The people who wrote the Old and New Testaments and the Koran all thought that God was a being who looked like a man, who lived in the sky and watched us, and so did almost all practicing Jews, Christians and Muslims until a couple of centuries ago. Those Christians and Muslims, plus those of the practicing Jews who believed in life after death (never a unanimous belief among Jews) believed that Heaven was up in the sky where God lived, and that Hell was deep underground. They believed that angels and demons, who looked somewhat like people except that they had wings and the angels had halos and demons had horns, were flying around us all the time, the angels having come down from the sky and the demons up from deep underground. They believed that Satan, an angel who used to live in the sky with God and the other angels, had been thrown out of Heaven and now operated from Hell, deep underground.
All of those paintings and sculptures made over thousands of years' time of God and angels and demons and Satan and Heaven and Hell -- they weren't symbolic presentations of principles of physics which weren't elaborated until long after they were painted or carved -- they were realistic depictions of what people believed literally existed. People claimed to have seen God and/or Jesus and/or angels, and these people weren't thought to be liars or hallucinating or over-imaginative -- and they damned well weren't thought to have been speaking in parables either. What they said was taken literally and they were thought to be blessed.
The many people accused of witchcraft by the Inquisition and Protestant witch-trials, most of them women, were usually thought to have literally had sex with horned flying demons, as part of Satan's master-plan to conquer the world with evil.
Now, a few people still believe in all of the above. When "progressive" theologians say that those people are misunderstanding things which were never meant to have been taken literally, they're full of shit. It's as simple as that. When they say that the bible and Koran weren't meant by their authors to be taken literally, they're full of shit. When they say that God is physics or love or some kind of principle of idea, they're saying something completely different than the Bible and Koran authors. They've had the good sense to reject the literal existence of all of those supernatural things in the Bible and in all of those religious pictures, but if they remain practicing Jews or Christians or Muslims, then they hardly ever have the intellectual honesty to admit that they believe in things which are completely different than the things in their holy books. They've switched from the nonsense of preaching the literal belief in all of those things to the nonsense of preaching that those things weren't literally believed in for the great majority of the history of they claim are their religions. It's maddeningly seldom that a contemporary theologian will talk sense about the theology of past eras.
Showing posts with label islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label islam. Show all posts
Sunday, February 21, 2016
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Richard Dawkins Claims He's 'Not Allowed' To Criticize Islam
Which of course is absurd. He hasn't been imprisoned or fined yet for his comments on Islam, his books containing comments on Islam continue to sell by the cargo ship-load, he continues to be invited onto popular TV and radio shows where he continues to be encouraged to speak his mind.
Perhaps what's actually bothering him is that little pissants like me ARE allowed to comment on what he says, ARE allowed to point out that he continues to write and speak about Islam as if all Muslims were extremists, ARE allowed to point out the opposition of most of the world's Muslims to extremism, ARE allowed to point out that most of the soldiers fighting ISIL have been Muslims sent by majority-Muslim countries, etc.
We're allowed to point out the achievements in art, literature, philosophy and whatever else, which have been made over the course of the past 1500 years by some of the billions of people who've happened to have been Muslims. We're free to point out passages from the Koran which we think are nice. We can continue to mock Dawkins for still not having read the Koran, obsessed with Islam as he seems to be.
Maybe it really sticks in Dawkins' craw that a little autistic nobody and general failure in life such as myself is allowed to publicly speculate that maybe what is up Richard's bum is not Islam at all, but... What? More dark-skinned people on the streets and in the classrooms and faculty lounges of Oxford and Cambridge and Canterbury and London than he likes?
I'm only speculating. I'm allowed to do so. And Dawkins' rants about Islam can't be explained by rational thought on his part. The explanation must lie elsewhere.
*sigh* He was so good at biology.
Perhaps what's actually bothering him is that little pissants like me ARE allowed to comment on what he says, ARE allowed to point out that he continues to write and speak about Islam as if all Muslims were extremists, ARE allowed to point out the opposition of most of the world's Muslims to extremism, ARE allowed to point out that most of the soldiers fighting ISIL have been Muslims sent by majority-Muslim countries, etc.
We're allowed to point out the achievements in art, literature, philosophy and whatever else, which have been made over the course of the past 1500 years by some of the billions of people who've happened to have been Muslims. We're free to point out passages from the Koran which we think are nice. We can continue to mock Dawkins for still not having read the Koran, obsessed with Islam as he seems to be.
Maybe it really sticks in Dawkins' craw that a little autistic nobody and general failure in life such as myself is allowed to publicly speculate that maybe what is up Richard's bum is not Islam at all, but... What? More dark-skinned people on the streets and in the classrooms and faculty lounges of Oxford and Cambridge and Canterbury and London than he likes?
I'm only speculating. I'm allowed to do so. And Dawkins' rants about Islam can't be explained by rational thought on his part. The explanation must lie elsewhere.
*sigh* He was so good at biology.
Thursday, December 24, 2015
"That's Not What I Mean When I Say 'God'."
Traditionally, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God has been an entity who looks like a man with a grey or white beard, lives in the sky and intervenes personally in the lives of people. The Greek god Zeus bears a lot of resemblances to the Abrahamic capital-G God. There's just one letter's difference between "Zeus" and "Deus," Greek for "God."
Today, most Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in a God who differs to a lesser or greater degree from the bearded man in the sky. Sometimes to such a great degree that, instead of "God," they could call it something else, like "physics" or "love" or "gravity."
So why do they still call it "God"? (Lucretius was posing the very same question to pagans almost 2100 years ago.) Nietzsche may have found the answer: he declared, in his book Der Antichrist, in the 52nd chapter:
"»Glaube« heißt Nicht-wissen-wollen, was wahr ist." ("Religious belief means not wanting to know what is true.")
They don't seem to want to know that not very long ago at all, when members of their religions said "God," they meant an omnipotent bearded man in the sky, and not physics or love or gravity. They seem to want to pretend that the bearded man in the sky was always a symbol, of -- something. Something other than an actual omnipotent bearded man who lived in the sky.
It's difficult to talk sense with people who don't want to make sense.
Nothing I've said in this post is a secret, or hard to understand. But many people, maybe most people on Earth, don't want to understand anything of the sort. Some of these people who don't want to understand such things, things which only become clearer and clearer with the passage of time, are intelligent enough that they have to study theology full-time just to keep themselves confused.
Today, most Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in a God who differs to a lesser or greater degree from the bearded man in the sky. Sometimes to such a great degree that, instead of "God," they could call it something else, like "physics" or "love" or "gravity."
So why do they still call it "God"? (Lucretius was posing the very same question to pagans almost 2100 years ago.) Nietzsche may have found the answer: he declared, in his book Der Antichrist, in the 52nd chapter:
"»Glaube« heißt Nicht-wissen-wollen, was wahr ist." ("Religious belief means not wanting to know what is true.")
They don't seem to want to know that not very long ago at all, when members of their religions said "God," they meant an omnipotent bearded man in the sky, and not physics or love or gravity. They seem to want to pretend that the bearded man in the sky was always a symbol, of -- something. Something other than an actual omnipotent bearded man who lived in the sky.
It's difficult to talk sense with people who don't want to make sense.
Nothing I've said in this post is a secret, or hard to understand. But many people, maybe most people on Earth, don't want to understand anything of the sort. Some of these people who don't want to understand such things, things which only become clearer and clearer with the passage of time, are intelligent enough that they have to study theology full-time just to keep themselves confused.
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Saying That There Are No Peaceful Muslims Is As Stupid As Saying That There Are No Violent Christians
Or no Jews who eat shellfish. Or no Hindus who eat beef. Or no Buddhists who don't meditate.
It's pretty freakin' stupid.
And -- I've said this before but it bears repeating -- making ISIL's actions about Islam as a whole is pretty insulting to Muslims in general, and especially insulting to most of the people who are actually in combat against ISIL. Most of those people are, of course, Muslims.
Bill Maher asks, "Why do they hate us?" without bothering to be specific about who "they" and "we" are. Lots of people are always trying to tell Bill why some Muslims hate some Christians, but Bill's not listening. If it's not about Islam as a whole, then to Bill, we're naive liberals.
What do I, an autistic American atheist raised in a Protestant Christian family, have in common with the vast majority of those of the world's Muslims who know who Maher is? I've never opposed the fight against ISIL in any way, and Bill Maher frequently pisses me off.
It's pretty freakin' stupid.
And -- I've said this before but it bears repeating -- making ISIL's actions about Islam as a whole is pretty insulting to Muslims in general, and especially insulting to most of the people who are actually in combat against ISIL. Most of those people are, of course, Muslims.
Bill Maher asks, "Why do they hate us?" without bothering to be specific about who "they" and "we" are. Lots of people are always trying to tell Bill why some Muslims hate some Christians, but Bill's not listening. If it's not about Islam as a whole, then to Bill, we're naive liberals.
What do I, an autistic American atheist raised in a Protestant Christian family, have in common with the vast majority of those of the world's Muslims who know who Maher is? I've never opposed the fight against ISIL in any way, and Bill Maher frequently pisses me off.
Friday, July 10, 2015
Islam Doesn't Do Anything
Because Islam is not a unified entity. You don't have to be paying very close attention at all to have noticed that Shia Muslims always seem to be in conflict with Sunni Muslims. It doesn't take excruciatingly long and difficult research to discover that the Shia-Sunni split goes back to within a few decades of Muhammed's death. Muslims haven't all agreed about anything since the 7th century. If you've gone from a horrified rejection of any examination of Islam to a casual interest in it, you can also see that even though one individual is a Shiite and another is a Sunni, they often will get along just fine. The way there's nothing at all strange about a Catholic and a Protestant being friends.
The same way that there's nothing at all strange about a Catholic and a Protestant and an Orthodox Christian and a Copt and a Shiite and a Sunni and a Hindu and a Sikh and a Buddhist and a Druze and a Bahá'í and an atheist all being good friends with each other and getting along just fine, although many of those individuals, perhaps even every single one of such a circle of friends, might unfortunately know people who share his or her religion or lack of it and think that it's not fine at all to be mingling with those others. But most people in each one of those groups don't want to kill over the differences between the groups.
I'd like to think that the great majority of people belonging to each one of those religious or non-religious groups feels a stronger identification with the entire group of humans than with their own individual group, and thinks of the people in the other groups as people like them, who get happy and sad and hungry and sleepy and have friends and families and quirks and senses of humor and hopes about putting ethnic and religious hatreds behind us once and for all, the sooner the better!
Let's compare the tensions over religion which are obsessing some people so much these days with ethnic tensions. There have been some terrible atrocities committed against non-white people by white people, horrible deeds committed in the name of white people. Nevertheless, white people are not a hate group. Why? Because the people who have done those horrible things, although they claimed to be acting on behalf of all white people, did not have the approval or backing of all white people. In the case of the Nazis in WWII, many of the people, probably most of the people, who fought against them and finally defeated them were white people. You didn't have to be non-white to vehemently hate everything the Nazis stood for.
In just the same way, most of the people fighting against ISIS today are Muslims. That's no secret, there hasn't been any official media black-out of that information in the West as far as I can see, and yet, many people act as if it would be news to them. As if Islam were one unified group which was coming to get us. The same way that some Muslims -- ISIS, for example -- talk about the West as if the West were one unified group which was coming to get them.
Imagine if in the midst of the Thirty Years' War, some Muslims in Egypt or Persia talked about how the Christians thought of nothing day and night except how they were going to crush Islam. Some Christian idiots were pre- occupied with such thoughts then, just as some Christian and New Atheist idiots think of little else today. Others were much too busy with the mostly Catholic-against-Protestant conflict in Europe to give much thought to Muslims.
Then as now, the biggest problem facing humanity was not one religious or ethnic group against another, but many different groups of idiots, large groups and smaller ones, each group against pretty much the entire rest of the world.
The same way that there's nothing at all strange about a Catholic and a Protestant and an Orthodox Christian and a Copt and a Shiite and a Sunni and a Hindu and a Sikh and a Buddhist and a Druze and a Bahá'í and an atheist all being good friends with each other and getting along just fine, although many of those individuals, perhaps even every single one of such a circle of friends, might unfortunately know people who share his or her religion or lack of it and think that it's not fine at all to be mingling with those others. But most people in each one of those groups don't want to kill over the differences between the groups.
I'd like to think that the great majority of people belonging to each one of those religious or non-religious groups feels a stronger identification with the entire group of humans than with their own individual group, and thinks of the people in the other groups as people like them, who get happy and sad and hungry and sleepy and have friends and families and quirks and senses of humor and hopes about putting ethnic and religious hatreds behind us once and for all, the sooner the better!
Let's compare the tensions over religion which are obsessing some people so much these days with ethnic tensions. There have been some terrible atrocities committed against non-white people by white people, horrible deeds committed in the name of white people. Nevertheless, white people are not a hate group. Why? Because the people who have done those horrible things, although they claimed to be acting on behalf of all white people, did not have the approval or backing of all white people. In the case of the Nazis in WWII, many of the people, probably most of the people, who fought against them and finally defeated them were white people. You didn't have to be non-white to vehemently hate everything the Nazis stood for.
In just the same way, most of the people fighting against ISIS today are Muslims. That's no secret, there hasn't been any official media black-out of that information in the West as far as I can see, and yet, many people act as if it would be news to them. As if Islam were one unified group which was coming to get us. The same way that some Muslims -- ISIS, for example -- talk about the West as if the West were one unified group which was coming to get them.
Imagine if in the midst of the Thirty Years' War, some Muslims in Egypt or Persia talked about how the Christians thought of nothing day and night except how they were going to crush Islam. Some Christian idiots were pre- occupied with such thoughts then, just as some Christian and New Atheist idiots think of little else today. Others were much too busy with the mostly Catholic-against-Protestant conflict in Europe to give much thought to Muslims.
Then as now, the biggest problem facing humanity was not one religious or ethnic group against another, but many different groups of idiots, large groups and smaller ones, each group against pretty much the entire rest of the world.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
How New Atheists Can Make Even Someone Like Reza Aslan Look Bright By Comparison
You heard me, pardner: there's a feud a goin' on between Reza Aslan and the New Atheists, and I must take Aslan's side.
A lot of people, probably most of them Christians, heard about that awful woman who reads the diatribes posing as news on Fox News ask Aslan how he as a non-Christian could dare to write a book about Jesus, and naturally took Aslan's side. Maybe some of them first actually read something by Aslan after that interview and said, Hm, this guy isn't much of a writer, but still, between him and that lady on Fox, I'm totally on his side.
In a not dissimilar way, I and some other atheists have seen the Harris-vs-Aslan shitstorm gathering force, and been terribly unimpressed by Aslan, but still side with him immediately and unconditionally on topics of religion if it's a choice between him and Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins.
Aslan has become famous with a supposedly nonfictional book about Jesus which is just as fictional as most supposedly nonfictional books about Jesus are. Like the authors of most of these books, Aslan has created a Jesus in his own image, or in the image of what he flatters himself to be. There's so little we actually know about Jesus that whoever writes an entire book about him, or even a book which long sections about him, has to make stuff up. Some of us, like me and Kazantzakis and Gore Vidal, have been honest enough with ourselves and the world to call these books what they are: novels. (And Kazantzakis' novel about Jesus, for one, is effin brilliant. Basically, he told the story of the Gospel of Judas decades before the Gospel of Judas was discovered.)
Aslan is no Kazantzakis and no Ehrman, but he's making a decent effort. Sam Harris is making a spectacle of himself. Aslan said that there is no relationship between religious texts and the lives of religious believers, and that was very silly, of course, but instead of acknowledging that of course he couldn't literally have meant that, the New Atheists have seized upon it and gone on an on and on about how ridiculous Aslan's statement is.
As opposed to making the slightest effort to understand what Aslan meant, which is that there are a wide variety of interpretations of the Koran, and a wide variety of beliefs and political positions among Muslims. Exactly the same way that they obsess on the few verses from the Koran or the Bible which cast Islam or Judaism or Christianity in the worst possible light, and ignore the rest of those books. (Let me take the opportunity to once again call BULLSHIT on the vast majority of New Atheists who claim to've read the Koran and Bible cover-to-cover.) Or the way that some of them reacted to Bart Ehrman's book Did Jesus Exist? by going on and on about some drawing of a bird in the Vatican and how that drawing supposedly exposed Ehrman as a fraud. That was bizarre, the way they went on about that drawing. I wish I could say it was atypical.
Aslan is attempting to point out the diversity in the actual lives of the actual more than one billion Muslims in the world, over the din of the New Atheists saying Oh there's some horrible stuff here in the Koran, Oh we've got to watch out for these Muslims, Oh, be very, very afraid -- a din which of course fits in very nicely with the islamophobic rhetoric of people like the aforementioned Fox News correspondent who asked Aslan how he got the nerve to write about Jesus without even being a Christian.
Of course Aslan pointed it out in a very unfortunate and clumsy way when he said that there is NO connection between the lives of believers and the texts of the holy books of those believers. Still, his point was against prejudice -- against assigning characteristic to Muslims because they are Muslims instead of looking closer and regarding them as the individual human beings they are. And that is a point which urgently needs to be made in our society which still suffers from so much prejudice against and fear of Muslims. Between Aslan's attempt to counter this prejudice and fear, and the New Atheists stirring it up, there's no question that any and every intelligent atheist must side with Aslan. In spite of the frequent facepalms over the clumsy way Aslan expresses himself, the message he expresses is far the wiser one. Stemming the tide of violence is far more urgent than whether or not someone believes in God. Identifying with and supporting Muslims fighting against extremism and Christians countering prejudice and fear is far more important than critiquing ancient texts.
And once again, New Atheists, if you're going to critique those texts, read the whole texts first. That's a bare minimum to have a chance not to look like fanatical fools. Don't keep telling me you already have -- like I keep telling you: I don't believe you. Show me you have, by saying something intelligent about the entire Koran or the entire Bible.
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Seriously, At This Point, What Is NOT Wrong With Kansas?
Let's give the smart people remaining in Kansas some time to move, and subsidize their moving expenses if need be, then just let Kansas secede and build a big high fence around the fucker. In 20 years all human life will have disappeared, and we can take down the fence, annex the territory again and start from scratch.
Okay, I don't really mean that. But it's alarming and confounding. I wish I had a real suggestion for what to do about things like this.
Okay, I don't really mean that. But it's alarming and confounding. I wish I had a real suggestion for what to do about things like this.
Monday, August 12, 2013
An Open Letter To Richard Dawkins
Hey, Dick!
I regret having stood up for you for some time in your capacity as a leader of New Atheism before having properly informed myself about your statements on various religions. Doubly so since I'm always chiding others for weighing in on topics about which they haven't first informed themselves. Which is pretty much what this post is about.
Let's concede for the sake of argument that you're correct in stating that science in the "Muslim world" is in a sorry state -- you've got a huge microphone and a towering podium, you've got some power: what are you going to DO about it? Beside repeating your mantra, "Religion is bad!"? Yes, Richard, religion is bad, but "Religion is bad!" is extremely oversimplistic, and extreme oversimplification is bad, if you will pardon my oversimplifying the case.
I'll tell you some things you can do:
Read the Koran, and until you're finished with that, enjoy a nice steaming hot mug of STFU about Islam.
But I see I'm far from the first to propose this to you. Oh well. Onward:
Visit some majority-Muslim countries, if you haven't already. If you have, pardon me, but it's hard to imagine that you have. In the course of researching whether or not you've ever been to a majority-Muslim country I came across someone posting on the Internet behind the anonymous safety of a handle, claiming to have been in the Middle East and to know that it amounted to suicide to be there and admit to being an atheist. I was immediately reminded of some other Internet pussies who claimed to live secretly as atheists in the US South, because coming out of the atheist closet there, they were certain, would be career suicide.
I lived in the middle of the Bible Belt for 10 years, during which time it never occurred to me to try to hide the fact that I was an atheist, and I knew people who were bolder than I, and we all were employed.
Admittedly, simply being an atheist, and being Richard Dawkins His Dangself, are two different propositions. But assuming that your personal security could somehow be arranged, would you consider going to Damascus University, say, or the University of Jordan, and meeting face to face with scientists working there, so you'd have a better idea of whom you're dissing? Visiting their labs, discussing their research?
If for no other reason, then to give yourself a shred of credibility on certain topics, as reading the Koran would?
I think your problem here is prejudice, Richard, and prejudice consists of assuming things about people rather than getting to know them as individuals. If "Muslim science" were represented in your mind by some people you'd met, whose labs you'd seen, maybe you'd be less inclined to say such stupid hurtful things about them. If those scientists in Jordan or Syria were not faceless to you, perhaps you'd be inclined to actually say, or even to do, things which could help them perform scientific work better. Of course, if you saw them for yourself, there's also the possibility that you'd see that you had been wrong about "Muslim science" being in such a sorry state, and instead begin wondering -- aloud, and in front of hot mikes, could one hope? -- about things such as why those scientists haven't received more attention from Western institutions such as those folks from Nobel.
Realistically, I don't see any reason to think that you'll do any of these this: read the Koran, go to the Middle East, meet "Muslim scientists" or tour "Muslim universities," or anything else which might open your mind a crack on the subject. (I'd be so glad if you'd prove me wrong.) And so instead, we atheists who are not as completely stupid about religion and culture and history as you -- have you met Salman Rushdie? If so it doesn't seem to have done you any good -- are just going to have to do a much better job of distancing ourselves from you. For so many reasons, including this one: it's true that not every atheist who is critical of Islam needs to have read the Koran, but the leader of a movement of millions of them should know it forward and backward, in Arabic. (Or at least for crying out loud be able to refer us to someone who does.) That's not very much to ask at all. There are plenty of atheists who fulfill that job requirement, including some you've probably never heard of because, you know, they live in the "Muslim world."
I regret having stood up for you for some time in your capacity as a leader of New Atheism before having properly informed myself about your statements on various religions. Doubly so since I'm always chiding others for weighing in on topics about which they haven't first informed themselves. Which is pretty much what this post is about.
Let's concede for the sake of argument that you're correct in stating that science in the "Muslim world" is in a sorry state -- you've got a huge microphone and a towering podium, you've got some power: what are you going to DO about it? Beside repeating your mantra, "Religion is bad!"? Yes, Richard, religion is bad, but "Religion is bad!" is extremely oversimplistic, and extreme oversimplification is bad, if you will pardon my oversimplifying the case.
I'll tell you some things you can do:
Read the Koran, and until you're finished with that, enjoy a nice steaming hot mug of STFU about Islam.
But I see I'm far from the first to propose this to you. Oh well. Onward:
Visit some majority-Muslim countries, if you haven't already. If you have, pardon me, but it's hard to imagine that you have. In the course of researching whether or not you've ever been to a majority-Muslim country I came across someone posting on the Internet behind the anonymous safety of a handle, claiming to have been in the Middle East and to know that it amounted to suicide to be there and admit to being an atheist. I was immediately reminded of some other Internet pussies who claimed to live secretly as atheists in the US South, because coming out of the atheist closet there, they were certain, would be career suicide.
I lived in the middle of the Bible Belt for 10 years, during which time it never occurred to me to try to hide the fact that I was an atheist, and I knew people who were bolder than I, and we all were employed.
Admittedly, simply being an atheist, and being Richard Dawkins His Dangself, are two different propositions. But assuming that your personal security could somehow be arranged, would you consider going to Damascus University, say, or the University of Jordan, and meeting face to face with scientists working there, so you'd have a better idea of whom you're dissing? Visiting their labs, discussing their research?
If for no other reason, then to give yourself a shred of credibility on certain topics, as reading the Koran would?
I think your problem here is prejudice, Richard, and prejudice consists of assuming things about people rather than getting to know them as individuals. If "Muslim science" were represented in your mind by some people you'd met, whose labs you'd seen, maybe you'd be less inclined to say such stupid hurtful things about them. If those scientists in Jordan or Syria were not faceless to you, perhaps you'd be inclined to actually say, or even to do, things which could help them perform scientific work better. Of course, if you saw them for yourself, there's also the possibility that you'd see that you had been wrong about "Muslim science" being in such a sorry state, and instead begin wondering -- aloud, and in front of hot mikes, could one hope? -- about things such as why those scientists haven't received more attention from Western institutions such as those folks from Nobel.
Realistically, I don't see any reason to think that you'll do any of these this: read the Koran, go to the Middle East, meet "Muslim scientists" or tour "Muslim universities," or anything else which might open your mind a crack on the subject. (I'd be so glad if you'd prove me wrong.) And so instead, we atheists who are not as completely stupid about religion and culture and history as you -- have you met Salman Rushdie? If so it doesn't seem to have done you any good -- are just going to have to do a much better job of distancing ourselves from you. For so many reasons, including this one: it's true that not every atheist who is critical of Islam needs to have read the Koran, but the leader of a movement of millions of them should know it forward and backward, in Arabic. (Or at least for crying out loud be able to refer us to someone who does.) That's not very much to ask at all. There are plenty of atheists who fulfill that job requirement, including some you've probably never heard of because, you know, they live in the "Muslim world."
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Dawkins' Tweet About Islam, Cambridge And Nobel Prizes
Richard Dawkins is a bit of a roller-coaster. I never know whether the next piece of his writing I'm going to read is going to be brilliant, stupid or somewhere in between. This recent tweet of his:
"All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though."
is one of the stupid ones. The reasons why it's so stupid are so perfectly summed up in a headline in the form of a rhetorical question over a column by Nelson Jones in the New Statesman that I could simply link Nelson's column, quote the headline, "Why do so many Nobel laureates look like Richard Dawkins?" and quit, and have a half-decent blog post.
But I have a little bit more to say. First of all, "the world's Muslims" are over a billion people, living in hundreds of countries, including people attending many thousands if not millions of schools, and, as Nelson adroitly points out, those schools now include Trinity college, Cambridge. As I have often pointed out when discussing Catholicism with simpleminded anti-Catholic bigots, any group of over a billion people will of necessity contain an extremely wide diversity of religious viewpoints, political orientations, levels of formal education, degrees of sophistication in approaches to science, etc, etc. I'm still not nearly as impressed by Francis I as many of my fellow atheists seem to be, but there's no denying that he provides a strong contrast to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and that makes it much harder for those anti-Catholic bigots to get away with referring to all one billion of the world's Catholics as if they all agreed with John Paul II and Benedict XVI about everything.
It's similarly ridiculous to refer to all one billion of the world's Muslims as if they were one homogenous group. I myself know that I cannot in any meaningful way keep up with the intellectual achievements of any group of one billion people, and much the less so when the majority of them have as their first language a language which is not in the same Indo-European language family as my first several languages. Furthermore, I dare to doubt that Richard Dawkins can encompass such vast activity within his mind. Using the famous Socratic principle properly, the first step for someone like Dawkins or myself toward understanding what intellectual activity is current among the world's Muslims is to acknowledge a great dark zone within our knowledge. And is it even necessary to point out how many Muslim intellectuals are Muslims pretty much in name only, because they were born into Muslim families? Or how many Muslim intellectuals, whether in countries which are majority Muslim, or majority Christian, or majority Hindu or Buddhist or majority something else, live and work daily alongside non-Muslims? Unfortunately, tweets such as this one by Dawkins make me think that it is urgently necessary.
I don't just dare to suspect that the people who award the Nobel Prizes, over the course of the more than 110 years in which it has been awarded, have been drastically ignorant of what's gone on in the world outside of Europe and North America, I assert outright that it's obviously the case, although they've gotten a bit more multicultural in the past few decades, like the rest of the world. Scandinavians have won a number of prizes wildly out of proportion to their numbers compared to the entire world's population. Does this mean that Scandinavians are generally more brilliant than others? No, it means that the prizes have been awarded by Scandinavians, and that Scandinavians will obviously and naturally be more familiar with the work of other Scandinavians than with the work of, for example, Kazakhs. They're also naturally going to be more familiar with the work being done in relatively nearby Trinity College, where the native language tends to be the world's, and especially Europe's, most widely-used second language, than with the work being done in, for example, Kazakhstan.
The obviousness of all of this is what makes Dawkins' tweet so stupid. Dawkins defended it by pointing out that the part about the numbers of Nobels won by Muslims and by Trinity college was factually accurate. But you can be factually accurate and stupid at the same time, by assigning an inaccurate significance to facts. I'll give you an example: "Year in and year out, a team from the United States of America wins the World Series."
One other thing which urgently needs to be pointed out is the hypocrisy of Westerners who, quite rightly, criticize human rights abuses and backwardness of education in other countries, some of which happen to be majority Muslim and whose rulers are Muslim, without criticizing at the same time, in the same breath, the governments of their own countries who maintain friendly relations with those other countries for the benefit of multinational corporations, whether we're talking about oil, or sweatshops, or clear-cutting old forests.
"All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though."
is one of the stupid ones. The reasons why it's so stupid are so perfectly summed up in a headline in the form of a rhetorical question over a column by Nelson Jones in the New Statesman that I could simply link Nelson's column, quote the headline, "Why do so many Nobel laureates look like Richard Dawkins?" and quit, and have a half-decent blog post.
But I have a little bit more to say. First of all, "the world's Muslims" are over a billion people, living in hundreds of countries, including people attending many thousands if not millions of schools, and, as Nelson adroitly points out, those schools now include Trinity college, Cambridge. As I have often pointed out when discussing Catholicism with simpleminded anti-Catholic bigots, any group of over a billion people will of necessity contain an extremely wide diversity of religious viewpoints, political orientations, levels of formal education, degrees of sophistication in approaches to science, etc, etc. I'm still not nearly as impressed by Francis I as many of my fellow atheists seem to be, but there's no denying that he provides a strong contrast to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and that makes it much harder for those anti-Catholic bigots to get away with referring to all one billion of the world's Catholics as if they all agreed with John Paul II and Benedict XVI about everything.
It's similarly ridiculous to refer to all one billion of the world's Muslims as if they were one homogenous group. I myself know that I cannot in any meaningful way keep up with the intellectual achievements of any group of one billion people, and much the less so when the majority of them have as their first language a language which is not in the same Indo-European language family as my first several languages. Furthermore, I dare to doubt that Richard Dawkins can encompass such vast activity within his mind. Using the famous Socratic principle properly, the first step for someone like Dawkins or myself toward understanding what intellectual activity is current among the world's Muslims is to acknowledge a great dark zone within our knowledge. And is it even necessary to point out how many Muslim intellectuals are Muslims pretty much in name only, because they were born into Muslim families? Or how many Muslim intellectuals, whether in countries which are majority Muslim, or majority Christian, or majority Hindu or Buddhist or majority something else, live and work daily alongside non-Muslims? Unfortunately, tweets such as this one by Dawkins make me think that it is urgently necessary.
I don't just dare to suspect that the people who award the Nobel Prizes, over the course of the more than 110 years in which it has been awarded, have been drastically ignorant of what's gone on in the world outside of Europe and North America, I assert outright that it's obviously the case, although they've gotten a bit more multicultural in the past few decades, like the rest of the world. Scandinavians have won a number of prizes wildly out of proportion to their numbers compared to the entire world's population. Does this mean that Scandinavians are generally more brilliant than others? No, it means that the prizes have been awarded by Scandinavians, and that Scandinavians will obviously and naturally be more familiar with the work of other Scandinavians than with the work of, for example, Kazakhs. They're also naturally going to be more familiar with the work being done in relatively nearby Trinity College, where the native language tends to be the world's, and especially Europe's, most widely-used second language, than with the work being done in, for example, Kazakhstan.
The obviousness of all of this is what makes Dawkins' tweet so stupid. Dawkins defended it by pointing out that the part about the numbers of Nobels won by Muslims and by Trinity college was factually accurate. But you can be factually accurate and stupid at the same time, by assigning an inaccurate significance to facts. I'll give you an example: "Year in and year out, a team from the United States of America wins the World Series."
One other thing which urgently needs to be pointed out is the hypocrisy of Westerners who, quite rightly, criticize human rights abuses and backwardness of education in other countries, some of which happen to be majority Muslim and whose rulers are Muslim, without criticizing at the same time, in the same breath, the governments of their own countries who maintain friendly relations with those other countries for the benefit of multinational corporations, whether we're talking about oil, or sweatshops, or clear-cutting old forests.
Sunday, July 7, 2013
"Contemporary Progressive" Religion
A new edition of some of the hadiths, the sayings of Muhammed, has been published in Turkey, intended for the use of "today's average Turk." Apparently the publication is causing some hoopla.
I don't know a lot about contemporary Islam, and I don't know how common such efforts are to edit core Islamic texts "for 21st-century Muslims." This effort in Turkey reminds me of what is advocated by many present-day Christian and Jewish theologians: efforts to make their religions "contemporary and progressive." I'm using quotation marks because I don't think there is any such thing as progressive 21st century religion. There are intelligent progressive people who are religious. And there are plenty of dimwitted atheists too, just look at the readers' comments in HP Religion. But even the dimwitted atheists are right about religion being make-believe (you don't have to be brilliant to see that), and an intelligent and well-informed religious believer, no matter how intelligent he or she may be on other subjects, is living in a world of make-believe whenever he or she talks about religion. He or she may be extremely well-informed about the names, dates and places of early Christianity, whereas a maddening number of atheist numbskulls insist on talking about such things without having first obtained a clue, claiming, for example, that Constantine re-wrote the Bible (there no evidence he ever even read it) at the Council of Nicea along with the Pope (the Pope wasn't there) in the year 400. (The Council of Nicea took place in 325, and Constantine died in 337.) But when it comes to the actual faith, suddenly the dopey atheist and the learned believer switch places: the atheist points out obvious things such as that it is absurd to build one's life around ancient or modern - religious texts, and the believer says ridiculous things such as "God's plan for us[...]" or "The timeless wisdom of these holy books[...]"
"We don't live in the 20th century anymore," said Mehmet Ozafsar, who oversaw this new publication, which involved more than 100 scholars in all, referring approvingly to the new edition of Mohammad's sayings. Of course not: a contemporary, cultured, enlightened Muslim lives simultaneously in the 21st and 7th centuries, just the same way that a contemporary, cultured, enlightened Christian lives simultaneously in the 21st and 1st century, and a contemporary, cultured, enlightened practicing Jew lives at one and the same time in today's world and in some various eras BC.
"We needed a new work with Islamic beliefs in the perspective of today's culture," Ozafsar went on. What they needed, I think, was some help in blurring the differences between today and 1400 years ago. I believe that theology consists more and more in the effort to help people fight off the impulse to think about certain things. The sad simple fact is that progress is made, and that while people of earlier ages may now and then have said something which we today still can find beautiful, or sometimes even wise, we cannot accept wholesale any worldview from centuries ago expressed in a form amounting to more than a couple of pages of prose, because any dimwit living today will have come to conclusions surpassing some of the conclusions of the wisest sage from then. Hume and Mohammed and Ezra are not to be despised for this mundane fact of life, any more than a 14th-century horse breeder would be mocked because any moped would beat any of his horses in a races of more than 2 miles.
What any atheist has grocked that any believer has not is that any text written in a time when it had not yet occurred to anyone anywhere that the institution of slavery might be wrong, not that this or that individual slave here and there had merited being freed but that the entire institution was wrong, along with institutions of misogyny and tribalism and superstition, IS NOT TO BE USED AS A GUIDE TO LIFE, AS ONE'S LIFE'S CENTRAL TEXT. That we can do better now. That religious believers misuse the term "superstition," that "religion" is synonymous with it, and does not refer, as the religious believer maintains, only to religions which conflict with his or her own.
As an amateur historian, naturally I'm interested in ancient texts -- and the more ancient the texts are, in every written culture I've encountered yet, the more religious they are -- and naturally I think it's great when other people study them too. As I hinted above, I wish many atheists would either become much more familiar with certain people, places and things from long ago OR FOR THE LOVE OF SHIVA STOP PRATTLING ON ABOUT THEM ALL THE LIVE-LONG DAY AS IF THEY SUPPOSED THEY HAD A CLUE. And as I said, many believers do study ancient texts relevant to their religions. Now if they could only drop the blinkers which make them pick a certain range of texts and study them with no critical faculties and declare that they are "holy" and/or "imbued with timeless wisdom." Timeless wisdom? I'd say there is no such thing. Hundreds of millions of years ago our ancestors were worms, tens of millions of years ago they were rodents, thousands of years ago every war was a total war and lasted until everyone on one side was dead or enslaved, hundreds of years ago the notion that women were as intelligent as men was not yet very widespread -- among men. Starting to see a pattern here? Good! Don't yet see how religion belongs back in the past with those other things? Keep thinking. Please. Because it's really not yet as if the human race were burdened with an overabundance of good sense.
I don't know a lot about contemporary Islam, and I don't know how common such efforts are to edit core Islamic texts "for 21st-century Muslims." This effort in Turkey reminds me of what is advocated by many present-day Christian and Jewish theologians: efforts to make their religions "contemporary and progressive." I'm using quotation marks because I don't think there is any such thing as progressive 21st century religion. There are intelligent progressive people who are religious. And there are plenty of dimwitted atheists too, just look at the readers' comments in HP Religion. But even the dimwitted atheists are right about religion being make-believe (you don't have to be brilliant to see that), and an intelligent and well-informed religious believer, no matter how intelligent he or she may be on other subjects, is living in a world of make-believe whenever he or she talks about religion. He or she may be extremely well-informed about the names, dates and places of early Christianity, whereas a maddening number of atheist numbskulls insist on talking about such things without having first obtained a clue, claiming, for example, that Constantine re-wrote the Bible (there no evidence he ever even read it) at the Council of Nicea along with the Pope (the Pope wasn't there) in the year 400. (The Council of Nicea took place in 325, and Constantine died in 337.) But when it comes to the actual faith, suddenly the dopey atheist and the learned believer switch places: the atheist points out obvious things such as that it is absurd to build one's life around ancient or modern - religious texts, and the believer says ridiculous things such as "God's plan for us[...]" or "The timeless wisdom of these holy books[...]"
"We don't live in the 20th century anymore," said Mehmet Ozafsar, who oversaw this new publication, which involved more than 100 scholars in all, referring approvingly to the new edition of Mohammad's sayings. Of course not: a contemporary, cultured, enlightened Muslim lives simultaneously in the 21st and 7th centuries, just the same way that a contemporary, cultured, enlightened Christian lives simultaneously in the 21st and 1st century, and a contemporary, cultured, enlightened practicing Jew lives at one and the same time in today's world and in some various eras BC.
"We needed a new work with Islamic beliefs in the perspective of today's culture," Ozafsar went on. What they needed, I think, was some help in blurring the differences between today and 1400 years ago. I believe that theology consists more and more in the effort to help people fight off the impulse to think about certain things. The sad simple fact is that progress is made, and that while people of earlier ages may now and then have said something which we today still can find beautiful, or sometimes even wise, we cannot accept wholesale any worldview from centuries ago expressed in a form amounting to more than a couple of pages of prose, because any dimwit living today will have come to conclusions surpassing some of the conclusions of the wisest sage from then. Hume and Mohammed and Ezra are not to be despised for this mundane fact of life, any more than a 14th-century horse breeder would be mocked because any moped would beat any of his horses in a races of more than 2 miles.
What any atheist has grocked that any believer has not is that any text written in a time when it had not yet occurred to anyone anywhere that the institution of slavery might be wrong, not that this or that individual slave here and there had merited being freed but that the entire institution was wrong, along with institutions of misogyny and tribalism and superstition, IS NOT TO BE USED AS A GUIDE TO LIFE, AS ONE'S LIFE'S CENTRAL TEXT. That we can do better now. That religious believers misuse the term "superstition," that "religion" is synonymous with it, and does not refer, as the religious believer maintains, only to religions which conflict with his or her own.
As an amateur historian, naturally I'm interested in ancient texts -- and the more ancient the texts are, in every written culture I've encountered yet, the more religious they are -- and naturally I think it's great when other people study them too. As I hinted above, I wish many atheists would either become much more familiar with certain people, places and things from long ago OR FOR THE LOVE OF SHIVA STOP PRATTLING ON ABOUT THEM ALL THE LIVE-LONG DAY AS IF THEY SUPPOSED THEY HAD A CLUE. And as I said, many believers do study ancient texts relevant to their religions. Now if they could only drop the blinkers which make them pick a certain range of texts and study them with no critical faculties and declare that they are "holy" and/or "imbued with timeless wisdom." Timeless wisdom? I'd say there is no such thing. Hundreds of millions of years ago our ancestors were worms, tens of millions of years ago they were rodents, thousands of years ago every war was a total war and lasted until everyone on one side was dead or enslaved, hundreds of years ago the notion that women were as intelligent as men was not yet very widespread -- among men. Starting to see a pattern here? Good! Don't yet see how religion belongs back in the past with those other things? Keep thinking. Please. Because it's really not yet as if the human race were burdened with an overabundance of good sense.
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