Time to end invocations

If Pennsylvania residents or viewers across the nation watching the recent spectacle that unfolded in Harrisburg were unclear about where freshman Rep. Stephanie Borowicz, R-Clinton County, stands on Jesus — and by implication, where she stands on the First Amendment — the answer reverberated throughout the chamber more than a dozen times.

Apparently meant to serve as a kind of holy buffer and a not-so-subtle plea for forgiveness for what was to come later, Borowicz delivered a two-minute prayer that invoked the name of Jesus no less than 13 times and included a bevy of overtly Christian-based words and phrases one might hear at an old-time religion tent revival.

Near the end of the prayer, Borowicz went into full evangelical preacher mode, saying that “every tongue will confess, Jesus, that you are lord,” which drew an “Objection!” from someone in the room. House Speaker Mike Turzai, who looked uncomfortable and, as far as I can tell, barely closed his eyes the whole time, then tapped Borowicz on the shoulder to wrap it up, which she promptly did, no doubt realizing she had gotten carried away.

The big news of the day wasn’t supposed to be the invocation. In a nation where the separation of church and state is routinely blurred, prayers of this type wouldn’t have raised many eyebrows. But the prayer was particularly problematic because the state’s first female Muslim representative, Movita Johnson-Harrell, of Philadelphia, was set to be sworn in immediately after the opening.

It was an important milestone for more diversity in politics that was overshadowed, probably by design, by Borowicz’s overwrought and potentially illegal appeal to heaven — the Christian heaven, that is — that may have violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

This was a public meeting in a public building in a nation that has established religious freedom as one of its founding principles, not just freedom for some believers, but freedom for all believers and all nonbelievers.

While the U.S. Supreme Court in 2014 ruled that open meetings can include sectarian invocations, meaning that they can invoke the specific god of the speaker, they must be reverential and “invite lawmakers to reflect upon shared ideals and common ends” and cannot “denigrate nonbelievers or religious minorities, threaten damnation, or preach conversion,” according to the court’s 5-4 decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway.

Borowicz careened well over that line.

But beyond the prayer to Jesus, the constitutional issues it raises and the impertinence toward adherents of Islam and to her fellow representative in the House, Borowicz’s breathless support Israel, both as a political entity and a theological mecca that all three Abrahamic religions claim as their own, was both unnecessary and beside the point.

If the goal here was to be incendiary and incite strong negative emotions, the opening succeeded. If the goal was to bring people together in a respectful manner, as invocations should, it failed. I dare say Borowicz was mainly there to preach, honor her religion at the detriment of all others and offer a thinly veiled rebuke of Johnson-Harrell’s swearing-in, no doubt one of the many reasons she asked Jesus for forgiveness.

Notwithstanding the House’s recent flirtation with constitutional impropriety, the chamber has already been taken to court for its policy of only allowing believers to deliver the invocation before meetings. Last year, U.S. Middle District Judge Christopher Conner found that the chamber must give nontheists an opportunity to deliver the opening message. The judge also ruled that the House’s requirement that lawmakers stand during the prayer was unconstitutional.

In short, sectarian prayers are permissible in Pennsylvania, but lawmakers can’t be compelled to participate in them.

I have covered public meetings in which residents have petitioned city and county boards to allow representatives from secular organizations to deliver the invocation as a way to try to get the board to be more inclusive. Believers and nonbelievers alike have quibbled over the sticky issue for years. Trying to appease everyone doesn’t admit to any easy answers.

I realize it might be a radical idea, but the simple solution is to end invocations altogether, start meetings with a polite greeting and quickly move to the public’s business. Invocations, oftentimes abused more for grandstanding than to be reverential or to espouse “shared ideals and common ends” among diverse people, can produce the opposite effect for which they are intended.

People of all faiths, or no faith at all, have freedom to live as they see fit outside of open meetings. Using public forums to offend the religious sensibilities of others does a disservice to Christianity and to democracy.

[Cover image credit: “Prayer” by fbuk.]

The anti-regressives: part 2

For those who are interested, here is first part of this series.

As other writers will likely attest, sometimes when sitting down to put pen to paper — or more accurately, keyboard to word processor — as I am wont to do in newspaper columns and as I have time on this blog, the entirety of what I might want to say on a particular subject is rarely fully formed before I take down the first sentence. Indeed, more times than not, while I usually have a general idea of where I’m headed on the page, epiphanies often occur in the process of writing, which is how the idea of the anti-regressives came about. This was either one of the more clever things that I have conjured up in 10-plus years of writing or it’s half-baked.

I’ll let others be the judge of that, but now that I have, I think, identified yet another subset of a subset of liberals who are at least as counterproductive and dangerous as regressive leftists like Glenn Greenwald, PZ Myers, Reza Aslan, Dean Obeidallah and all the rest, I only did so briefly in the previous post, tacking it on near the end of a fairly long post on Atheism is Unstoppable’s insidious YouTube critique of Lawrence Krauss’ recent essay, “Thinking Rationally About Terror.” It was also getting rather late as I was trying to finish the previous post, and I realized that I needed to fine tune a couple points and clear up a previously confusing title. And yes, I do realize that in identifying “anti-regressivism,” I run the risk of simply getting bogged down in labels and terminology.

In any case, I felt like I needed to take a few moments to more fully expand what I meant by the anti-regressives and how they came about in liberal circles.

That said, the first thing to point out is that I do not, in the least, blame people like Bill Maher, Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins for feeding the fire, for lack of a better phrase, of the kind of sentiment expressed in the cauldron of intolerance ginned up in YouTube videos, comment sections and on Twitter. I suggested that, perhaps, the impetus behind that kind of rhetoric sprung out of harsh criticisms of Islam as an ideology, whereby disenchanted or angry readers may go well beyond anything Dawkins or Harris have actually said on the subject and begin making crazy assertions like, “any city on earth … will have acts of Muslim terrorism in it,” as did the maker of the AiU video.

I don’t think Harris and Co. have fed the fire directly, and I know they certainly did not mean to do it indirectly either. Harris is currently collaborating with multiple current Muslims and former Muslims in a courageous and necessary attempt to reform the religion, or help believers reform it, from the inside out. Rather, I think that by pulling the gloves off and by being honest, forceful and unremitting in their critiques of Islam as an ideology, Harris and Co. have left the door open for certain individuals on the left to move the conversation far afield out into some kind of strange mixture of liberalism and outright bigotry and xenophobia. Harris, Dawkins, Maher and others aren’t Islamophobes simply because they criticize the religion of millions of Muslims. If that were the case, we must also dismiss them as Christophobes and Judeophobes, and that’s positively absurd.

We have overused the word, “Islamophobe,” to such an extent that it barely carries any meaning anymore, so let me bring that word back down to reality. There is true anti-Muslim bigotry out there, and it doesn’t just come from the right. If regressives like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan are apologists for Islam and are overtly tolerant of dangerous ideologies apparently just for the sake of political correctness, the anti-regressives, residing somewhere on the other side of the liberal dial, eschew political correctness altogether, and indeed, common decency, and take the opportunity to bury the better angels of their nature so that true intolerance can boil to the surface.

Take the following actual comments from people responding to AiU’s video, which was intended for fellow, self-proclaimed liberals:

KillerInstinct69 21 hours ago
I’m glad my state refused Syrian refugees. Conservatives are pretty much right when it comes to Islam in general…

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InvokerLongQua 2 weeks ago
What a fucking shame.
You guys should browse r/atheism to see more of this filths ilk.
If it ain’t Christianity, religion apparently has a place in this world. (ISLAM of course).

Am I in a fucking bizzaro world? I am seriously just going to vote Trump this year. If nobody has the balls to call out the Muslim threat, then Trump is the only candidate I will vote for.

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Adam Aston 3 weeks ago
perhaps he (Lawrence Krauss) should have taken a trip from Phoenix to Cologne Train station on New years Eve – I wonder what he’d think when he actually got to see some real life Muslims whilst 1000 of them were on thier robbing /molesting /raping spree of which they targeted only German women. (takes balls to rob a man you see). I used to highly respect Krauss but you can’t just criticise Islam and not it’s adherents. I would love to hear his opinions also if he came and lived where I do for a few months,lol . My Mrs can’t walk to the shop by herself at night for Pervy gangs of Muslim youth. …

The Dance Of Victory 3 weeks ago
(In response to the above comment) That sounds awful. Not sure where you live (assuming somewhere in the UK) but damn. I’d get the hell out of there. These Rapeugees all need rounding up and shot.

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Adam Aston 3 weeks ago
Have to say I was doubtful when I watched him (Krauss) speak to Noam Chomsky on some YT vid. I thought he was gonna drop to his knees as suck him off right there on the stage. uggh shrivelled old regressive cock – what a vision.

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MarketingDan 3 weeks ago
(testing new name – formerly 30 Day TYT Detox) Still his book A Universe From Nothing was brilliant – he should stick to what he’s good at. By throwing out his academic credentials like that on a subject he has no expertise in is very dishonest. He extends other scientist that respect – by admitting he has no expertise in other areas than his own. I Saw him in a conversion with Richard Dawkins a while back in Sydney – Great respect for the man, he’s achieved more than most ever will in his career at least. Sad day all the same.

This last one may not be questionable on the surface, but he seems to agree with most of AiU’s video, which most certainly is questionable.

A few more:

Callum Pearce (Britishgamer666) 3 weeks ago
+Ryan Floch Secular muslims? Oh, you mean the “HEY, LOOOK AT US! THE FEW MUSLIMS WHO SAY WE’RE MUSLIM AND ARE OKAY WITH OTHER RELIGIONS, BUT FUCK THE GAYS! ALSO, JEWS ARE BAD!” Those aren’t Muslims. Muslims have to follow the Quran to be Muslim. So that means killing non-believers, killing apostates, killing gays, converting, raping, forced marriage and children marriage. It’s happening in front of your eyes.+Proboscis the support for terrorism in the muslim world is around 10% according to any poll, so 100s millions will be correct, i don’t see how you being a fighter in the army gives you a better way to evaluate those numbers.
“they”, 100s of millions of muslims, are definitely “bad”, and not just because of the terrorism, that is a minor issue, what troubles me most is the support for sharia which exceeds 50% of muslims, that includes support for killing apostates, stoning adulterers etc…
if you are not against that then you are intellectually bankrupt.

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pwnsauce319 3 weeks ago
If you want to be very picky, you’ll get Islamic based violence on a significant scale in any city with Muslims. Not all of it is terrorism obviously. Some is honor killings, spousal abuse, and other manifestations of Islam. Of course you’ll have violence anywhere Buddhists or Christians or any people live, but that violence isn’t inspired by religion. Most violence committed by Muslims is inspired by Islam.

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Goshawk 3 weeks ago
+Lazarus You lost everyone with a semblance of intelligence when you said: “To be honest Chompsky (sic) has a point”. Saying we helped create ISIS is like saying we (UK,US and France) created Naziism. It’s pure, self hating, Chompskyist (sic) regressivism. Muslims have been on the warpath for decades. They’re doing their murderous stuff worldwide. They don’t need to be triggered by us. They’re at it in Africa(many countries), India, Lebanon, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines etc In fact, to find which states have Islamic terrorism just list the states that have substantial muslim populations. They’re at it everywhere. Go on – dig for the proof that we caused it all. It’s all our fault. Chomsky will have an explanation. You stupid, regressive twat.

***

Nevermind the people who seem confused about what “regressivism” means in the first place, these are folks who, in many cases, are familiar with the work of both Chomsky and Krauss and who either agreed with AiU’s assessment about Muslims or made an effort to reiterate some of his more outlandlish points. And in some of the more extreme cases, they even agreed that Donald Trump had some good ideas about how to deal with refugees seeking asylum in the United States.

I certainly don’t have time to sift through hundreds more posts tonight, but I dare say one could find similar sentiments, if not worse, over at Reddit. Again, I am and have been as tough on Islam, and the other monotheistic religions, as anyone, but the comments above show that people who are watching videos intended for left-wing viewers seem to have crossed over into what I am calling anti-regressivism, that is, using legit criticisms of Islam as an ideology — and using the unfiltered frontier that is the Internet — as a liberal license to run down Muslims or Muslim-majority communities, which is obviously a problematic overreach, counterproductive and childish.

The anti-regressives

[Note: I have fine tuned a couple points at the end and simplified what was previously a confusing title. – JES]

Before dismissing a person as a member of the regressive left, especially someone with as much intellectual integrity as theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, one probably should have a firm understanding of what the term actually means.

The Muslim reformer who coined the term, Maajid Nawaz, co-author of “Islam and the Future of Tolerance” with Sam Harris, provided an expansive view on what he meant by “regressive left” here, but basically it is:

a section within the left … that have come to the view for the sake of political correctness, for the sake of tolerating what they believe is other cultures and respecting different lifestyles. They have an inherent hesitation to challenge some of the bigotry that can occur within minority communities. I mean at the end of the day if we truly subscribe to liberal human rights values in their universality and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they apply not just in favor of minority communities, but in some instances upon minority communities too. …

The term has been clarified further in interviews with Nawaz, Harris, Dave Rubin and others, but it simply describes, in its narrowest form, a subset of liberals who refuse to acknowledge the problem of Islamic extremism and the real religious motivations behind jihad, or worse, those who work as apologists to deflect blame away from political Islam, or Islamism, to any number of negative social, cultural or economic conditions.

Unfortunately for YouTube user Atheism-is-Unstoppable, who just comes off as shrill, half-cocked and angry in his pair of attack videos on Krauss’ recent New Yorker article, “Thinking Rationally About Terror,” AIU never gets around to telling us what exactly he means when he calls Krauss a “raging regressive,” other than smearing him as a “weakling” and “coward” who is not willing to “face and confront and fight against evil motherfuckers.” Instead, in AIU’s estimation, Krauss “wants to tolerate and even celebrate them (he means the evil motherfuckers, I guess) or at least tolerate and celebrate the level of violence that they bring. Your words, Larry, not mine.”

Unfortunately again, AIU only gets about six paragraphs into his excoriation of Krauss’ 13-paragraph essay before throwing his hands up in a fit of obscenities and name-calling. I happen to think AIU did read through the whole piece but only chose to talk about less than half of it for reasons that escape me, but in any case, had he examined the entire piece on video, he would have could have come away with a more balanced view.

Here are the two videos in question:

Krauss’ essential point in the essay was that we all should step back from the “panic” that terrorism sometimes induces and consider that we, meaning those who live in modern societies, are more likely to die in a car crash or by routine gun violence on the street than to an act of terror and that surrendering to irrational fear is offering up a win to the terrorists:

Driving a car carries with it a set of inevitable risks. Going to a concert or eating at a restaurant should not. Still, the risks of falling prey to terrorism are nevertheless very small for most Americans. Terrorists have forced us to accept that any activity associated with living in a free society now carries with it a finite, and microscopically small, chance of tragic horror. Still, it’s up to us to choose how to react to this minuscule possibility.

Needless to say, it is terrifying to know that there are individuals living among us with the express intent of killing randomly, for effect. But we must recognize that that’s the point of terrorism: it aims to scare us, thereby disrupting normal life. More than that, terrorism is designed drive a wedge between segments of a community which otherwise might have coexisted peacefully, both politically and socially.

… Succumbing to the intended effects of terrorism means giving in to it. By contrast, responding in a way that is commensurate with the actual threat—recognizing that the average person living in France, for example, is living with a threat of murder of less than one in ten thousand, a threat equivalent to living in New York City—is more appropriate and healthy. We can be more vigilant without becoming irrational.

If we were more rational in the degree to which we’re alarmed about terrorism, we might become more rational in our responses to it. …

And unlike AIU’s intellectually dishonest and literally half-hearted characterization of the essay, Krauss did say at the end, had AIU carried his “analysis” that far, that we are in a fight against terrorism, and we should proceed with more reasonable and practical approaches that put terrorism into its proper perspective alongside all the other things in the world that threaten civil society:

… We need to distinguish policies that can realistically improve the safety of the public from those that only appear to do so. In this regard, the greatest loss arising from the nation’s fixation on terror may be the opportunity cost in time and energy that could instead be spent on developing policies that address other urgent national concerns and needs. Perhaps the biggest defense against terrorism isn’t just to demonstrate that we can go on with business as usual; it’s to use terrorism as an occasion for addressing actual safety concerns that we can control. Terrorism is designed to distract us and muddy our thinking. To fight it, we need to keep it in perspective.

AIU seems to take particular issue with the Krauss’s failure to specifically name “Islamic terrorism,” deferring to a safer term, “religious extremism.” As I pointed out in a comment on YouTube, it apparently never occurred to AIU that a politically correct, actual regressive editor at The New Yorker could have been responsible for “softening” the language in the essay. Columnists, even famed scientists like Krauss, are not afforded absolute editorial control, especially not in a national publication such as that.

In any case, Krauss has been critical of all three major religions, including Islam, and was particularly forceful in his debate with Muslim Hamza Tzortzis. Indeed, in this recent interview, Krauss uses the words “Islamic terrorism” to describe the problem and says “any kind of fundamentalism,” including Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, is dangerous and a threat.

Perhaps the most perplexing part of AIU’s diatribe was this bit of wild generalization:

Name any city on earth and you will have acts of Muslim terrorism in it, provided there are Muslims there of course.

In the YouTube comment, I took up the challenge and named every major city in Canada, with the possible exception of Toronto, which was not the victim of a direct act of terrorism, but a failed attempt, which may or may not count in AIU’s shoddy calculus. With some research and time, I no doubt could come up with hundreds more communities across the world that contain plenty of Muslims who somehow, in spite of themselves, manage to avoid going on killing sprees or hurling themselves into buildings.

In short, then, AIU is guilty of same kind of thing Krauss actually warned against, implicitly at least, in his piece, and judging from some of the disturbing comments posted in response to his video on YouTube, AIU is clearly not alone in his thinking. The video just serves as a distraction from the kind of reasoned approach that will be needed to help us confront our society’s many problems, which come at us on multiple fronts. It also oversimplifies and overdramatizes the scope of the religious problem in suggesting, ludicrously, that radical strains of Islam are a ubiquitous threat infesting nearly every community in America and the world.

Once upon a time, crazy talk like that was confined only to the far right; now, it has apparently manifested itself in a kind of anti-regression birthed out of a “radicalization” of thought that, perhaps, finds its impetus in outspoken critics of Islam like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher, who, harsh on the religion though they are, have, from my view, always been careful not to denigrate forward-thinking, modern and peaceful loving Muslims as people or the communities in which they live. Nuance, of course, seems all but lost on anti-regressives and the thousands of people who watched the two videos and hundreds who “liked” them on YouTube. Or, perhaps what I am calling “anti-regression” just amounts to unfiltered intolerance, in which case, it deserves as little serious consideration from reasonable thinkers as regressive leftism.

In any case, whereas regressive leftists kowtow to Islamists and attempt to deflect responsibility away from faith and religion, anti-regressives seem to sail off the cliff on the other side of the spectrum. If, as Rubin once argued, regressives are to liberals as Tea Party supporters are to conservatives, anti-regressives are the “patriot movement” militiamen in political reverse.

[Cover image credit: American Dreaming]

Simi Rahman: ‘There is only We’

Apologies to folks expecting or wanting new content from me more than a handful of times per month. Work has required a little more attention with the rollout of a new content management system, and I fully intended to post a few things over the holidays, but it obviously didn’t happen since I was trying to make the most of trip to see family and friends.

***

In any case, earlier this month I reached out to a former believer named Simi Rahman requesting permission to repost an inspiring personal account of her time as a “moderate” Muslim living in the Midwest and her courageous journey out of Islam. Because of a filter on her Facebook account, a couple weeks passed before she got back to me, but she did, and I’m glad to be able to share this with readers in my own — however limited — sphere of influence.

The following was initially removed from Facebook because it supposedly “violates their standards” — you know, the politically correct mandate that says no one can speak out against the dangers of Islam less than be branded an Islamophobe — but was later reinstated.

Her story deserves to be read thoroughly, and multiple times, by Christians, Muslims and atheists alike because it, in bold form, dares to spell out precisely why religion, and not just fundamentalist strains, is so potentially harmful, not just to adults, but to children. Indeed, Rahman’s account of Islamic theology, in many ways, could just as well apply to Christianity since they share many of the same doctrines, Old Testament stories and notions about the nature of God. What is it about religion that can turn a formerly moderate mind into a radical, she asks? One example was the “fealty that Allah demands during the Eid ul Adha (Festive of the Sacrifice)” in contemplating God’s commandment for Abraham to kill his son, which is the same sort of personal sacrifice Christians must, in theory, be willing to make if ever they are asked to demonstrate their own faith in a tangible, unambiguous way.

Fortunately, most Muslims don’t act on the barbaric impulses that inspired certain passages in the Quran and the hadith, and fortunately for Christians, big brother in the sky, despite supposedly being the same today, yesterday and forever, somehow never gets around to making any similar physical demands of loyalty to modern believers as he was wont to do so many times in the Old Testament fables.

As she rightly points out, then, fealty itself to anachronistic sacred texts and an “archaic structure of beliefs” that have no place in the year 2015 is the central challenge that we, as a species, must overcome together.

***

Here are Rahman’s thoughts in their entirety:

Dec. 5, 2015

Every Muslim humanist is asking themselves a question I first asked myself in September 2001.
How do you tell a radical Muslim from a moderate peace loving one?
And here is my train of thought.

The 9/11 hijackers reminded me of boys I had gone to school with in Dubai in the 80s and 90s. They were the same age, background, and modern enough to have listened to 80s pop and chased girls. Meaning that just like most young people in the Muslim world, we weren’t that religious.
So, I thought, maybe I could locate the differences between them and me, and at some point I would identify a breakaway point. Something they would do that I never would. And it took me a while to realize this, and now with the California shootings, it has reaffirmed for me, that indeed, when it comes to being able to tell a moderate from a radical in Islam, you can’t.

You really can’t tell until the moment before they pull the trigger, who is moderate and who is jihadi. Tashfeen has broken our moderate backbone, by revealing that she lived among us, unnoticed, normal, experiencing motherhood, enveloped in our secure community and yet, had radicalized.

And that’s the problem, that there are many others like her with exactly the same beliefs, who may not have been ignited yet by a radical cleric, but if the opportunity presented itself, they would follow. They’re like a dormant stick of dynamite, waiting for the fuse to be lit. The TNT is already in there.

What’s it made of? Not the 5 pillars, belief, charity, prayer, fasting and pilgrimage. Not the sayings of the prophet as to how to lead a good and just life. Not the celebration of Eid ul Fitr.

It possibly glimmers through in the fealty that Allah demands during the Eid ul Adha, when Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as a sign of his superior faith is commemorated in a sacrifice and celebration very much like the American Thanksgiving, with family and food. But without the football. And with a side of divinely aborted filicide.

It is there in the silence one must maintain during prayer, brooking no interruptions, because it would make the prayer invalid. It is there in the severity of the hijab when it is followed to a tee. Not a hair can show. It is there in the forced separation of men and women at social gatherings.
It is present in every act that is performed that excludes us from the mainstream. It is present in the very concept of Us and Them. Because the only way we remain Us is to reject Them. The only way to be an exemplary Us is to reject westernization at every turn. Halal only is a sham, constructed out of this notion of meat that has been cut a certain way. It’s the same meat. And yet there is a magical difference that people will attest to in all seriousness.

I went deep into the Midwest, wore a hijab for a year and lived there for 8 years. In that time, I attended ISNA gatherings, met w educated, professional people like myself who were also asking the same questions. They were looking to their faith for answers. And sure, there were efforts made to modernize Islam, but they were only superficial. We couldn’t do it. We couldn’t do it because there is a logical dilemma at the core of Islam. And that is, that the Quran is the last word of God, that it is perfect and unchangeable. And to even suggest such a thing is blasphemy and apostasy.

And so, to understand the moderate mind, you have to envision it on a continuum from radical to middle, but the closer you get to liberal, there is a wall. It creeps up on you, in the condemnation of homosexuality, in the unequal treatment and subjugation of women, but it’s there. Beyond that wall that they are afraid to look over, for fear of eternal hell fire and damnation, is where the answer lies though. So being a Muslim moderate these days is like running a race with a ball and chain attached to your feet. A handicap. Unless you can imagine what the world beyond that wall looks like, you can’t really navigate it. If you’re so terrified of blasphemy that you refuse to look over, you’re forever stuck. Right here. And behind you is the jihadi horde, laying claim to real Islam, practicing it to perfection, as it is laid out in the Quran. A veritable rock and a hard place. I feel your pain. I’ve been there. And it was untenable.

I read, discussed, debated alongside many good Muslim young people from all over the world, in Internet forums, trying to argue our way to a solution, much like we are doing on social media right now. I knew I rejected the homophobia, I knew I rejected the subjugation of women. And it all remained a theory until I saw it in practice. In the drawing rooms of the Midwestern professional moderate Muslim. There was the discussion of whether the verse that allows a man to strike his wife instead actually means, he should strike her with a feather. As a doctor, I am a humanist first, and so the blatant homophobia was irrational, dangerous and something I stopped tolerating politely. I attended presentations at the mosque of videos from the Palestinian Territories, played to rouse the outrage of the gathered congregation.

And that’s when the absurdity started to really hit home. What in the world were we doing? We were training our children to kowtow without questioning an authority that we believed would keep them safe from evil western ways. And so the community’s children went to Sunday school, wore hijab, prayed and fasted. They were enveloped in a Muslim identity that was unlike any that I had experienced before. I was raised in a Muslim country in the Middle East and religion was something we kept in its place, somewhere after school, soccer and cartoons. Here was a more distilled, pure and, most dangerously, a context-free Islam. There were no grandmothers here to sagely tell us which parts of the Quran to turn a blind eye to. There were no older cousins here who skipped Friday prayers and goofed off with their friends instead. Oh no. This was Islam simmered in a sauce of Midwestern sincerity, and boiled down to its dark, concentrated core. This was dangerous.

As my children grew older, I grew more afraid. I had tolerated their father’s insistence on sending them to Sunday school, where mostly they played and learned a few surahs. But as they grew older I knew it would change. A sincerity would creep in to their gaze, teenage rebellion would find just cause in judging your less religious parents as wanting and inferior. Bad Muslims. How many teenagers have started to wear hijab before their own mothers? I’ve lost count. Mothers who found themselves in this dilemma would choose to join their child on this journey. They would cover too, and as such offered a layer of protection from the ideology by offering perspective.

I worried though, about the Internet, about radical recruiters posing as friends, finding willing and malleable clay in our unformed children. For we would keep them unformed. We would shield them from western influences in order to protect them, only to create a rift that could be exploited as an entry point. We would in essence be leaving our children vulnerable to radicalization.
And that is exactly what has been happening. The young girls from Europe and the US who have traveled to Syria to join ISIS, have done so because they’re looking for what all teenagers are looking for, a sense of identity, to differentiate themselves from their parents and find a separate identity, the thrill of rebellion, adventure. They can’t date, drink or dance, so they might as well Daesh.
This thought is what drove me to scale that wall. I dropped prayer, stopped feeling guilty for not praying. I drank alcohol, in moderation like most people do in the west, and I didn’t instantly turn into an alcoholic. I dropped the need to cover to my ankles and wrists, and wore regular clothes. Bacon. I mean, seriously, it’s bacon, I don’t have to explain how good it was. I turned to look back at the wall from the other side, and it was…a relief. I relief to lose that fear of apostasy. To realize there was no such thing, it was purely in my mind. The ideas that had worn a groove in my mind, the guilt, the anxiety, the self flagellation for being a bad Muslim, all were gone.

And now, looking in the rear view mirror, I cannot recall what that felt like. I can’t recall what believing used to feel like, because it’s not as if there’s an absence. It’s not like I miss it. No, in its place has come a more robust understanding of humanity, philosophy, history, human nature and yes, even of religion.

A realization that the future is everything. There is no heaven or hell. Or rather, we no longer need a heaven and a hell to curb us into moral behavior. We have evolved. We know more of the universe, too much to be afraid of it anymore. We know more of this earth, and we know that every human being is made of exactly the same material. There is no Us, no Them. There is only We. We need to move on. We need to break free. We need to scale the wall so we can push back against the forces that seek to snatch our children’s minds and bodies. We need to protect them, we need to inhabit our own intelligence instead of surrender it in the service of an archaic structure of beliefs that make absolutely no sense to follow in this day and age.

We have to break the chains in our own minds in order to do any of this. And it is scary. Especially when you’ve believed your whole life in the concept of blasphemy. Especially when you know that to openly come out and reject these beliefs would be to risk alienation, to be ostracized and maligned, rejected and alone. And in many cases, dangerous to your own person.

So maybe that is where we should start. By encouraging Muslims to create safe spaces to challenge the logical fallacies and inconsistencies, not between translation to translation, but between Islam and the modern world.

Peter Janecki, who created a machine that converts sewage into clean drinkable water and energy, noted in his TEDMED talk recently that he had to zoom out and look at it not as a garbage problem, but as an energy problem. He had to make the problem bigger in order to come up with a solution.
And I think it’s the same with islam. We have to make the problem bigger. Instead of minimizing, we need to blow it up big and examine it and let go of this idea that a sacred text is unchangeable. Or unquestionable. We have to look at it instead as a humanism problem. Is Islam, in the way it is practiced and preached, humanistic enough? In that does it respect the personhood of a human being enough, and if it doesn’t, then what can we do about it.

We have to make it ok to walk away. We have to come out of this closet and into the light. Because none of us are safe anymore. And none of the old bandages will hold much longer before it becomes a full on carnage that we only have ourselves to blame for.

[Photo credit: The Brick Testament]

Internet overlord of obscurantism

In his seemingly limitless propensity for thick-headedness and mischaracterizations, PZ Myers is at it again, skewing points that Richard Dawkins made about Islam recently on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” — or apparently just commenting on a Daily Beast article about the discussion between Dawkins and Maher, rather than, you know, taking an extra 3 minutes and watching the full video to get some context. Of course, doing so would not have played into the message that Myers is attempting to convey to his fawning followers, so he picks out the most provocative part of the interview and latches onto it, as he is wont to do, like a wolf going after a fresh kill.

Here is the clip from “Real Time”:

The interview begins with Maher pointing out that Dawkins actually came to the defense of Maryam Namazie, an ex-Muslim who was recently disinvited from speaking at Warwick University for her “controversial” (my quotes) views on Islam. Namazie, ironically enough, is a fellow writer with Myers at Free Thought Blogs and has been a particularly harsh critic of Islam. Dawkins and Salman Rushdie, another vocal, liberal critic of Islam, were able to get Namazie reinstated.

In his post, Myers, of course, doesn’t mention any of this, nor that Dawkins was standing up for free speech at college campuses. Instead, he launched into a confused analogy between Dawkins’ fondness for tolerance and Enlightenment principles in the West versus the evolutionary biologists’ critiques of Islam. Here is Myers, in characteristic shrillness, again, just cut and pasting from an article about the interview, rather than actually pulling from the conversation itself (interview quotes in italics):

Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher — a combination to bring out the worst in both — got together to damn everything Muslim.

Oh, that’s their culture, you have to respect it, Dawkins said mockingly.

That’s right! That’s what they say. It’s just insane, Maher said, swooning.

Liberal about everything else, but then this one exception, ‘It’s their culture.’ Well, to hell with their culture,Dawkins concluded, to a storm of applause and a passionate yelp of approval from Maher.

To hell with their culture? I despise all religions, and I can sneer at every hateful thing that emerges out of a culture, every culture — but to ignore the good to condemn the bad, to make sweeping dismissals of entire complex traditions…I am sorry, Professor Dawkins, but that is bigotry. To forgive the sins of one culture because of the things one likes about it, while damning another culture wholesale because you don’t like certain parts of it (even when those parts are unforgiveably evil) is something that perpetuates conflict.

Myers, and apparently the author at The Daily Beast, isn’t interested in accurately and honestly reflecting what was said in the interview, as the article doesn’t mention Dawkins’ support of Namazie either. If he were, Myers could not have possibly concluded, as he seems to do, that Dawkins somehow thinks that we:

need to erase the history of the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, and contributions all around the world. We should not ignore the Islamic gifts to literature, poetry, music, mathematics, and science; we must not forget that these are human beings who may feel the deepest love for their culture as a whole, even as they deplore aspects of it.

Dawkins and Maher were clearly referring to oppressive cultures within a minority of Muslim communities that suppress free thought, demonize gays and apostates and subjugate women and force them to wear burqas and full-body coverings as per fundamentalist interpretations of sharia law. They, of course, were not referring to the entire Muslim community or the majority of Muslims who respect free speech and the rights of women to wear what they please, including the right to cover their faces in respect to their religious traditions. Only someone who has been sitting on the sidelines intellectually could possibly conclude that Dawkins does not understand and respect the contributions to math, art and science that Muslims have made down through the generations.

Myers concludes his post with an obligatory nod to radical feminism, as if an old white guy, who happens to be one of the preeminent scientists and thinkers of our day, could possibly have any wise words to offer humanity:

Richard Dawkins is a smart guy, and we see these glimmerings of appreciation for the complexity of human life (how can he not, as a biologist?) in his writings — I hope he can see that he’s taking the wrong path. Even more importantly, I hope atheists everywhere can learn that he’s not the atheist leader we need…and that maybe we shouldn’t be looking for a man to tell us what to think at all.

Self-defeating as that last line is, all of that is actually not the most disturbing part of Myers’ post. The most disturbing part is the headline, “Atheists should not condemn any culture.” Seriously? So, we should not condemn cultures that practice animal sacrifice? What about cultures that eschew the rights of women and essentially give young girls zero say-so in who they can marry? What about cultures practicing female genital mutilation? Cultures that support and encourage honor killing? Cultures that support, with a full endorsement from their holy texts, the work of thugs who lop off the heads of journalists, shoot young girls for daring to educate themselves and hysterical jihadists who hurl themselves into buildings?

This, like the rest of Myers’ pathetic attempts at disparagement, is utter bullshit.

Sam Harris exposes Salon’s intellectual dishonesty

After attempted hack jobs against Sam Harris like this article and this one, it’s not like we needed more proof, but Salon’s dishonest brand of “journalism” and anti-intellectualism has now been laid bare, as Harris published the full version of his interview with Salon writer Sean Illing.

Harris, who called Salon “among the worst offenders of the new pseudo-journalism,” said he only agreed to do an interview with the website if the following two conditions were met:

1) I would get final approval of all the words attributed to me; 2) I could say whatever I wanted about Salon. These conditions were agreed to, and I spent several hours producing the following exchange by phone and email.

In an early version of the story and interview posted on its website, Salon made this claim in its introduction:

Harris’ remarks were edited merely for clarity and length. No substantive changes were made to the text beyond those considerations.

Yet, the current lead-in to the article says this:

This was mostly an email correspondence, not a traditional interview, so remarks were edited throughout.

The interview posted on Salon’s website omits a large block of text, in which Harris essentially implicates Salon as an active participant in the Regressive Left program of, not only running down Harris and other critics of Islam, but more importantly, ignoring or downplaying the very real dangers inherent in the religious motivations behind jihadism and literalist readings of the Quran and hadith.

I commented briefly on Salon’s handling of this interview on Twitter (here and here), but I thought I would repost the entire omitted part of Harris interview so that as many people as possible, within whatever limited reach I have, can be made aware of the pervasive levels of intellectual dishonesty in certain liberal circles.

Harris’ notes about the omission bookend the commentary:

[Note: Salon deleted the following section from the interview.]

As long as we’re talking about the regressive Left, it would be remiss of me not to point out how culpable Salon is for giving it a voice. The problem is not limited to the political correctness and masochism I’ve been speaking about—it’s also the practice of outright deception to defame Islam’s critics. To give you one example, I once wrote an article about Islamist violence in which I spoke in glowing terms about Malala Yousafzai. I literally said nothing but good things about her. I claimed that she is the best thing to come out of the Muslim world in a thousand years. I said she is extraordinarily brave and eloquent and doing what millions of Muslim men and women are too terrified to do, which is to stand up to forces of theocracy in her own society. I also said that though she hadn’t won the Nobel Prize that year, she absolutely deserved it—and deserved it far more than some of its recent recipients had. And in response to this encomium, Salon published a piece by the lunatic Murtaza Hussain entitled, “Sam Harris Slurs Malala,” which subjected my views to the same defamatory and dishonest treatment that I’ve come to expect from him. And this sort of thing has been done to me a dozen times on your website. And yet Salon purports to be a forum for the civil discussion of important ideas.

Most readers simply don’t understand how this game is played. If they read an article which states that Sam Harris is a racist, genocidal, xenophobic, pro-torture goon who supported the Iraq war—all of which has been alleged about me in Salon—well, then, it’s assumed that some journalists who work for the website under proper editorial control have actually looked into the matter and feel that they are on firm enough ground to legally say such things. There’s a real confusion about what journalism has become, and I can assure you that very few people realize that much of what appears on your website is produced bymalicious freaks who are just blogging in their underpants.

I’m not saying that everything that Salon publishes is on the same level, and I have nothing bad to say about what you’ve written, Sean. But there is an enormous difference between honest criticism and defamatory lies. If I say that Malala is a total hero who deserves a Nobel Prize, and Salon titles its article “Sam Harris Slurs Malala,” that’s tabloid-level dishonesty. It’s worse, in fact, because when one reads about what a nanny said about Brad and Angelina in a tabloid, one knows that such gossip stands a good chance of not being true. Salon purports to be representing consequential ideas fairly, and yet it does this sort of thing more often than any website I can think of. The latest piece on me was titled “Sam Harris’ dangerous new idiocy: Incoherent, Islamophobic and simply immoral.” I don’t think I’m being thin-skinned in detecting an uncharitable editorial position being taken there. Salon is telling the world that I’m a dangerous, immoral, Islamophobic idiot. And worse, the contents of these articles invariably misrepresent my actual views. This problem isn’t remedied by merely publishing this conversation.

[Of course, Salon didn’t actually publish that part of the conversation.]

Under the spell: Revelation and mutual exclusivity

Other than its presentation of Scientology, which I would argue isn’t a theistic religion at all, the following video from DarkMatter2525, outlines with a good deal of accuracy — with a couple of quibbles that I will point out — the way in which many religions, and denominations within certain faiths, claim for themselves the only path to God and absolute truth:

 

Represented here are:

• Mainstream Protestant Christians;
• Muslims, who obviously do not acknowledge Jesus as god;
• Jews;
• Catholics, who are known to focus on the “faith without works is dead” mantra, although Catholic.com takes exception to that characterization;
• Methodists;
• Relativistic Unitarian Universalists;
• Baptists, and in particular, Southern Baptists, and more specifically still, redneck Southern Baptists;
• Revisionist Mormons;
• Creepy Scientologists;
• Babbling Pentecostalists;
• Meditating Hindus; and of course,
• A mildly (and ironically) preachy-sounding atheist, to which I take a little exception.

I wish atheist commentators wouldn’t stereotype some Christians, namely Southern Baptists, in this way as slack-jawed backwoods cretans, and while they may hold bankrupt ideologies based on equally deeply flawed ancient texts, most, from my 30-plus years experience with believers — as a believer myself and now as a freethinker — are more or less thoughtful human beings who just just been infected by the germ of faith, and almost like an addiction, have trouble letting go of all that false hope and comfort that comes from belief in big brother.

On the flip side, I wish we could also be rid of the characterization that atheists and freethinkers profess to have all the answers. While I understand what Peter Boghossian and “street epistemologists” are attempting to do in helping people explore why they believe what they believe by engaging the faithful in a socratic line of friendly, non-confrontational questioning, we do, it seems to me, run the risk of crossing a line between merely having a conversation on faith and proselytizing, to which Boghossian would probably retort, “Not if you’re doing it right.” I do, of course, wish that more people would find the light of reason, re-examine their faith and conclude that we can, individually and as a species, live more fulfilling lives without god and religion, and if merely sharing my opinion achieves that outcome for some people, all the better, but I try not to actively “win converts” to the cause because atheism itself has no cause. All content that I produce or share through my website or social media is voluntarily consumed. People are free to hear what I have to say or simply ignore me. Unfortunately, the faithful, from street preachers, evangelizers and missionaries shilling the gospel message on unwitting Africans or South Americans, don’t extend the same courtesy to the rest of us.

That said, one of the main points of this video — and as far as I can tell nearly all of DarkMatter’s excellent videos — is to make people laugh and poke fun at religion all the while. The highlight for me was this brilliant exchange between the Mormon, a black Methodist and a Scientologist:

Mormon: Jesus visited the Indians and cursed black people.
Black guy: Say What?
Mormon: And I’m going to get my own planet after I die.
Scientologist: Not if Xenu escapes his volcano prison.
Black guy: Say what?
Pentecostalist: Ooglyscooglekutalooloolabidabitakasslope …

Say what, indeed.

The other point of the video, of course, is to make the rather obvious case — although it must not be so obvious to millions of believers — that many, if not all, mainstream religions profess to be the one and only conduit of information from heaven, while all others offer only false narratives.

But as the video suggests, if a perfect deity really was the source of all information known to man, would it not have wanted to make sure, in all its omniscience and power, to get its message right the first time, such that thousands of different and warring doctrines and ideologies could not have possibly developed that cast doubt on all other competing doctrines?

Credit: SaintGasoline.com

Credit: SaintGasoline.com

At best, this is sloppy work from a being who is supposed to be flawless; at worst, this is deleterious to the existence of an all-knowing, omniscient, perfect god. As DarkMatter tells us, a perfect god would have simply gotten it right the first time.

Freethinkers don’t pretend to have all the answers about life and the universe, but we do have a more trustworthy method for finding out what is true about the world, and that is precisely the point. Whereas religion professes to have all the answers to life’s greatest questions without a shred of evidence for any of it, science is about the business of collecting facts and data to close the gaps in our knowledge about the origin of the universe and our place in the cosmos in an environment where learning and asking questions is, not just OK, but encouraged.

With good reason, then, Christians across the globe begin teaching young children myths about creationism and intelligent design and downplaying the real science of evolution by natural selection; they know the proliferation of facts and empirical evidence is detrimental to faith itself — as did Darwin when he first hypothesized about evolution — so they claim to have a direct information feed from heaven. Unfortunately for them, many other religions make the exact same claim. They can’t all be right, but they can all sure be wrong.

Hope he’s enjoying those 72 virgins

Abdelhamid Abaaoud, an ISIS member and Islamic radical, was killed yesterday as part of a raid in Saint Denis. According to this story from BBC News:

The suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was among those killed in a French police raid on Wednesday, prosecutors say.

Credit: Reuters

Credit: Reuters

They confirmed the Islamic State (IS) militant had died in a flat in the Paris suburb of Saint Denis.

His body was found riddled with bullets and shrapnel in the apartment.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said he had received intelligence that Abaaoud had passed through Greece on his return from Syria.

It is unclear whether the Belgian had concealed himself among the thousands of migrants arriving in Greece before heading for other EU nations.

One of the other dead Paris attackers, who blew himself up outside the Stade de France during an international football match, was traced to Greece by his fingerprints, where he was registered as a migrant. …

Here is a BBC timeline of his movements in the last two years:

• 2013 — Said to have first visited Syria, joining the Islamic State group before slipping back to his home country, Belgium

• Jan. 20, 2014 — Passes through Germany’s Cologne-Bonn airport, en route to the Turkish city of Istanbul. Returns to Syria, where he becomes one of the faces of IS propaganda

• Jan. 15 — His mobile phone is reportedly traced to Greece from calls made to an Islamist cell in Verviers, Belgium

• Nov. 16 — Three days after the Paris attacks, a foreign intelligence service alerts France that he is back in Europe, having passed through Greece; police receive a tip-off that he is on French territory

• Nov. 18 — Killed in police raid on Paris suburb of Saint Denis

[Feature photo credit: Getty]

Religion of peace?

Note: As I just finished a rather lengthy op-ed piece on the recent Paris attacks, terrorism and Islam, I don’t feel the need to retread all of that ground here. I will post a link to the column once it hits the press. I did want to offer some other commentary on my experiences on Twitter and elsewhere online Friday night hours after the attacks took place. Those thoughts and my interactions on Twitter, are collected here.

***

Umer Ali, a journalism student and contributor with The Nation, should be commended for having the courage to say what many in the West, even seasoned reporters and editors at major newspapers, have cowardly avoided, namely that terrorism (and the oppression of women, apostates and gay people) in 2015 is motivated by religion, contrary to the popular phrase on Twitter this weekend, “terrorism has no religion,” and that religion is political Islam based on literal and fundamentalist interpretations of the Quran and the hadith.

Sure, most everyday Muslims are peaceful believers — even though high percentages of Muslims support Sharia law in Middle East, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, according to Pew — but as I pointed out in the column this week, it is the dangerous, religiously-fueled ideologies permeating in places like Iraq and Syria that need to be challenged by leaders within Muslims communities since it is Muslims themselves, people of other faiths and skeptics and gays living in secrecy who are suffering the most under the heel of these oppressive regimes and statelets.

Here is how Ali concluded his honest and clear-minded look at the real problem:

The fundamental mistake committed by Muslims all over the world is statements like ‘Terrorism has no religion’, ‘Terrorists don’t represent Islam.’ Rather than being in denial and delusional, let’s accept the fact that these terrorists ARE Muslims and they DO represent an interpretation of Islam – which most Muslims reject.

Neither equating the whole Islamic world with terrorism, nor giving sweeping statements, acquitting it from the responsibility, is the solution. Islam needs a reformation and Muslims need to be educated about changing world realities and evolving societies.

West, on the other hand must realize that invading countries for the actions of few is not a viable solution, for it only helps radicalize more minds. A global effort to rewrite the anti-terrorism narrative is need of the hour too.

Thousands of liberals and Islamic apologists took to Twitter on Friday night and through the weekend in an attempt to disabuse us of the notion that religion has anything to do with terrorism. Most that I saw were critical of people who were bigoted against Muslims as people, but many, like the following tweet, did not distinguish between Muslims as people and criticisms of Islam on its own merits:

And there were and are many, many more, like these:

And, of course, this misguided tweet, and with it, the viral, cherry-picked quote from the Quran that makes Allah sound like some kind of peace-loving Jain:

Growing increasingly impatient with deluded statements like, “Islam is a religion of peace,” I took to Twitter myself Friday night and posted the following series of tweets:

And for proof of this, in addition to the numerous examples Umer Ali pointed out, we need to look no further than ISIS’ own statement on the attacks in Paris, which, in part, reads:

Youths who divorced the world and went to their enemy seeking to be killed in the cause of Allah, in support of His religion and His Prophet, Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him, and his charges, and to put the nose of His enemies in the ground.

As Ali Rizvi pointed out, ISIS’ statement is a reference to verse 59:2 in the Quran.

The point is that, just like with the Yahweh in the Bible, for however many verses Muslim apologists produce that seem to condemn murder and point to the benevolence of their god, other verses paint a contrary view. And even if the message from verse 5:32 in the Quran posted above was the consistent message throughout scripture, it’s still suspect and doesn’t hold water since no loving father or deity says, “Look, wretch, at how great I am; now get on all-fours and worship me” or else, die — unless, of course, we alter the definition of “love” to include such things as self-loathing and masochism.

The sooner we realize this as a society, the sooner we realize that Christopher Hitchens was right all along, that religion “infects us in our most basic integrity” as human beings, the better, and society will not move forward on a path toward lasting peace until that day.