Tag: “Respect”

  • My way or your respect for my way

    So Morsi’s a cultural relativist. You wouldn’t think a Muslim Brotherhood guy would be a cultural relativist, would you. Pretty much the opposite. There is one way to be and Mohammed is its prophet.

    But then it’s not so much that he is a cultural relativist as that he thinks other people should be if they don’t share his non-relativist culture. Heads I win tails you lose. My way is the right way and your way is to respect my way. Mk?

    He spelled it out for the New York Times, who wrote it down and put it in the paper.

    On the eve of his first trip to the United States as Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi said the United States needed to fundamentally change its approach to the Arab world, showing greater respect for its values and helping build a Palestinian state, if it hoped to overcome decades of pent-up anger.

    …

    If Washington is asking Egypt to honor its treaty with Israel, he said, Washington should also live up to its own Camp David commitment to Palestinian self-rule. He said the United States must respect the Arab world’s history and culture, even when that conflicts with Western values.

    Keep tactfully silent, maybe. Respect? No.

     

  • Being constructive

    Chris Stedman is patting himself on the back again for being more “constructive” and bridge-building and worried about marginalized communities than everyone else. He patted himself on the back on Facebook this morning for a blog post about Draw Mo Day.

    In my work for the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) I’ve labored alongside Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims. My biggest takeaway has been the notion that people of different religious and philosophical identities have a lot more in common than we instinctually imagine. Sure, my Muslim collaborators think Muhammad was the prophet of a God that I don’t even think exists. But, I don’t care much about that difference between us. Our deeper convictions—that all people have the right to dignity, that we need to find a way to achieve a more peaceful world—are the same and, frankly, they matter more.

    That’s lovely – as long as their deeper convictions are in fact that all people have the right to dignity (with all that that entails). It’s not safe to assume that with theists, though – theists always have the potential for believing the opposite – that not all people do have the right to dignity. Religions play a very large part in rejecting that very conviction and assertion.

    The theists (and Buddhists) Chris Stedman knows nevertheless hold that conviction, according to him. Good; excellent. But he doesn’t get to extrapolate from that that all theists do. He doesn’t get to assume that all theists put human dignity (and thus equality) first and belief in their god or their god’s prophet second.

    The significant disagreement among secular folks around EDMD isn’t a new phenomenon. Our community is an oft divided bunch. This diversity can be an asset as often as it is a weakness. But the only way this will be a source for strength is if we can come to a consensus on some ground rules. The first of these must be respect for our ideological differences, a respect we must extend to communities beyond our own.

    No it must not. That’s why I refuse to join Stedman’s parade, and why I keep raining on it. (Well, that plus the relentless way he keeps saying how swell he is for saying things like that.) I’m not going to sign up for any ridiculous blanket respect for ideological differences; I’m not going to respect the Catholic church’s ideology about women, for one example, and there are plenty more where that came from.

    I guess that means I’m not “constructive.” Well, too bad.

  • “Protecting faith and freedom”

    Oh no you don’t.

    I’ve already said I think Rev Jones is a bad man. He’s no ally or comrade of mine. In his world I would be a lifelong domestic servant with no vote no voice no views no rights, so even without his dramatic performances, he would be no comrade of mine.

    But that’s my reasoned choice; it’s not the law of the land. “Interfaith Alliance” please note.

    Washington, DC – Interfaith alliance President Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy issues the following statement in response to the killings of UN Workers in Afghanistan.

    …this violence is a response, unacceptable as it may be, to the burning of a Qur’an in Florida last month by a local pastor. The disrespect he has shown for the Muslim faith has now reflected on the rest of us and has led to the worst possible outcome.

    We as a nation must do more to make clear that bigoted rhetoric and action against the Muslim faith will not be tolerated and does not represent what is in the hearts and minds of the majority of Americans.

    Oh no we must not. We must do no such thing. What Gaddy chooses to call “bigoted rhetoric” against Islam is protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution, and even “interfaith alliances” don’t get to suppress it. We are allowed to criticize Islam, even harshly, and no interfaith boffin gets to stop us.

  • Urgent re-education

    And another thing. Where I come from, diversity training means something along the lines of learning not to express stupid dislike of people for absurd reasons such as race sex class sexual orientation foreignness and the like. But at the Foreign Office it apparently means more than that.

    All the staff involved in producing the memo are to be sent on “urgent diversity training”…”Although [the memo] was intended only for internal use, it was ill-judged, naive and disrespectful of some key tenets of the Catholic faith.”

    Clearly this urgent diversity training will be for the purpose of teaching staff to respect all key tenets of the Catholic faith – so “diversity” now means not just different kinds of people but different kinds of beliefs and “tenets,” and the underlying assumption is that they all have to be respected.

    But – but – but some ideas are just stupid and wrong. Some of the tenets of the Catholic church are just fictitious and wrong but others of them are harmful and wicked. People shouldn’t be trained to respect them. I can see the FO wanting narrowly vocational training in when to say what and to whom, although I’m not sure I can see extending that to internal memos – but I know I can’t see extending it to what to think, which is what this kind of “diversity training” amounts to.

  • Paul Sims on the Harry Taylor question

    I don’t disagree with Paul Sims on all points, but I do on some.

    If Taylor had been convicted for publishing the images in a magazine, or on a website, where members of the public have the choice not to buy or visit, I would strongly oppose his conviction. But this isn’t what Taylor did – he placed the images in a room provided for the religious to quietly practise their faith, away from public space.

    But why is a room provided in an airport for the religious to quietly practise their faith? Rooms aren’t provided for the religious to quietly practise their faith in supermarkets and bookshops and bus terminals and parks, so why in airports? And if such rooms are provided in airports, do they thereby become the equivalents of churches and mosques? If they are, then, again, what are they doing in airports? Why is part of a public space provided for the religious to quietly practise their faith at all? Why is part of a public space turned into a mini-mosque or church?

    Either the “prayer room” isn’t really a quasi-church or mosque, in which case Harry Taylor was just expressing his views in public, or it is, in which case Harry Taylor was making what seems to me to be a valid objection to religious encroachment on public space.

    But given the confrontational nature of the material, isn’t it entirely plausible that his aim was in fact to “harass, alarm or distress” religious believers by making them feel uncomfortable using a room provided precisely to allow them to feel comfortable practising their faith in a busy public building?

    But there again – why are rooms being provided to allow people to feel comfortable practising their faith in a busy public building? Why is this seen as desirable or necessary? Why can’t people just “practice their faith” internally until they get home or to a mosque or church?

    And it follows that the Chaplain was right to inform the police once she discovered that someone who clearly had no business in the prayer room was leaving this material in public view with a deliberateness that certainly warranted investigation.

    But there again, again – how can you have a room in a public facility where someone “has no business”? – apart from obvious exceptions like rest rooms and nursing rooms. And what are airports doing having “chaplains”? And if religious believers get to have chaplains, can we have the atheist or secular equivalent to speak for us and protect our delicate feelings and keep people out of our room?

    Having said all that – I don’t entirely disagree that what Taylor did was obnoxious. On the other hand, I don’t think being obnoxious should be illegal, much less subject to the ferocious punishment he got.

  • It’s even more of an outrage than I thought

    Manic street preacher reports that

    Mr Taylor seemed like a perfectly rational, intelligent and calm man who wanted to put his point across and was certainly not the “crackpot” that several bloggers, including myself to an extent, had presumed him to be. He was clearly still deeply affected by his horrendous childhood experiences of a strict Catholic upbringing by the Christian Brotherhood and was so distressed by the prospect of receiving a custodial sentence that he had to leave the courtroom midway through the hearing after nearly fainting.

    He also quotes the Telegraph with more and even nastier details:

    Judge James told him: “Not only have you shown no remorse for what you did but even now you continue to maintain that you have done nothing wrong and say that whenever you feel like it you intend to do the same thing again in the future.”…

    He was sentenced to six months in jail suspended for two years, ordered to perform 100 hours of unpaid work and pay £250 costs.

    Remorse – why should he show remorse for something so minor, so non-criminal, so victimless, so basically anodyne? What is all this monstrous bullying in the name of ever more abject “respect” for religion?