonous about theism. We do get to resist – we do get to call out the lies – we do get to defend ourselves.

A really nice touch – it’s not just that Bishop Walter Mixa has now admitted that he used to beat the children in a Bavarian orphanage –

Accusations have also surfaced of financial irregularities at the orphanage’s foundation.

A lawyer hired by the foundation has raised questions about thousands of dollars spent on wine, art, jewelry and even a tanning bed while Bishop Mixa was chairman of the foundation’s board, from 1975 to 1996, while he was a priest in the town of Schrobenhausen.

Isn’t that just typical. The Irish Catholic church sent a lot of the money the government gave it for the care of children in its prisons to Rome while the children slept in the cold and wore rags and ate crap and got next to no schooling. It’s interesting to see that the Bavarian Catholic church apparently used its money-intended-for-child-prisoners on luxury items for itself – at least one supposes it wasn’t hanging the art in the children’s dormitories and giving them pretty bracelets for their birthdays and serving them wine at dinner and letting them use the tanning bed when they were looking a little pallid.

You know how people like Massimo Pigliucci and others like to say that science has nothing to say about the supernatural? And therefore scientists who dispute religion are trespassing on other people’s territory and crossing their own borders without a passport and generally misbehaving? I’ve been thinking about that.

I googled the two words just now, and found a nice helpful item by Victor Stenger. He quotes the National Academy of Sciences:

Science is a way of knowing about the natural
world. It is limited to explaining the natural
world through natural causes. Science can say
nothing about the supernatural. Whether God
exists or not is a question about which science
is neutral.

That’s good, because it says exactly what I had in mind, what I’ve been thinking about –

what I think is a crock of shit.

Here’s why: there’s no such thing as “the supernatural.” Nobody cares about some general thing called “the supernatural.” People care about particular things that could be put under the heading “supernatural” but are not “the supernatural” themselves. And many or most of the things that people care about and that can be put under the heading “supernatural” are not really supernatural in a sense that would make science unable to say anything about them. And that includes “God” – except when the deist god is meant, which in fact it almost never is.

“The supernatural” is just the name of a category, but what’s really in dispute is not a category, but a person, an agent. The supernatural is one thing, and “God” is another, and it’s a distraction to pretend that by walling off “the supernatural” from science it is possible to get science to agree that God is beyond dispute. The god that is meant when people say “God” – the god that will be in charge on National Prayer Day, when Obama tells us all to get busy praying – is not supernatural at all but heavily involved in human life. A god that really really is super-natural – altogether outside nature – is not the one that people care about and summon to tell us all what to do. The god of believers is a part of this world, however magic and elusive and tricky it is supposed to be.

So saying “science can say nothing about the supernatural” is true enough as far as it goes (because it’s true by definition), but it’s irrelevant to god-talk.

Two Belfast girls, age 12 and 14, were going to be sent to Pakistan by their parents, for “education.” A judge issued a forced marriage protection order to prevent this little jaunt.

He said: “I find as a fact that there is a present real and substantial risk that G and D will be forced by their parents to marry against their wishes.”…He found the real reason G and D were to be sent to Pakistan in 2007 was “so that they could learn ‘respect’ as an overarching filial duty which I hold in the context of this family means obedience overriding their full and free choice.”

Ah yes, ‘respect’ as an overarching filial duty, meaning people never have lives of their own, because they are always the property of their parents. Life under that arrangement is always vicarious, either upwards or downwards, and never simply a matter primarily for the person whose life it is. Excessive submission on the one hand and excessive authority on the other and never a decent proportionality.

One of the places we’ve seen this claim that science has nothing to say about God or other religious beliefs lately is in the article about Francisco Ayala in the Times after he won the Templeton Prize.

Professor Ayala…won the prize for his contribution to the question “Does scientific knowledge contradict religious belief?”…[Ayala] says science and religion cannot be in contradiction because they address different questions. It is only when either subject oversteps its boundary, as he believes is the case with Professor Dawkins, that a contradiction arises, he said.

That’s a recipe for epistemic chaos. We can’t have hermetically sealed ways of “addressing” questions – not if we want to get things right. Ways of addressing questions have to be consistent with each other, at least. The claim that science and religion address different questions only works if you admit that religion – when it comes to addressing questions – is simply a branch of fiction. This means you’re admitting that religion doesn’t really address questions at all, if “address questions” is taken to mean raising questions in the hope of answering them.

You can’t do both. You can’t say that they’re radically different, and still maintain that religion does anything other than raise questions only for the sake of giving answers that don’t have to meet any criteria.

A line from Sam Harris’s The End of Faith (p 128):

…we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification and which therefore cannot even be discussed, and yet these are the very beliefs that underlie many of the demands they are likely to make upon us.

This is why NOMA, in addition to being wrong as a description, is no use. It’s also why the much-repeated claim that science has nothing to say about God or other religious beliefs is flawed. If religious beliefs are immune to any kind of rational, this-world inquiry or dispute, then we are abandoned to a world in which unreasonable, protected beliefs get to tell us what to do.

NPR’s On the Media did a piece about the disproportionate number of men in the media, including NPR and On the Media. An NYU professor did a blog rant on the subject awhile ago, and On the Media brought him (yes, him, and they did the irony-check) to talk about the issue. He said women aren’t quick enough to say “Me me me me look at me I’m good me me me.”

CLAY SHIRKY: I said it then, I believe it now. I think the concern for how other people think about you is one of the sources of essentially work paralysis among women.
One of the big skills that you need, and my institution does not do a good job of inculcating this in women – there are not enough institutions that do – one of the big skills is to be able to do what you want to do without caring what other people think.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You have to acknowledge the fact that when women put themselves out there, they’re called “biatches.” The word “shrill” is applied to them. They are not called “leaders.” They are not called “strong.”
CLAY SHIRKY: That is right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They’re called “strident – hags.”
CLAY SHIRKY: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And it’s a pain in the – butt.

Yes it is. And I’ll tell you why. There is more than one way for people to think about you, and some kinds of indifference are easier than others. Gladstone and Shirky sum up that difference very briskly in that brief passage. Allow me to explain. It is one thing to be considered – however disapprovingly – tough and aggressive and strong and ballsy. It is another to be considered a shrill strident hag bitch.

That’s all there is to it, really. That’s why Gladstone says it’s a pain in the ass. Yes it damn well is. Being considered strong and tough is not all that unpleasant even if the people who consider you that detest you. Being considered a shrill strident hag bitch is a whole different thing. And what Gladstone says is no lie: it takes very little for people to call a woman a bitch – or, as we have seen, shrill and strident.

So women can’t win no matter what they do. Either they hang back and don’t get the top jobs because they didn’t grab for them, or they grab for the top jobs and spend the rest of their lives as shrill strident hag bitches.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You write, “Women aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks, they are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.”

Okay – I do better with that one. I’m very very very good at behaving like an anti-social obsessive. I’m a *genius at that. Top of the class. And I’m not too bad at the pompous blowhard thing, and I do a fair bit of the self-promoting narcissism routine too.

CLAY SHIRKY: I’ll tell you though, the reaction that has surprised me most is that any number of people, many of them women, have come forward and said, essentially, women have a different way of getting along in the world, we’re more social, we’re more nurturing, and so forth.
And I have two problems with that attitude. The first is, essentially, that if you flowered up the language a little bit, you could dump that into a Victorian almanac.
And the second is that all of that kind of nurturing, social junk imagines that the best role we can imagine for women in the workplace is as kind of middle-management mommies, right?

God yes. I squawked when I heard that part. I squawked and I threw some things. It drives me crazy when women buy into that crap.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In your view, what is the impact of having so many more male voices as experts and sources than women?
CLAY SHIRKY: I think one of the big impacts is that the male voice is what expertise comes to sound like. And so, even from someone who doesn’t go in with a formally sexist bias about whether men are more expert than women in general, you may just unconsciously flip through to those parts of the rolodex.
Someone somewhere has to say, we have to change the fact of the representation before we change people’s mental model of what expertise sounds like because if we just wait, we will always lag the cultural change rather than leading it.

The male voice is what expertise comes to sound like – that is exactly it.