Religion

Many across the bits of the blogosphere I read have declared themselves simply bowled-over by “the latest column from the Observer’s Nick Cohen”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1371935,00.html . Cohen is writing, _inter alia_ in opposition to David Blunkett’s deeply flawed proposal to ban incitement to religious hatred, and one passage in particular has been reproduced in full or in part on at least five blogs (“Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/cat_uk_politics.html#003048 ,
“Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/12/the_power_to_sh.html , “SIAW”:http://marxist-org-uk.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_marxist-org-uk_archive.html#110285818716789492 , “Mick Hartley”:http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2004/12/nick_cohen_gets.html , “Melanie Phillips”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/000941.html ) :

bq. MPs didn’t point out that when society decides that people’s religion, rather than their class or gender, is the cultural fact that matters, power inevitably passes to the priests and the devout for whom religion does indeed matter most. To their shame, many on the left have broken with the Enlightenment to perform
this manoeuvre. They have ridden the Islamic wave and agreed to convert one billion people into ‘the Muslims’. A measure of their bad faith is that they would react with horror if this trick was pulled on them, and they were turned into ‘the Christians’ whose authentic representatives were the Archbishop of Canterbury and ‘Dr’ Ian Paisley.

I hope I’m not alone in being considerably less admiring of the passage in question.

[click to continue…]

I’m trying very hard to imagine what the film version of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is going to be like if “The Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C2-1393306%2C00.html is to be believed. According to an article today, the film’s director is cutting all references to God and the church from the script, for fear “of a backlash from the Christian Right in the United States.” Instead, the sinister ‘Authority’ (read horrid amalgam of Calvinism and the Catholic Church) of the novel will be taken as representing any old repressive establishment that you might care to oppose yourself – totalitarian, Marxist or what-have-you. This seems to me (and I suspect to most of Pullman’s readers) to be utterly mad – the entire point of the series is that it’s an extended diatribe against organized religion. Pullman is a vociferous member of the Devil’s party, even if his vague humanistic alternative to Christianity (described in the greatly inferior final volume of the series), is decidedly “droopy”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002961.html.

It also says some interesting things about the comparative state of debate over religion in the UK and the US. In the UK, the Anglican establishment seemed to be “quite delighted”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1165873,00.html with Pullman’s books – that someone took Christianity seriously enough to attack it was cause for celebration. In the US, in contrast, the movie’s financial backers are clearly terrified of a backlash from fundamentalists who are anything but interested in vigorous debate about the merits and defects of organized Christianity. Anti-semitic movies about the Passion are all very well and good, but pull-no-punches atheism and criticism of organized religion apparently are not. Of course, this may just be nerves on the part of the money people (in fairness, Gibson’s magnum opus got squeamish responses from potential backers too), but it is interesting how little public space there is for the expression of atheistic views in the US. I’m neither religious nor a card-carrying atheist myself (I’d describe myself as a mostly-lapsed Catholic), but it seems to me that it doesn’t do any great service to genuine religious debate if a well argued and intellectually coherent perspective on religion is denied any space in popular culture.

Update: slightly revised following comments.

Pharyngula “has a post”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/sultana_of_the_texas_taliban_scourge_of_scholars_despoiler_of_textbooks/ about how the Texas School Board is trying to exclude not just the mention of evolution from school textbooks, but also references to pollution, global warming, overpopulation, contraception and “married partners” (might include gays). (This kind of thing doesn’t alarm the Dupe, who “argues”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2109377/ — if “argues” is the right word — that Bush’s victory is a triumph for the forces of secularism.)

Following up John Quiggin’s follow-up to my first post on Silenced and Left Behind-style tribulit generally, a couple quick links and thoughts.

[click to continue…]

Yusuf Islam — the former singer once known as Cat Stevens — “has been banned from the United States”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3678694.stm . And not just banned, they actually diverted the plane 600 miles to Maine to remove him from it. He’s made some equivocal statements in the past, but more recently “has been forthright in his condemnation of terrorism”:http://catstevens.com/news.html?id=00174 . Perhaps there’s something we don’t know, but, on the surface, this looks like a bad mistake. Ordinary Muslims will be bound to see this as hostility to their religion as such rather than just to extremists and terrorists.

The recent visit to Britain of Shaikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and his reception by London mayor Ken Livingstone generated a lot of controversy. I confess that I was a little bit skeptical about some of the claims made about him by his opponents on a “they would say that, wouldn’t they?” basis. His latest declaration calling on Muslims to fight the Americans in Iraq and including civilians as legitimate targets should remove any doubt. Juan Cole — who can read the Arabic sources and is not one of the people who recycles the ravings of Daniel Pipes — is disgusted, “and provides a good deal of further background”:http://www.juancole.com/2004_09_01_juancole_archive.html#109419064196351096 .

“Tariq Ramadan has an article in the New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/opinion/01ramadan.html responding to the revocation of his visa and to some of the accusations made against him.

According to “Scott Martens at A Fistful of Euros”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000782.php , Tariq Ramadan (recently “interviewed”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-5-57-2006.jsp by OpenDemocracy) who had been appointed to a visiting position at Notre Dame, has been denied a US visa under sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act that were amended by the Patriot Act. Scott comments:

bq. Whether one agrees with Ramadan or not, it is difficult to image an Islamic intellectual figure who is likely to be more acceptable as the other side in an American dialogue with Islam. Thus, the refusal to allow him to enter the US suggests that someone in Homeland Security agrees with the Daniel Pipes standard: Any Muslim who fails to condemn Islam, from its founding to the present and in all its manifestations, must be a fanatic and a threat to the West. …. This is an opportunity for Europeans and Americans to show that at the very least they are capable of exercising better judgement than the Bush administration.

The (London) Times “is running a series on Muslims in the UK”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1192019,00.html . Not profound stuff, but a useful antidote to the demonization that prevails in parts of the blogosphere. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that young Muslims have views about sex and alcohol (among other things) that resemble in important respects the views that many young Catholics have about contraception.[1]

fn1. The article is freely accessible from within the UK, but may require registration from elsewhere. My information about whether those attempting to access from elsewhere need to subscribe varies.

In the light of some recent discussions at “Butter”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=491 “flies”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=492 “and”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=493 “Wheels”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=494, “Daily”:http://marcmulholland.tripod.com/histor/index.blog?entry_id=377372 “Moiders”:http://marcmulholland.tripod.com/histor/index.blog?entry_id=380130 , “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/07/22/islamophobia.php, “Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/butterflies_and.html , and even here, I thought I’d post a link to “this OpenDemocracy interview with Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-5-57-2006.jsp , which I found of interest.[1] I also see that “Norm has just posted”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/andre_glucksman.html some lines from Andre Glucksmann on anti-semitism in France which are sort-of relevant, since a polemic against Glucksmann (among others) raised accusations of anti-semitism against Ramadan, a charge Ramadan rejects in the O-D interview.

fn1. Since these are sensitive times, and readers sometimes think that linking suggests endorsement, let me insist, self-defensively and for the record, that I’m not endorsing, just linking to something interesting.

Swift brash flash of blue
Nobly shielding your fledglings
Can’t I mow the lawn?

One thought that went through my mind during the recent fuss over the visit of Yussef al-Qaradawi to Britain was this: what did those who, after September 11th, uttered variations on “Islam needs a Reformation” expect the agents of such a Reformation to look like? Martin Luther or Calvin maybe? Because those guys had some pretty nasty views, and yet ….

Marc Mulholland has written “a very useful and serious post”:http://marcmulholland.tripod.com/histor/index.blog?entry_id=377372 on “liberal Islamophobia” over at Daily Moiders, and, in comments, Anthony Cox responds.

The comments on the recent post about Focus on the Family’s distribution of Michael Moore’s home address have occasionally drifted into anti-Christian sentiment, which was very much not what I was hoping for. For a more heartening look at conservative Christianity:

The Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative denomination closely aligned with President Bush, said it was offended by the Bush-Cheney campaign’s effort to use church rosters for campaign purposes.

“I’m appalled that the Bush-Cheney campaign would intrude on a local congregation in this way,” said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission…

The Bush campaign defended a memo in which it sought to mobilize church members by providing church directories to the campaign, arranging for pastors to hold voter-registration drives, and talking to various religious groups about the campaign…

But on Friday, Land said, “It’s one thing for a church member motivated by exhortations to exercise his Christian citizenship to go out and decide to work on the Bush campaign or the (John) Kerry campaign. It’s another and totally inappropriate thing for a political campaign to ask workers who may be church members to provide church member information through the use of directories to solicit partisan support.”

I disagree with the Southern Baptists on many things. At the same time, I have great respect for this enthusiastic defense of the boundaries between church and state from a religious organization . Furthermore, their apparent acknowledgement that it’s just as legitimate for congregants to feel moved by Christian principle to work for Kerry as Bush is highly welcome. My heartfelt thanks to the Southern Baptists for this bit of culture war disarmament.

P.S. More on Focus on the Family here (funny!) and here (not funny; it’s a FOTF ad).

AND ANOTHER THING: A small point about that ad- who is that sad little boy supposed to be? In context, it only makes sense if he’s supposed to be a boy raised by gay parents, upset because he doesn’t have both a father and a mother. How, exactly, is a constitutional amendment preventing his parents from marrying each other supposed to help him?

Eugene Volokh “posts a table”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_06_14.shtml#1087270691 from a “poll”:http://pollingreport.com/religion.htm showing that about 60 percent of Americans say they believe Biblical stories like the 7-day creation, Noah’s flood and Moses’ parting of the Red Sea to be literally true. This is rather higher than other estimates I’ve seen of Biblical Literalism. Based on “GSS data”:http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS/ (the GSS is the best available public opinion survey in the U.S. with a long time-series), we know that in 1998 about 30 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word”. This was down from about 40 percent in 1988. (Most of the decline seems to have happened in the late 1980s, however.) About half of Americans agree that “The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word.” And a steady 15 to 17 percent agree that it’s “an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men.” “Here’s a graph”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/BT-plot.pdf, I put together of these trends, in pdf format.

[click to continue…]