The Bully’s Lament

Christian Apologist Anthony DeStefano: Atheists to blame for world’s ills

I don’t want to give Anthony DeStefano a dime. Indeed, I only learned who DeStefano was five minutes ago when I saw one of his op-ed columns, with the laborious headline, “Today’s atheists are bullies — and they are doing their best to intimidate the rest of us into silence,” posted on social media. But if I can find a way to access his book, Inside the Atheist Mind: Unmasking the Religion of Those Who Say There is No God,” from which the column is adapted, without paying for it, probably through the library, maybe I will read it and respond here. For now, though, let’s see what DeStefano thinks of me, and presumably, all atheists:

Atheists today are the most arrogant, ignorant and dangerous people on earth.

We’ve all seen how these pompous prigs get offended by the slightest bit of religious imagery in public and mortified if even a whisper of  “Merry Christmas” escapes the lips of some well-meaning but naïve department store clerk during the “holiday season.”

He then cited three examples in which prominent atheist or freethinker organizations, American Atheists, the American Humanist Association and the Freedom from Religion Foundation, exercised their right to free speech and protested potential violations of the separation of church and state. This, of course, is what free and empowered people do in a democracy, but to folks like DeStefano, behavior such as this is arrogant, ignorant, dangerous and pompous. Arrogance and pomposity are pretty close to the same thing, but I guess he was running low on adjectives. In any case, he has more childish insults for us.

Yes, these atheists are loud, nasty, unapologetic and in-your-face.

But while their arrogance is annoying, it’s nothing compared to their ignorance. Atheists believe that the vast majority of human beings from all periods of time and all places on the Earth have been wrong about the thing most important to them. They basically dismiss this vast majority as being either moronic or profoundly naïve. What they don’t seem to know – or won’t admit – is that the greatest contributions to civilization have been made, not by atheists, but by believers.

Here is a real bit of arrogance: Claiming to know what atheists think about believers or presupposing that just because DeStefano has had a certain experience with some nonbelievers, then that must apply to most or all atheists.

I don’t think DeStefano has had many, or any, personal experiences with atheists, outside of what he’s read in books or on websites, and thus, it becomes easy to generalize and demonize a whole group of people when one doesn’t have to be bothered to view them as thoughtful, intelligent and moral human beings.

Both nonbelievers and believers through history have been wrong about a great many things about how the world works. The difference is that intellectually honest people, regardless of whether they are believers or not, must be willing to change their minds if new information comes in that goes against their previously held notions. And people who are serious about searching for truth must search after it no matter where it leads.

For centuries, science has been ever-narrowing the gap in which god and the entirety of the spiritual world resides, and increasingly, we have had fewer and fewer reasons to turn to religion for explanations about the world because the natural explanations are much more rewarding and much more elegant than anything dreamed up in holy books.

It is true, of course, that most major scientific discoveries down through the ages have been made by religious people or at least people who claimed to believe in some kind of deity, but that is only because society and culture has been dominated by religion for millennia. These discoveries were not made because of religion. In some cases, like Darwin’s earth-shattering theory of evolution, they were made in spite of religion.

DeStefano’s claim that the “greatest contributions to civilization” were made by believers is easily refuted. Some contributors to science, culture and art were believers; many were not. To make a blanket statement like that is dishonest. But in many Christian apologetic circles, politically-minded ones even more so, intellectual dishonesty is a virtue.

Yes, the new atheists have an ignorance of history bordering on madness.

Uh huh. Next.

But are they really dangerous, too?

You bet they are. The truth is, the atheist position is incapable of supporting any coherent system of morality other than ruthless social Darwinism. That’s why it has caused more deaths, murders and bloodshed than any other belief system in the history of the world.

Do I really need to elucidate the abject immorality of Christianity again? A couple paragraphs from this post will do to squash any notion that believers, and their god, have any kind of monopoly on morality or ethics:

In real life, people are free — they have freewill — to decline a gift if the giver has, perhaps, overstepped her bounds and maybe was too generous. With Christianity, we must accept the “gift” of eternal life, even though we weren’t consulted about it first, we must fear the one we are commanded to love or face the fire, and good riddance all the while. If we happen to think the four evils of Christianity, vicarious redemption, scapegoating, human sacrifice and compulsory love, are inferior doctrines of previous barbaric epochs and want nothing to do with them, well, we can be damned for that too and shooed off to hell like the carnal garbage that we are.

Oh, and by the way, since God is omniscient, he knew who would be “saved,” and conversely, he knew the face and lives of each and every person who was going to burn forever — he knew them intimately — yet he chose to put this experiment called earth into motion anyway with the full knowledge that millions would not only suffer ghastly fates in their physical lives but would be tortured forever and ever in everlasting fire, many of whom because of a mere accident of birth. He knew them all intimately, this “good” creation he made, and would watch them fall down to perdition seemingly with indifference.

Atheism has caused more bloodshed than any system in the world. Really? If we’re doing a death total, the God character in the Bible puts Hitler to shame in the sheer number of people that died on his watch. Thankfully, there’s a website for that. Dwindling in Unbelief puts the number of human people God killed, either directly or otherwise, at about 25 million. And this doesn’t begin to account for the vast numbers of believers and nonbelievers alike who were murdered after the events of the Bible for heresy or witchcraft or, you know, for fun, at the hands of believers.

It is true that history has seen its fair share of psychopathic dictators who were not believers, but they reeked havoc on humanity, not because of their atheism, but because they were simply evil people. Atheism doesn’t necessarily make a person good, nor does religion make a person bad. Often, the converse is true, but assuming each is true and then generalizing about each to win an argument is, again, dishonest, and I would wager, decidedly anti-Christian.

The idea that DeStefano would, with a straight face, attempt to suggest a “frightening connection between atheism and death” is laughable. He trots out people like Pol Pot and Stalin to make his case and then tries to argue that Hitler, modern history’s top villain, was, himself, an atheist hellbent on ending “the disease of Christianity,” a quote DeStefano uses with arrogant assertiveness that was probably never even uttered by Hitler. It’s a disputed passage. Hitler’s thoughts about the Jews, and the entire Nazi philosophy related to Jews, was built on the idea that Jews killed Jesus, first and foremost, and that is the bedrock belief of nearly all of the hatred, bigotry, subjugation and violence by Germans and other antisemites against the Jews. Again and again, Hitler referenced “providence” and “God’s will” to assert for himself and for his listeners that he was, indeed, walking a divine path.

Here are a few, of many, examples:

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. (Mein Kampf, p. 65)

And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God. (Mein Kampf, p. 174)

As Fuehrer of the German people and Chancellor of the Reich, I can thank God at this moment that he has so wonderfully blessed us in our hard struggle for what is our right, and beg Him that we and all other nations may find the right way, so that not only the German people but all Europe may once more be granted the blessing of peace. (Sept. 1, 1939)

I may not be a light of the church, a pulpiteer, but deep down I am a pious man, and believe that whoever fights bravely in defense of the natural laws framed by God and never capitulates will never be deserted by the Lawgiver, but will, in the end, receive the blessings of Providence. (July 5, 1944)

DeStefano goes on to say:

Atheists don’t believe in God, so they don’t believe in any transcendent, objective moral law. Nor do they believe that human beings are made in the image of God, and so they don’t believe humans possess infinite value and dignity. When you put these two beliefs together, you have a deadly recipe that makes killing “problematic” human beings quite easy and defensible.

To suggest that nonbelievers don’t think humans have value and dignity and that killing is somehow defensible in any context is, not just wrong, but embarrassingly short sighted and mean-spirited. And we are supposed to believe that people like DeStefano have the moral high ground?

DeStefano concludes as he began, by calling atheists a well-trod schoolyard name: bullies. To review, in the length of a short op-ed column, DeStefano has called nonbelievers — many of them well-meaning, moral, truthseekers — arrogant, ignorant, dangerous, pompous prigs, loud, nasty, unapologetic, in-your-face, annoying, amoral, ignorance bordering on madness and dangerous (again).

Who is the real bully here?

[Image credit: “Constantine’s Vision” by DeviantArt user Julian-Faylona.]

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.]

Religion played ‘key’ role in social evolution?

Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar and a team of researchers at Oxford University revealed during a recent American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting a new and frankly, rather confounding theory suggesting that religion played an integral part in the social evolution of human beings, as reported in The Washington Post’s article, “A scientist’s new theory: Religion was key to humans’ social evolution.”

As this hypothesis goes, religion, with its communicative and interactive elements, helped to drive the social development and bring people together in important ways through singing, traditional rituals and customs and shared experience. Dunbar has argued that these religious components release endorphins, which, in turn, support feelings of in-group closeness and togetherness. According to Dunbar:

You need something quite literally to stop everybody from killing everybody else out of just crossness. Somehow it’s clear that religions, all these doctrinal religions, create the sense that we’re all one family.

Dunbar is best known for coming up with a sociological system known as “Dunbar’s number,” which is a tally for how many connections humans can maintain at any given time. For instance, he has argued that we can maintain ties with five intimate friends, 50 good friends, 150 friends more casual friends and as many as 1,500 acquaintances. He posits that his number is so high for humans largely because of religion. Here is The Post:

And then Dunbar turned to figuring out why Dunbar’s number is so high. Did humor help us manage it? Exercise? Storytelling? That riddle has been Dunbar’s quest for years — and religion is the latest hypothesis he’s testing in his ongoing attempt to find the answer.

“Most of these things we’re looking at, you get in religion in one form or another,” he said.

I doubt I will be the first to point out that his proposition on the role of religion on social evolution suffers from multiple fatal flaws.

First, and perhaps most obvious, is that the social evolution of humans began many millions of years before religion. Earliest estimates indicate that developing humans did not begin what we might consider religion activities (i.e. the ritual burying of the dead) until 100,000 ago or slightly earlier.

Matt Rossano, a psychology professor with Southeastern Louisiana University, in his paper, “The African Interrugnum: The ‘Where,’ ‘When,’ and ‘Why’ of the Evolution of Religion,” argues that the evolutionary foundation for religion began between 60,000-80,000 years ago:

A crucial aspect of their (anatomically modern humans’) increased sophistication was religion. It was during the time between their retreat from the Levant to the conquest of the world (The African Interrugnum) that their religion emerged. Using archeological, anthropological, psychological, and primatological evidence, this chapter proposes a theoretical model for the evolutionary emergence of religion — an emergence that is pin-pointed temporally to the ecological and social crucible that was Africa from about 80,000 to 60,000 ybp (years before present), when Homo sapiens (but for the grace of God?) nearly vanished from the earth.

Even before that, scientists have concluded that our primate ancestors coalesced around a common cause for the purposes of hunting, staying alive and yes, some kind of primitive form of socializing and even levity in between meals and child rearing. All things considered, I would even go so far as to argue that since religion has only been around for a such a short period of our common history based on the vast stretches of evolutionary time — tens of thousands of years versus millions — that it can hardly be considered as having been a major factor in the social evolution of humans. Although it might have brought some level of “sophistication,” as Rossano points out, religion was a late bloomer on the horizon of humanity.[pullquote]Religion was a late bloomer on the horizon of humanity.[/pullquote]

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If The Post article accurately reflects what Dunbar thinks on religion, a couple other parts of this article are wide of the mark.

In the first quote I posted here, Dunbar suggests early humans would have just torn each other apart limb from limb in wanton displays of aggression and bloodletting were it not the moderating influence of religion and doctrine in these early human communities. Intergroup aggression and nearly endless quarrels over land and resources were hallmarks of early societies and are well documented, but even within individual communities, certainly males acted with hostility and jealousy toward other males who might threaten to wrest their mates away from them.

Even so, the sense that “we’re all one family” inside a particular tribe or culture was largely rooted in place — in the particular spot that group had captured or settled and called home, not in religion. At least in more modern ancient times, gods were viewed as distant and inaccessible. All of the other elements of religion, like singing, dancing, rituals and burial and mating practices, were secondary to maintaining and protecting whatever the concept of “home” meant for them.

Dunbar also seems to draw too close of a connection between religion and singing, as if religious worship has a monopoly on being able to evoke emotion and draw people together. Here is another quote:

What you get from dance and singing on its own is a sense of belonging. It happens very quickly. What happens, I suspect, is that it can trigger very easily trance states. Once you’ve triggered that, you’re in, I think, a different ballgame. It ramps up massively. That’s what’s triggered. There’s something there.

One can’t read this quote from Dunbar without wondering if he has been to a secular music concert in his life because if he had, he would realize that hearing an inspirational and uplifting rock anthem or a love song or a ballad produces precisely the same kinds of emotions as one can experience inside the walls of a church or in a kind of spiritual “trance.” Suggesting that singing and dancing in the name of religion is any more meaningful or creates anymore of a sense of belonging than doing these activities for their own sake or with friends or loved ones in a moment of innocent revelry seems like too far of a leap from one hypothesis to the next. These can be, and have been for millenia, enjoyed in and of themselves independent of any admonishments from heaven.

Women dancing on a vase in the Museo Borbonico, Naples.

Women dancing as depicted on a vase in the Museo Borbonico, Naples.

Haslam says no to Bible bill

Time to give credit where it is due. Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has vetoed the bill that would have made the Bible the official state book.

bill haslam bible bill

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam in Nashville on April 12, 2016. (Samuel M. Simpkins /The Tennessean via AP)

This comes after both the state Senate and House approved the measure. The House voted in favor of the bill last year, while the Senate approved the legislation by a 19-8 vote, despite the fact that Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery issued an opinion in 2015 saying that it violated the separation of church and state. Haslam voiced similar concerns before agreeing to veto the bill.

The point that seemed to carry the most weight with the governor was the idea that the Bible would be devalued if it was placed alongside many other random and relatively inconsequential state symbols like limestone and the raccoon.

Here is what he wrote to House Speaker Beth Harwell, R-Nashville:

In addition to the constitutional issues with the bill, my personal feeling is that this bill trivializes the Bible, which I believe is a sacred text. If we believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, then we shouldn’t be recognizing it only as a book of historical and economic significance. If we are recognizing the Bible as a sacred text, then we are violating the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Tennessee by designating it as the official state book.

Although I disagree that the Bible is a sacred work, I can’t disagree with his logic.

I will take issue with the last part of his statement to Harwell:

I strongly disagree with those who are trying to drive religion out of the public square. All of us should and must bring our deepest beliefs to the places we are called, including governmental service. Men and women motivated by faith have every right and obligation to bring their belief and commitment to the public debate. However, that is very different from the governmental establishment of religion that our founders warned against and our Constitution prohibits.

No one is attempting to drive religion out of the public square, and local, state and federal officials are free to worship as they see fit and draw on their faith however they choose so long as it does not infringe on the rights of others or impede their work. What they can’t do is use public resources to show favoritism for one religion over another or for religion at all, organize prayer or Bible studies on government property during school hours, open with prayer during meetings of publicly-funded bodies or place religious symbols on property that was purchased with taxpayer dollars, all of which, like the Bible bill, violate the separation of church and state.

I have no doubt that at least one or two of these, perhaps all of them, are going on in many small, rural counties across this state and, indeed, across the South but because of a lack of resources and frankly, time, these practices quietly go unchecked.

Fortunately for believers, who, for some reason, think the god of all heaven and earth would care about what happens in a city council or commission meeting taking place in some podunkville county in the hinterlands of Tennessee or Georgia or Mississippi, the ACLU and other organizations that seek to expose church and state violations can’t be everywhere at once. And so, the exploitation of public resources at the altar of religion lingers on.

I must say, though, the fact that believers so vigorously defend their right to exercise religion in public even at the expense of violating the law shows a troubling amount of insecurity. If religion has that much going for it, if more people, not fewer, were signing up to follow Christ, if scripture was so self-evidently true, why do believers have to fight so hard to protect it?

Simply put, if the case for Christianity or Islam or Judaism were stronger, people would not be running from religion in droves. It would not need all this breathless support, and the all-powerful, omniscient god of all three messianic traditions would not need millions of cheerleaders shilling his message to the masses.

It’s not that people are rejecting religion because they are resistant to change or want to defile themselves in a heap of hedonistic pleasure and debauchery, as many pastors claim; people want to live genuine, fulfilling, lives of grace, dignity and honesty, and all religion has to offer is compulsory love and admiration for an absentee god; some highly unsophisticated, self-contradictory, cobbled together texts written by people who were so ignorant about the world that they didn’t know what they didn’t know; a barbaric sense of morality that carries vicarious redemption, human sacrifice and scapegoating as its main principles; and plentiful amounts of wishful thinking and false hope, all packaged in this sinister little word, “faith,” or, the pretense of knowledge in the absence of actual knowledge.

Unholy ground: The Bible as the official state book

Below is the letter I wrote to Gov. Bill Haslam on Tennessee’s bill to christen the Bible as the official book of the state. The legislation passed both the Senate and House and is now awaiting a decision from Haslam.

As I outlined in the letter, this is a bad idea for many reasons — and for Christians and nonbelievers alike. This appears to me to be just another in a string of proposed bills across the nation designed as a pushback against what Christian lawmakers and their constituents no doubt feel is the great demoralization of America, as members of the LBGT community finally get some of the rights they have been due all along.

Screenshot 2016-04-13 at 1.21.57 AM

Lawmakers, preachers and those with a modicum of power, of course, don’t want this and seemingly feel threatened that, perhaps, they are losing their grip on America, as Christianity has already lost its grip on much of the developed world.

The truth is that however much believers like to claim the moral high ground, while at the same time castigating gay and lesbian people, even those who are in loving and committed relationships, as hedonists who are one second away from devolving into sex-crazed maniacs — a completely distorted and bigoted picture of reality — the Bible, and believers’ willingness to trust it on its own merit or on the authority of church leaders, is responsible for holding mankind back morally and socially for hundreds of years such that we humans, only now, are beginning to pull ourselves out of the mire.

As I said below, the Bible, whether the stories are true or not, depicts some of the most depraved acts and belief systems in all of literature. Only the most sadistic of fathers would create his children, set them up to fail in the garden, tell them about the wonders of heaven and then demand that they love him and worship him or else, face annihilation and unrelenting, eternal torment. Further, the Bible’s “teachings” about the supposed value of human sacrifice and scapegoating are borrowed from savage ages, and were it not for the centuries-old tradition of the church and humans’ fear of the unknown and their incessant need to be told how to think and feel, these ancient elements would have already been discarded in the dustbin of history where they belong.

But for Tennessee lawmakers, although they had scores of more deserving books from which to choose, the Bible was apparently the best they could do. This is truly sad.

If you would like tell Haslam what you think about this noxious bill, go here to send him a letter.

Here is mine.

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Dear Gov. Haslam,

Tennessee includes people of many different backgrounds, including Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and nonbelievers. According to data from Pew Research Center, 14 percent of Tennessee’s residents are either agnostic, atheist or unaffiliated with any religion.

State, local or federal governments serve at the behest of the people — all of the people — and as such, should not show favoritism toward one religion over another or indeed, to religion at all.

Passage of SB 1108/HB 0615 would serve as an affront to thousands of your constituents who don’t regard the Holy Bible as a suitable moral or spiritual guide. The Old Testament contains some of the most vile passages in all of literature with its tacit promotion of slavery and bigotry and graphic depictions of rape, looting and pillaging and outright slaughter in the name of religion. We don’t believe the New Testament is any better, holding as its central tenets eternal damnation for nonbelievers and people of other faiths and the immoral doctrines of vicarious redemption and scapegoating. The Bible is not fit to be the official book of Tennessee or any other state.

The Bible has some historical and literary significance, but it doesn’t just claim to be a work of literature or a history book. It makes serious claims about the origin of the universe, the nature of humanity, morality and God. The Bible claims for itself ultimate authority from God the Father and Jesus Christ, a message that, if foisted upon the state as the official book, would surely ostracize people of other religions along with nonbelievers in Tennessee. For us, the Bible has exactly the same spiritual significance as the Iliad and Odyssey, which is to say, none.

Notwithstanding the personal misgivings of myself, my fellow nonbelievers and advocates for the separation of church and state, it should go without saying that government officials should not use their public positions to promote their personal feelings about the validity of the Bible, much less attempt to translate those beliefs into law.

This legislation is a clear and blatant violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution and the Tennessee Constitution.

Moreover, making the Bible just another officially recognized state symbol alongside things like the raccoon, the mockingbird, the square dance and limestone, the state’s official rock, would greatly undervalue a book that many lawmakers, hundreds of pastors and millions of churchgoers across the state consider to be a sacred text.

For the rest of us — at least 14 percent of Tennessee’s residents and possibly even more — the Bible is a non-entity in our lives. That such a bill could even be considered in the Tennessee House and Senate, much less pass, defies logic.

I hope that you will consider just how bad of an idea this legislation is and veto it at the first opportunity.

Thank you for your time.

Jeremy Styron

Legislating discrimination under banner of ‘liberty’

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. — Bertrand Russell

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As most people who follow politics know by now, conservative Christian lawmakers have begun proposing measures that would give businesses, churches or other faith-based organizations legal license to turn people away based on their religion or gender identity, yet have framed the discussion in terms of increasing “religious liberty.” This, in a nation that already has unfettered religious freedom and a church on nearly every corner.

What lawmakers in states like North Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi really want is a legal workaround that would allow for the discrimination against members of the LBGT community such that, after the nation was lifted up on a wave of equality after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on same-sex marriage, Republicans now seem hellbent on organizing a pushback against what they no doubt feel is affront to their “traditional” values. Of course, given the many disgraceful policies against black folks throughout the late 19th century and continuing through much of the 20th century — not even counting all the inhumanities that took place in the land where “all men are created equal” before and during the Civil War — one could make a strong case that racism and bigotry are as “traditional” in America as apple pie and baseball on Sundays.

Credit: Associated Press/Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal announces he will veto religious liberty bill.

Credit: Associated Press/Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal announces he will veto religious liberty bill.

So when conservatives start talking about traditional family values in one breath and in another float proposals that would separate families and send parents thousands of miles away from their kids, prevent loving couples from enjoying the same protections and privileges under the law as everyone else, defund an organization that provides invaluable, affordable services to millions of women and men each year and gleefully acknowledge their belief in a book that gives us story after story of families being ripped apart or slaughtered outright at the behest of an angry god, I really have no idea what the hell they’re talking about.

Indeed, one can easily infer Republicans’ real intentions from what they have actually said on their not-so-thinly-veiled planned discrimination against the LGBT community. As a former Georgia resident, I’m not Gov. Nathan Deal’s biggest fan, but he deserves a lot credit, as I said on Twitter today, for sticking to his guns and vetoing his state’s so-called “religious liberty” bill that would allow faith-based organizations like churches, religious schools, conventions and others to deny services to those who do not share their “sincerely held religious belief” and then provide legal protection against lawsuits if and when denials take place.

State Sen. Josh McKoon called the current bill “significantly watered down” from a previous version that did more of what McKoon and his ilk were actually intending; that is, prevent businesses and other organizations from serving people who do not hold their beliefs. Here is McKoon:

I’m extremely disappointed. … (The bill) did not apply to businesses. I’m just very, very disappointed the governor would veto this modest protection for people of faith.

I sense a hint of victimhood in that last sentence. “People of faith” have a robust set of protections to ensure that they can, not only worship as they choose and congregate unhindered in every town and city in America, but churches enjoy a range of tax exemptions that actually place more financial responsibility and pressure on everyone else to make up the difference in lost revenues to support things like fire and police departments, schools and other public services.

But back to the bill. In addition to potentially allowing churches to deny services to people, perhaps most importantly, the legislation stipulates that no faith-based organizations will be required to hire people who do not agree with their worldview:

… no faith based organization shall be required to hire or retain as an employee any person whose religious beliefs or practices or lack of either are not in accord with the faith based organization’s sincerely held religious belief as demonstrated by practice, expression, or clearly articulated tenet of faith.

Nonetheless, as it stands now and if Deal’s decision is upended by a veto session, the legislation could pave the way for members of the LGBT community to face discrimination, overt or otherwise. Although the bill doesn’t come out and say that churches can screen potential employees based on sexual orientation or gender identity, which would be a clear violation of federal law, the implication is most certainly there, which is the context for this whole discussion in Georgia and states with similar legislation.

For his part, Deal said the bill sent the wrong message and did not reflect that Georgians were actually “warm, friendly and loving people:”

Our people work side by side without regard to the color of our skin, or the religion we adhere to. We are working to make life better for our families and our communities. That is the character of Georgia. I intend to do my part to keep it that way For that reason, I will veto HB 757.

Georgia’s bill was not solely about protecting religious liberty and everyone knows it, which is why a large number of large corporations, including Time Warner, Disney and Apple, admonished Deal to ax the bill, and the NFL and the NCAA have also “hinted,” as this AJC story worded it, that they could pass over the state as a location for championship games as a result of the bill.

While I realize we have little assurances of this, if Georgia lawmakers are smart, they will abandon the bill, and with it, the brazen affront to actual liberty, so that their state can avoid what is currently happening in North Carolina and Mississippi.

Religious freedom law have been around a long time going back to 1993 when President Bill Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and proponents of the bill at the time were more focused on protecting believers from being forced into taking actions that went against their convictions or protecting elements of religious practice. As this article from Time outlines, the law said the federal government must have a “compelling interest” before it could infringe on religious liberty, and “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability.” Perhaps the most conspicuous application of it has been in the case of Native Americans, some of whom have sought exemptions on religious grounds for the use peyote in traditional spiritual ceremonies.

The spirit of the federal law, then, is to actually protect the free exercise of religion, whereas the recent string of state laws are meant to restrict liberty among certain groups that conservatives would, if they could, more or less ignore completely except to keep passing more restrictions to effectively eviscerate them from civil society altogether.

Unfortunately for these traditionalists, the tide has already turned, and public sentiment is now largely against the kind of America that they want to create such that sooner or later, like the enfranchisement of women, desegregation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage and other victories that have charted our path on the moral compass, the United States is moving toward a more diverse and pluralistic society, and we are headed there with or without conservatives and the Republican Party.

That’s not a prediction or wishful thinking. The march of progress may be long, arduous and slow, but it is certain.

[Cover photo credit: David Goldman/AP]

Out of Eden: God’s love and the fall

The image to the right features an actual sign at a church in the area, and just across the street, another sign reads, to paraphrase: “Heaven: A prepared place for a prepared people.”

A friend of mine made a salient point years ago that, of course, still holds true today, even as Christianity has been losing ground to nonbelief the last few years in America (more recent research from Pew shows a similar trend), if church leaders insist on using passive methods like billboard messages to attempt to reach the public, they should at least be focused on getting people into the doors of the church, rather than making theological points that a large portion of unchurched people aren’t going to understand in the first place.

20160218_124718_resized

In any case, indulge me while I unpack the message in billboard above and the message posted across the street. “When God made you, it was love at first sight” is essentially saying that, based on theology and biblical teaching, that God’s creation, man, was made in Yahweh’s image and was, thanks to God, endowed with free will to choose right from wrong and was given remarkable intelligence and complexity to be able to rule over the earth as a unique being among God’s other creations. It is also saying, from a more specific and modern standpoint, that God’s love extends to everyone and, to flesh out the idea a little further to really capture what the church teaches, God supposedly loves everyone so much that he sent his son to die on the cross for the atonement of sins, and even when a person chooses not to accept this “free” gift of salvation, God is supposedly grieved by the loss.

If we work through the theology logically and take the Bible and Christian doctrine at face value, we can see that neither statement about God’s love happens to be true, and even if it were, God’s love is actually inferior to the human conception of real love.

Here, I will have to slip into rhetorical language and speak as if I think all of this could be true for the sake of argument. Some Christian apologists have misunderstood this technique, as they misunderstand a great many things, to mean that I might actually believe in God and that I simply don’t like the story or don’t want to accept it. I, in fact, don’t believe, but in order to argue against this theology, I have to assume, at least for the duration of this post, that it could be true in order to fully work through its implications.

So, with that out of the way, the first thing that needs to be said is “God’s love,” agape love, is supposedly the highest form of affection that can be bestowed on another being in the universe, but as we shall see, it is a strange, debased, almost perverse, kind of love. Since we are told that “God is love,” I will speak of love as if it’s a stand-in for God himself (or herself).

God’s love is the kind of love that made it perfectly acceptable to place a wager on Job’s life, one of the deity’s most devout servants, and then stand idly by while this beloved follower was stricken with all sorts of personal maladies and afflictions. It’s the kind of love that commanded Abraham to kill his only son as a demonstration of his own love and devotion.

It’s the kind of love that created humans with the full knowledge that Satan would wander into the garden, under the roving, all-knowing eye of Yahweh, tempt Adam and Eve and cause the fall of the entire species.

It is the kind of love that foresaw from before the beginning how man would suffer and die for thousands of years under unimaginable brutality, enslavement, famine and disease and watched, as Christopher Hitchens has said, with “indifference” and “folded arms” before finally deciding to get involved a few thousand years ago in largely illiterate Palestine.

It’s kind of love in which the end, the salvation of mankind and the consecration of the new covenant, justifies the means by the morally bankrupt concepts of scapegoating and vicarious redemption.

It’s the kind of love that is responsible for heaven and hell, Satan, original sin and indeed, evil itself. For, if God is not ultimately responsible for these things — all of these things — he is not omnipotent or omniscient, and thus, not God.

It’s the kind of love that foisted mankind, without giving us any say in the matter, into a cosmic chess match between the forces of good and evil.

It is the kind of love that compels man to reciprocate that love, bend the knee or perish forever, that commands us to love someone in whom we must also fear.

It is the kind of love that condemned man even before he was created and then proceeded to make humans the carriers of a disease the church calls original sin that has only one cure — that same love, a terrible love.

If all of this is true, God, equipped with the complete knowledge of human history before creating a single biological cell, still hurled mankind into the grist mill, into the wreckage of earth, where we are told that the wheat will eventually be separated from the chaff, where far more than half of us, either unaware of the gospel message or unable to use our reasoning capacities to verify the authenticity of the stories and holy texts, would be cast down to perdition to cringe and scream and burn forever and ever, where we are shuttled out of the womb into the shadowlands, hobbled from the start by ancestral trespasses and original sin.

This is what you must believe about God’s love in order to be a Christian. Perhaps even more wicked is the idea that God, having knowingly shackled his “good” creation right from the beginning, “prepared a place” for those who, concluding that life without Big Brother was just too difficult a prospect, could then be shuffled away to a gloomy ingathering once the veil of woe was finally draped over all of life — the creator paralyzing his own creation and then calling the one and only antidote true love.

At issue, then, are the basic contradictions or incompatibilities between God’s love, humanity’s idea of love and the theological concept of sin.

If God, in his omniscience, was somehow surprised or caught off guard by man’s first disobedience, he’s not omniscient and thus, not god. Those who view the Adam and Eve story simply as an allegory still have to account for the enduring dissonance between God’s love and the problem of evil. If evil springs from God, then God is the progenitor of evil, and is thus, not omnibenevolent; if evil came from another source outside of God, then God is not a unilateral, self-sufficient agent, and is thus, not singular or all-powerful.

Apologists may argue that our idea of love and God’s idea of love as presented in the Bible are two different things: God can see the big picture and his version of love is more broadly defined to include a system of punishments and rewards as a way to teach and help us grow in the faith — the common refrain that we should become more “spiritually mature” — whereas humans’ concept of love is more narrowly focused on interactions and affection in the here and now. But for humans to even be capable of loving someone that we can only read about and pretend to talk to in our heads, God’s love must be relateable to us in some real way, and as I have argued, any reasonable examination of the gospel story will find that this love, real or imagined, holds little intrinsic value, except to those who are the most wishful-thinking, ill-begotten, downtrodden and hopeless.

The Bible must be an attempt to appeal to us, on some level, by human standards of love, but for many of the reasons I just laid out, it fails.

We can even go so far as to say that the modern conception of human love and affection supersedes godly love by several large degrees, and the contrast could not be anymore pronounced.

Real love, unlike godly love, does not come with contingencies. Real love, unlike godly love, is not compulsory and cannot be forced. Real love does not require a series of tests and temptations for verification of authenticity. Real love does not come prepackaged with guilt and fear. Real love is a two-way street. Real love does not require the complete surrender of a person’s individuality. Real love means caring for someone else selflessly as they are, not for who they should be or will be at some point in the future.

Real love, most importantly of all, is unconditional.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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]