From the category archives:
Religion
The whole business with the Danish cartoons has now reached new levels of insanity with Christians and their churches being attacked in Nigeria and Pakistan. That the Danish newspaper had the right to publish its deplorable cartoons ought not to be in question. But it does not help the case for freedom of speech if Muslims can truthfully say that there is a double standard and that the sensibilities of Christians are regarded as a valid legal reason for restraining freedom of expression whereas theirs are not. Mark Kermode had a piece in the Observer a week or so ago concerning the film Visions of Ecstasy which the British Board of Film Classification refused to grant a certificate to on the grounds that a successful prosecution under Britain’s blasphemy laws was likely to succeed. The film maker took his case to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming that that the refusal to grant classification was a breach of his rights under Article 10 of the Convention. He lost. In line with a previous judgement, the Court
bq. accepted that respect for the religious feelings of believers can move a State legitimately to restrict the publication of provocative portrayals of objects of religious veneration.
It is therefore simply not true to say that in Europe freedom of expression trumps the sensibilities of believers. What is true is that some believers, of some denominations, get legal protection from being offended, and others don’t. Not a satisfactory situation.
The full judgement of the ECHR (complete with concurring and dissenting opinions) is here .
Last we heard from Andrew Sullivan, he was hyping up the danger of clerical thugs being able to blackmail western democracies into dismantling themselves. I suggested that, insofar as civil liberties were being eroded, this was something elites in these countries were doing to themselves. Now I see that he’s come up with an example from (noted democracy) Russia of, in his words How Muslim Blackmail Works. One of Russia’s leading Muslim clerics said that anyone planning to turn out for a gay pride parade in Moscow “should be flogged”. The parade was canceled, and QED says Sullivan. Except that, as Cathy Young argues the news reports actually show a more complicated picture. The short version is that rather than being canceled in response to this pressure it was vetoed by the city government, and the muslim cleric was joined in his opposition to the parade by the Mayor, the local Russian Orthodox Bishop and others. Astonishingly, Putin’s Russia turns out not to be such a haven for free speech, civil society or popular dissent. Who’d have thought it?
A couple of unrelated thoughts as we wait for the Superbowl parties to start…
I’m puzzled by some of the reaction to the Jyllands-Posten affair. In free speech debates over the last few years I’ve often encountered so-called libertarians who argue that speech ought to be absolutely protected from state interference but that private individuals may legitimately do what they like when it comes to sacking people whose views they disagree with or boycotting products. That isn’t the way I see things, but it is hard to see how someone running that line can object to a private company sacking an editor for reprinting the cartoons or to Muslims boycotting Danish goods in protest. Of course, not everyone takes the view that the state should keep out of speech. Norman Geras, for example, recently linked (I can only assume approvingly) to a report of a court decision in France which condemned the publisher of Le Monde for “racist defamation” against the Jewish people, an article that goes on to condemn the Western media quite generally for anti-semitic representations of Israel, including in cartoons depicting Ariel Sharon and described the court decision as “a major landmark”. Yesterday Geras linked to a piece approving of France Soir’s action, his blog headine being France Soir takes a stand . I take it, then, that Geras would disapprove of any similar court decision against France Soir. No doubt those wishing to distinguish the cases would claim that cartoons of Sharon eating babies are racist but those depicting Muslims as ignorant towel-heads and suicide bombers are merely engaged in the legitimate criticism of ideas: the images may looke like they come from Julius Streicher but the motive comes from Voltaire … or something like that.
So what does Chris think, you ask? Well I was mildly heartened by the recent defeat of the UK government’s proposed law on religious hatred. Only mildly though, because it is obvious that racists in the West (such as the BNP in Britain) are using “Muslim” as a code under which to attack minorities in ways that don’t fall foul of laws against the promotion of racial hatred. When the assorted pundits and TV comedians who complained about government plans to outlaw satire begin to take _that_ seriously, I’ll start to take them seriously. But I’d certainly support a law that could reliably catch the racists but spare the satirists, _The Satanic Verses_, _Jerry Springer the Opera_ &c. That is, I think I’m in pretty much the same space as Daniel in comments to a post over at the excellent Blood and Treasure .
While we’re on the subject of religion, I happened (via Charles Dodgson at Through the Looking Glass) to discover that George Bush rarely goes to church (behind paywall, but the intro gives you the basics).
NTTAWWT – I’m sure he goes more often than I do. But it struck me as a blogworthy factoid.
I learned yesterday via a local newspaper report of the existence of the Vatican Observatory which, surprising as it may seem, is exactly what it sounds like: the astrophysics research division of the Catholic Church. While its headquarters are at Castel Gandolfo (the Pope’s Summer home) in Italy, it’s based here in Arizona at the Mount Graham Observatory. There, a bunch of Jesuits operate the VATT, the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope. I think that’s just fantastic — like something out of Phillip Pullman. Is it too much to hope for the Vatican Superconducting Supercollider, which would once and for all resolve the question of how many angels would be killed if a stream of particles were smashed into the head of a pin?
This Financial Times article (sub required) has a quote from an email written by Michael Scanlon, former bagman for Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff, which sums up the modern Republican party in two sentences.
bq. Michael Scanlon … explained the strategy in an e-mail to a tribal client. “Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them,” he wrote. “The wackos get their information [from] the Christian right, Christian radio, e-mail, the internet and telephone trees.”
Fundamentalist wackos, stirred up by cynical political operators in it for the money. Not a pretty picture.
Bob Dylan, 1963 :
bq. In a many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.
The Vatican 2006 :
bq. JUDAS ISCARIOT, the disciple who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, is to be given a makeover by Vatican scholars. The proposed “rehabilitation” of the man who was paid 30 pieces of silver to identify Jesus to Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane, comes on the ground that he was not deliberately evil, but was just “fulfilling his part in God’s plan”.
Technorati’s List of Popular Books introduces me to There is Eternal Life for Animals, which argues that
bq. All animals go to heaven. How do we know? We look in the book that God left us, the Bible. This book takes you through the Bible and proves through the scriptures that there is life after death for all the animals. It covers: — God’s relationship with the animals; — The current life of the animal kingdom; — The future life of the animals and its restoration; — What animals are currently in heaven; — Whether animals have souls and spirits; — Praying for animals. There Is Eternal Life For Animals includes numerous Bible scriptures, opinions and commentaries from Bible Theologians, visions, stories, near-death experiences of children, and personal experiences. It also reviews many of the original Greek and Hebrew words and their translations.
I am tempted to buy the book and have it sent to P.Z. Myers as a gift. It’s true that if the book’s argument is right the downside for P.Z. is, of course, that there is a benevolent God filling up Heaven with our beloved cats and dogs. On the other hand, maybe the beloved giant squid are up there, too, in the deep-sea regions of heaven.
I’m interested to read the “What animals are currently in heaven” section. Does the author mean what _kinds_ of animals, or particular _individual_ animals? If the former, do Deer Ticks make it? Or Liver Fluke? If the latter, Phar Lap is surely there (despite also being scattered around Australia), but what about Garfield?
In comments to Daniel’s post about the “Project”, commenter Sean Morris responds to the following remark by Daniel:
bq. Messing around with “Project” conspiracy theories about ethnic minorities is not a harmless hobby.
with the rhetorical question:
bq. Since when was a religion an ethnic minority?
To which the short answer is, in some cases, since forever. This rhetorical move is often made in blog debates by people who want to deny Muslims in European societies the kinds of protections that are afforded to some other groups. But it is a move without merit, since, depending on the social and cultural context, religion, like anything else, can function as the marker that denotes the insider-outsider boundary.
This gives me the excuse — which is the real function of the post — to reproduce a few lines from Howard Becker’s Tricks of the Trade on the definition of ethnic groups:
We would wonder, for instance, how to define the concept of “ethnic group.” How did we know if a group was one of those or not? [Everett C.] Hughes had identified our chronic mistake, in an essay he wrote on ethnic relations in Canada:
Last week’s New Yorker (Dec.5, 2005) had a very good article on the trial concerning “intelligent design” in the high school of Dover, PA. (It’s not online, but a Q&A with the author, Margaret Talbot, is.) It included lots of interesting original reporting, including the following:
The night after the board approved the evolution disclaimer, Brad Neal, a social-studies teacher at the high school, had an e-mail exchange with [assistant superintendent Mike] Baksa. “In light of last night’s apparent change from a ‘standards-driven’ school district to the ‘living-word-driven’ school district … I would like some direction in how to adapt our judicial-branch unit,” Neal wrote. “It is apparent that the Supreme Court of the United States has it all wrong. Is there some supplemental text that we can use to set our students straight as to the ‘real’ law of the land? We will be entering this unit within the next month and are concerned that we would be polluting our students’ minds if we continue to use our curriculum as currently written in accordance with [state] standards.”
Neal’s message was sarcastic, but Baksa’s reply was not. “Brad, all kidding aside, be careful what you ask for,” he wrote back. I’ve been given a copy of ‘The Myth of Separation,’ by David Barton, to review from board members. Social studies curriculum is next year. Feel free to borrow my copy to get an idea where the board is coming from.”
Fortunately, those are now ex-board members.
David Kopel has a post about the origins of the Thanksgiving hymn We Gather Together. (Originally Dutch: a “Nederlandtsch Gedenckclanck,” which is a phrase I could say all day.) It put me in mind of the stuff I learned when growing up in Ireland. Much of it was pretty thin gruel, like the execrable Christ be beside me. But there were a few standouts — mostly leftovers from the pre-Vactican II fire-and-brimstone era. Chief among these was God of Mercy and Compassion. Nothing like hearing a bunch of eight-year-olds cheerily singing lyrics like “See our saviour bleeding, dying / On the cross of Calvary / To that cross my sins have nailed him / Yet he bleeds and dies for me.” Clonk! Clonk! Clonk! Do you hear those nails going in? Do you?
To offset this, though, when I was in fifth class our teacher, Mr Buckley, read us Frank O’Connor’s small masterpiece, “First Confession,” which put a more humane face on the whole thing. My view of religion was never quite the same afterward.
Then, to crown my misfortunes, I had to make my first confession and communion. It was an old woman called Ryan who prepared us for these. She was about the one age with Gran; she was well-to-do, lived in a big house on Montenotte, wore a black cloak and bonnet, and came every day to school at three o’clock when we should have been going home, and talked to us of hell. She may have mentioned the other place as well, but that could only have been by accident, for hell had the first place in her heart.
She lit a candle, took out a new half-crown, and offered it to the first boy who would hold one finger — only one finger! — in the flame for five minutes by the school clock. Being always very ambitious I was tempted to volunteer, but I thought it might look greedy. Then she asked were we afraid of holding one finger — only one finger! — in a little candle flame for five minutes and not afraid of burning all over in roasting hot furnaces for all eternity. “All eternity! Just think of that! A whole lifetime goes by and it’s nothing, not even a drop in the ocean of your sufferings.” The woman was really interesting about hell, but my attention was all fixed on the half-crown. At the end of the lesson she put it back in her purse. It was a great disappointment; a religious woman like that, you wouldn’t think she’d bother about a thing like a half-crown.
You can read the whole thing in the space of a few minutes. Vintage publish a good edition of O’Connor’s short stories.
Websites which regularly enthuse about the man are linking to this quasi-interview with Hitchens in which he vaunts his atheistic credentials:
bq. He’s not just an atheist who doesn’t believe in God, he says, but an “anti-theist,” who actively denies the existence of same, a distinction he insists on making. …. His new book, _God is Not Great_ , is a call for people to grow up and abandon the self-comforting fantasy: “I personally think that’s the only answer. In the meantime, any government that allows any privilege to any one faith is preparing to commit cultural suicide.” And any state that retains even a quasi-connection to Christianity, he adds, will have to face Muslim arguments exploiting it. It is all gloomily predictable.
Last week Nick Barlow pointed to the website of the Family Research Council (“Defending Family, Faith and Freedom”) with a picture of a man looking rather like Hitchens who had given an address to the group. One can only suppose that evil biotechnologists from the idiotarian left have produced a clone of Hitchens which now goes around acting in a way that would discredit the real one. Somehow I doubt that such a risible scheme will discredit the “Dude” in the eyes of his faithful admirers.
I got quite a bit of flak in comments last week for using the word “pogrom” to allude to the parallels between the rumour-driven riots in Birmingham and the persecution of Jews in 19th-century eastern Europe. Insofar as “pogrom” suggests some kind of official sanction, the word probably had slightly misleading connotations. But I see that both the conservative columnist Theodore Dalrymple and the Observer's Nick Cohen have also noticed the echoes. Dalrymple wrote:
bq. The rumour that a 14-year-old black girl had been caught shoplifting by a Pakistani shopkeeper in the Lozells area of Birmingham, and subsequently raped in revenge by a score of his compatriots, is highly reminiscent of the blood libels that used to sweep through Tsarist Russia at the end of the 19th century and led to vicious pogroms.
And comments:
bq. Of all the paradoxes of the situation, none is greater than that the Muslim traders of Lozells, among whom an unthinking anti-Semitism is probably widespread, should now find themselves in the position of the petty-trading Jews of Tsarist Russia, Moldavia and Romania.
And Cohen refers to Dalrymple and then generalizes the the work of Amy Chua:
bq. In World on Fire, published two years ago and which deserved far more attention than it received, Amy Chua showed how globalisation had created an explosion of racism in the anti-semitic tradition. The new wave of capitalism had raised the living standards of ordinary people by a little and the rich by a lot, her argument ran. The supporters of free markets and democracy thought everyone was benefiting and hadn’t noticed that their ideas helped fuel resentments in those countries where ethnic minorities dominated business.
Thoughts that are outrageous on Crooked Timber on Monday, are conservative talking-points by Wednesday and the conventional wisdom of the “decent” left by the following Sunday. Maybe I should be worried about that!