Atheists and Islam, Part IV.

This is Part IV of a three part series. Previously, Part I, Part II, Part III.

Atheists and Islam: Part IV, Enlightenment Values.

So, what does all of this have to do with atheists? The risk is that an aversion to Islam could push some in the atheist community towards condoning violations of freedom of religion and expression. These are two of the central values of Enlightenment thought, and the best angels of the Enlightenment spirit are the cornerstones on which all free, rational discourse relies. Call me an Enlightenment fundamentalist if you will, but these are two principles which should never be compromised.

My concern is that it is too easy for us to point our finger at Islamist terror and conclude in a self-satisfied way that this proves our point about religion better than anything. And perhaps it does – after all I am not denying that the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam plays an important role in encouraging the violence in the Middle East. But to leave it there is to tempt us into being intellectually lazy, and once you get lazy, you also get defensive and reactive. During my discussion with Aslan, he expressed surprise at my assertion that all the atheists I know are opposed to the minaret ban and the ban on the veil – and as you can see, this has been the case at this blog. Aslan however went as far as to say that the willingness of atheists to circumvent religious freedom in the name of opposing Islam in fact characterizes the majority of our community.

The idea that this might be true distressed me. Therefore, I decided to do a little research on the question, and spent several hours trying to find commentary on atheist blogs concerning the question. What I found was mostly reassuring – at The Friendly Atheist, for example, Hemant Mehta came down clearly on the side of opposing the minaret ban in Switzerland as a violation of religious freedom, and of the extensive thread that followed, I counted only five discrete commentators who supported the ban. The Freethinker fared less well, containing about 20 supporters of the ban in the thread about Switzerland but at least an equal number of people opposed to it. (I also counted as ‘supportive of the ban’ people who complained that the call to prayer was the cause of their support, although they are misinformed as the call to prayer was already not allowed in Switzerland.) The Freethinker, it occurred to me, is a British blog, and it was suggested to me by other atheists that the divide between European style atheism and American style atheism could be an important part of what was going on here – and indeed, Aslan had just returned from a trip to Europe where he had been dealing with that particular brand of opposition to religion for several weeks. Perhaps this helps explain his surprise at the dedication many atheists have to the principle of freedom of worship – perhaps also, as I suggested to him, this has something to do with the split between what one hears at a grassroots level, and what one hears from the loudest, most visible members of a community. Indeed, even in Switzerland agnostics and atheists actually voted against the minaret ban in higher numbers than religious believers.

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Atheists & Islam, Part III.

This is Part III in a four part series. Previously, Part I and Part II.

Atheism and Islam: Part III, Sam Harris.

However, if Aslan insists on the importance of context while downplaying the importance of truth claims, Sam Harris reverses his mistake and treats ideas as isolated things, neglecting or dismissing the importance of context in determining how ideas actually operate. Throughout his chapter on Islam “The Problem With Islam,” in his book The End of Faith, Harris acknowledges that society and politics – in particular the baneful legacy of colonialism and the United States’ less than stellar record when it comes to foreign policy in the Middle East – play a role in fostering Islamism. But for the most part his next step is to insist that we should still primarily point our finger at Islam. Harris argues that commentators who insist that the problem is primarily political are “unable to place [themselves] in the position of one who actually believes the propositions set forth in the Koran – that paradise awaits, that our senses deliver nothing but evidence of a fallen world in desperate need of conquest for the glory of God.” Harris thus insists that “‘the rise of Islamic fundamentalism’ is only a problem because the fundamentals of Islam are a problem.”

You will have no argument from me that the fundamentals of all religions are deeply flawed and often destructive to human happiness. However, Harris treats the passages of the Qur’an which can clearly inspire violence as a sufficient cause for Islamist terrorism, rather than a necessary cause or even, as a case could be made, merely a very aggravating cause. Harris makes a clearly ahistorical argument when he argues that without Islam, “most Muslim grievances against the West would be impossible even to formulate, much less avenge.” First, this statement seems to dismiss the entire legacy of European and American imperialism – whether it was conducted by armed soldiers or undercover CIA operatives. Second, this ignores the historical reality of terrorist groups not inspired by religion, and moreover acting on grievances not overwhelmingly more compelling than those the Muslim world harbors. The terrorism of anarchist groups of the nineteenth century comes immediately to mind – and of course, there is a long list of terrorism inspired at least partially by other major religions. Therefore, to single out Islam as the factor which “explains the actions of Muslim extremists” better than anything else is inadequate – it is part of the picture, for sure, but that it can be isolated as the most important factor is extremely doubtful. Harris insists that oppressed, poor people are everywhere and yet, very few resort to this particular type of violence – true enough, but the reasons for violence or the lack thereof in any given social situation are so complex that to suggest that peaceful situations are maintained simply because Islam is not a factor is an unsophisticated argument indeed.

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Atheists & Islam: Part II.

This is the second installment of a four-part series. Part I can be found here.

Atheists & Islam: Part II, Reza Aslan.

First, I would like to critique Reza Aslan’s description of religion as it is portrayed in No god but God and this debate with Sam Harris. Aslan writes,

“Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith. It is an institutionalized system of symbols and metaphors (read rituals and myths) that provides a common language with which a community of faith can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence.”

This is a very postmodern understanding of religion – and it is right, at least in part. But the problem with this definition is that it is a definition that few religious people actually accept – at least the devoutly religious. That will be the day when an evangelical Christian says to me, “it’s not really important that one literately believes that Christ rose again, that is just the story we use to symbolize our faith.” And it is the same with Islam – while Islam undoubtedly represents a diverse tradition which encompasses the spiritual experiences of millions of people over hundreds of years, the traditional (or most common) telling of the tale nevertheless does include believing very concretely in several things. Therefore, the goalpost is moved when Aslan goes on to write,

“Religion is concerned not with genuine history, but with sacred history, which does not course through time like a river. … To ask whether Moses actually parted the Red Sea, or whether Jesus truly raised Lazarus from the dead, or whether the word of God indeed poured through the lips of Muhammad, is to ask totally irrelevant questions.”

I have no doubt that these questions are irrelevant to the particular task Aslan set for himself in No god but God, which aims to be a historical account of the development of Islam and a description of its core ideas. However, when it comes to the issues believers and non-believers alike wrangle with today, these are extremely relevant questions. I have no objection to people engaging with the part of ourselves that is capable of transcendent or sublime experience – in fact I encourage it, as it seems quite fundamental to the human condition. However, should a person choose to do this through any organized religion, the question of why this religion becomes quite operative – and for most people, the answer to that question involves certain truth claims.* These claims involve not just the effectiveness of any one “discourse” of religion to connect them to an experience of transcendence, but truth claims that depend for their effectiveness on the belief that certain things actually happened. Therefore, the questions of what the Qur’an says, and whether or not part or all of its Revelation is believed to be historically true, are incredibly important if we are going to deal realistically with the dynamics of Islam in the world today.

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Atheists & Islam, Part I.

This is Part I in what will be a four part series. I will add a new segment every 5 days or so, and once they are all posted we will also put up the audio recording of my interview with Reza Aslan.

Atheists & Islam: Part I, Introduction.

In the winter of 2010, I participated in a discussion held by a local atheist group. The topic of the night was, “Is Europe failing its Muslims?” After watching the video of an Intelligence Squared debate on the question, a vote was held which resulted with only three people voting yes, in a crowd of about 15-20 people.

I was one of those three people. Coming as the vote did after the minaret ban in Switzerland, I was surprised to find myself so much in the minority. Granted, those who argued for the “yes” side of the question in the Intelligence Squared debate did a notably bad job at making their case, mixing weak postmodern reasoning with obscure references to the grassroots campaign for tolerance. However, I thought the speakers arguing for “no” did quite a poor job as well, particularly when Douglas Murray employed xenophobic doublespeak, at once insisting that the conflict between Islam and Western values was solvable but also claiming that Muslims could not consider themselves brothers to believers and citizens of Britain at the same time.

Since then, the so-called “Burqa Ban” in France (inaccurately named because barely anyone in France wears the burqa, and the law was mostly aimed at the veil) and the hysteria over the (also misnamed) “Ground Zero Mosque” have convinced me further than not only Europe, but also America, are flirting with betraying, in the name of opposing Islam, the core Enlightenment concepts of freedom of worship, freedom of expression, and the rights of the minority. Furthermore, the atheist community has a peculiar relationship with Islam – while there is evidence to support the argument that we are more, not less, likely to respect freedom of worship than believers, our ranks also include some of the most strident critics of Islam who insist that, in addition to our general opposition to religion, Islam in particular deserves our ire and our suspicion.

It was in this context that I seized the opportunity to meet and discuss Islamophobia with Reza Aslan when he came to UC Davis this October. By way of preparing myself for the interview I read Aslan’s No god but God, an introductory text to Islam which is written in light of Islamist terror – and by way of familiarizing myself with the opposing end of the argument about Islam, I read “The problem with Islam,” the chapter in Sam Harris’s The End of Faith which deals exclusively with Islam. What follows are my reflections and opinions on this question after seriously pondering them for several weeks.

As I am likely to raise some heckles during the course of this discussion, let me start out by stating clearly that I am, of course, still an atheist. As an atheist I do believe that the less human beings resort to religious belief to cope with the human condition, the better the global human community can move forward to progressive and peaceful solutions for the problems of society. Therefore the following is in no way intended as a defense of Islam insofar as it is a religion – however, it is meant as a defense of all Muslims who are confronting everything from pedestrian prejudice to state sanctioned discrimination.

Next time, I will start my discussion by critiquing Reza Aslan’s conception of religion.

Catholicism? Really?

Last night, as I was watching the recent debate between Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair, a question that has occurred to me several times before popped up again: why would anyone in their right mind convert to Catholicism?

Now of course for an atheist the larger question is why would anyone in their right mind convert to anything. But let’s put that aside for a second and recognize that, as Sam Harris has pointed out on multiple occasions, not all religions are equally pernicious. Let us now narrow our choices to the various branches of Christianity. On nearly every count, Protestantism seems more intellectually rigorous, more internally coherent, and less prone to the grievous abuses of power that having such an absurd institution as the Pope seems to encourage. So, what the fuck, Tony Blair? And you’re British! Really now.

But I am biased. I find the intellectual history of Protestant theology to be gripping and at times even inspiring. The usual Christian faults aside, such as his anti-Semitism, Martin Luther was a very admirable person and I am quite fond of him. (Calvin, however, seems like a complete dick to me.) At least Protestant theology is more consistent with scripture and, moreover, contained elements of egalitarianism which would later help things like democracy seem thinkable. And Protestantism is also, of course, largely responsible for our modern concepts of individuality and autonomy.

On the other end of this, what does Catholicism have to offer? A church dogma which still claims that the Eucharist ritual can magically transform wine into blood and bread into flesh, a medieval position on contraception, a rigid, hierarchical structure prone to abuse and corruption, and priests who can molest their young parishioners and be assured that the Church will let them get away with it. And that is only recently – the history of the Catholic Church reads like a satire devised by an enemy of religion, designed exclusively to show how religion enables ignorance, hypocrisy, and just plain absurdity to reach limitless heights in the pursuit of power. Like when there were two Popes in the fourteenth century? Yeah, comically ridiculous.

And who would want to give up talking to God directly, as the Protestants claim we can all do? Is it more attractive for some people to have men with special outfits designated as especially in tune with God? Is it the ritual of confession that is so assuring and therapeutic that it trumps all the freedom from medieval dogma various strains of Protestantism have to offer? The only thing I can think of that the Catholic Church clearly does better than Protestantism is art. Catholic Churches are beautiful – Protestant churches, thanks to their founders’ suspicion that anything that brings one joy is suspicious, less so. But they are catching up. There are not a lot of Puritans left in the modern world. [And really, if you are all about the art you could just join the Anglican Church, which is basically Catholicism Lite.]

Again, I guess I am not supposed to have such a strong opinion on this considering that I believe all forms of Christianity are essentially rubbish. But Protestantism did help encourage some wonderful things in Western civilization, even if we got an extra dose of anxiety for every ounce of individuality we gained. But Catholicism? For what do I have Catholicism to thank? Tony Blair, what are you thinking? And don’t just tell me it is because your wife is Catholic. I expect intellectual justification for this decision.

Sam Harris in Berkeley

I was in Berkeley last night to see Sam Harris talk about his new book, The Moral Landscape. Harris makes a convincing case for how science, so broadly defined that I think ‘rationality’ really serves as a more appropriate phrase, can allow us to determine right from wrong, or when one of those clear positions is not available, the ethically most optimal behavior.

Harris’s argument really only requires you to accept one assumption – that morality is based on human wellbeing; ie, human suffering (of all kinds, physical, psychological, ‘spiritual’ if you will even) is bad, human happiness and fulfillment, good. I know that many of the religious will lay their objection precisely here – that without God you cannot provide any reason for why human suffering should be considered bad – and yet when Sam Harris asks his audience to imagine the worst possible world, one in which everyone is suffering the maximum amount of suffering possible, he points out that no one would ever find reason to argue that this would be a good or neutral world, whatever their metaphysics. (I could go a lot more into this, but I imagine he does so in a much better way than I could, so for the curious I would read the book.) But it also occurred to me that religion itself often lacks a compelling argument for why human suffering should be considered bad – after all, the concept of original sin has been interpreted by many religious groups to mean we ought to be suffering, that we deserve suffering, and that our lives are hardly about happiness. It is difficult to see why this (and several other) religious metaphysics actually compels us to care about the well being of our fellow human beings any more than our reason and instinctual humanity does.

From there, Harris’s argument is largely common sense or, at least this is how it came across to me. This is not to belittle his accomplishment; to display how clear his argument is, Harris has to cut through a lot of obfuscation caused by outdated philosophical debates and postmodern obsessions about subjectivity.

Of the three biggest “New Atheists,” I have to say Harris is my favorite – his background in philosophy and his interest in transcendent, emotional experience makes him more well-rounded, in my mind, than either Dawkins or Hitchens, and allows him to speak more broadly about the implications of atheism to the human condition, rather than simply discrediting religion and leaving it there. I was particularly impressed by his contribution to this discussion. He still, however, goes after Islam in a way which I feel unfairly leaves out the social and political context of Islamic terrorism - and I will talk much more about that next week, when I post about my recent interview with Reza Aslan – but no one is perfect.

Morals without God? Why not?

This article by Frans De Waal is both very interesting and very confusing. Most of the article is spent explaining De Waal’s and other’s findings on ethical behavior among primates, such as a sense of fairness and genuine altruism. The studies De Waal’s discusses are strong arguments for the evolutionary origins of ethics and morality, and De Waal also wisely dismisses the argument that all animal altruism is selfish, pointing out that if this were the case, all human altruism must be considered selfish, as well.

De Waal then changes track, however, and argues for a conclusion that contradicts with the evidence he has presented. While primates appear to have a basic sense of fairness built into them, De Waal explains, morality as we understand it is only possible with high level thinking. Human ethics becomes morality because we have to imagine scenarios involving more complex questions, and larger groups of people, than primates encounter in small group settings. Therefore, this requires systemization and logic, and, De Waal appears to argue, religion.

Science is not in the business of spelling out the meaning of life and even less in telling us how to live our lives. We, scientists, are good at finding out why things are the way they are, or how things work, and I do believe that biology can help us understand what kind of animals we are and why our morality looks the way it does. But to go from there to offering moral guidance seems a stretch.”

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