Category Archives: Religion

I have lots of thoughts about the topic of religion. Much of this stuff may be polemic in nature, but that isn’t always the case.

Religious Freedom and a Great Big Church!

17 Wednesday Mar 2021

Posted by in Native American Themes, Politics, Religion

≈ 3 Comments

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What does religious freedom look like today?

Apparently it’s a wedding cake, or more to the point, the absence thereof.

Today, religious freedom is a-cakeism.

For some folks anyway!

Religious freedom has meant different things to different people at different times.

Let me tell you about a time when religious freedom looked like a lake!

I don’t have a picture of the lake. I don’t even have a picture of the absence of it, because the lake is real; I just can’t go to it. Most of us can’t go to it. That’s religious freedom.

At least it does to the people of Taos Pueblo.

What I am talking about here is a landmark piece of legislation, known as the Blue Lake Amendments, which was signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1970. The law returned Blue Lake, along with its watershed to the people of Taos Pueblo, in effect placing roughly 48,000 acres under trust title for the benefit of the Pueblo. This rationale for doing this was explicit; this was done because it was deemed the only effective means of protecting the religious freedom of Taos Pueblo and its people.

That’s right!

Congress placed 48,000 acres of land under trust title because doing so was necessary for the protection of religious freedom.

***

To fully appreciate this, you have two wrap your minds around two things (at least by my reckoning);

  1. it isn’t clear that Native American peoples practice ‘religion,’ or at least that this term with all its Euro-American baggage can be applied to any aspect of Native American society without distorting a few things in the process.
  1. Prior to 1970, Native Americans simply did not enjoy religious freedoms, and the elders of Taos Pueblo had been especially targeted for abuse on the basis of religious practices.

Is that a contradiction?

To say that Native Americans don’t necessarily have religions, then to say that their religious practices have been attacked?

Perhaps.

But only because language is a tricky thing.

***

The current church at Taos

The first point is a question of social morphology, i.e. the language we use to chop up society into meaningful chunks of related activities. As it has typically been defined in western traditions, religion is a function of what you believe. Your membership in a given faith is a function of your decision to affirm or deny its tenets, and you religious practice is largely a function of prayer. Church may be a good place for prayer, but prayer is something you can do yourself.

As to the role of priests, mileage varies.

My point is simply that the concept of religious freedom has developed in a tradition in which religion is defined largely in individualistic terms. We can see how religion influences art, education, politics, and so on, but we can usually find some means of separating what counts as religion from what counts as the rest. It’s a lot harder to do this with Native American societies in which ceremonial participation was typically a function of community membership. Rather than helping Lutherans distinguish themselves from Methodists, etc. these ceremonial systems were historically much better suited to uniting communities, at least for a moment of social interaction. The practices in question are accordingly ubiquitous. Native ceremonial themes pop up in their politics, their art, their kinship, their hunting and farming techniques, etc. This is why the establishment clause was omitted from the Indian Civil Rights Act. It’s also why the word ‘sacred’ has become a highly over-used buzz-term in Indian-white relations. It’s short-hand for “this is important,” and for; “You guys probably wouldn’t understand.”

I think you could honestly say that Native American societies do contain almost everything we typically convey with the term ‘religion.’ What I don’t think we can say is that they isolate those elements of religious meaning from other aspects of their social life. This makes it kind of difficult to think about religious freedom in the context of Native American social practice.

Course it helps if you try.

***

North side of the Pueblo

Which brings us to point number two, which is that for most of United States history, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thought about any aspect of Native American life in terms of religious freedom. Few in Native American circles seemed to try the argument, and fewer still outside those circles were prepared to respect those freedoms, or even to recognize them as such. When the office of Indian affairs turned its attention to cultural warfare instead of literal shooting wars, one of the first things they did was to formulate the religious crimes codes outlining punishments for Native American religious practice. This was all part of the effort to ‘kill the Indian’ in order to ‘save the man,’ so to speak, but for the present, the point is that government officials deliberately sought to punish Native Americans for practicing heir own religions. They even used the word ‘religion.’

The word ‘freedom’ didn’t enter into it.

It’s hard to say just how much these rules were enforced. It fell upon indigenous judges to do this, and it should surprise no one if more than a few of those judges found reasons not to. What we can say is that Taos felt the sting of these codes well into the twentieth-century, In the 1920s, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Charles Burke had a number of Taos elders locked up on the authority of the Religious Crimes Codes. He was particularly outraged that they had taken children out of the schools for purpose of training in the ceremonial kivas.

Somewhere between the 1920s and 1970, the political climate in America had changed sufficiently that same government which had once locked up Taos elders for practicing their faith (and in particular, for teaching it to their children) was now prepared to protect the religious freedom fof Taos people, even to the extent of making claims on a rather large tract of land.

***

What happened?

Significant changes in Federal Indian policy combined with shifts in the national culture may have helped the case for return of Blue Lake, but much of the credit would have to go to the Taos people themselves. Their own response to conflict over the lake forged much of the logic for return of Blue Lake to their land base. Arguably, their decisions also transformed the way that native and non-native alike came to view a range of issues now commonly thought of as involving matters of religious freedom.

***

Flowing down from Blue lake itself, this stream cuts through the center of town

The trouble began in 1906, when…

No, it began before that.

The trouble began with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. This treaty concludes the Mexican-American war. Its terms include cession of lands to the United States, including present-day New Mexico, and it also includes guarantees that pueblo land grants within New Mexico would be recognized and protected by the United States. Unfortunately, Blue Lake was not in the land grant for Taos, a fact which had never been much of an issue under Spanish or Mexican occupation. As Americans began settling into the area, the lack of title would soon become a problem.

This brings us back to 1906.

In 1906, the Federal government placed Blue lake and the surrounding lands under the control of the Forest Service. Today, some will tell you this is when the trouble began. Interestingly enough, this wasn’t seen as trouble at the time. An informal understanding with administrators in the Forest Service served for a time to help protect the lake from outside encroachment. It wasn’t until later, with changes in local administration, that this legal status became a problem.

What made it a problem?

It was a problem that the forest service clear-cut a section of land within the watershed.

It was a problem that they stocked the lake with game fish for sport fishing.

It was a problem that they built a cabin by the lake.

It was a problem when they allowed visitors into the area.

None of these things were consistent with the Pueblo’s own use of the lake which was largely centered around ceremonial practices carried out at the lake at specific times of the year. The Forest Service was implementing its own multiple use policies and planning long-term harvesting of the trees, consistent with the conservationist policies of the era. Such practices threatened the pristine environment critical to the significance of the lake in Taoseño cosmology. These changes were already too much. Who knows what could happen next? So, the Pueblo began to seek return of Blue Lake.

The campaign to secure return of Blue Lake was a long haul. It took many twists and turns, not the least of them being an effort to bargain with the Pueblo Lands Board (in effect, conceding interest in lands held by non-native squatters in exchange for a recommendation that Blue Lake be returned, …the concession was accepted; the recommendation was not made). Somewhere along the line, there was a cooperative agreement with the Forest Service, but that didn’t work out. When the Pueblo won a case before the Indian Claims Commission, they side-stepped the financial compensation to which they would be entitled, seeking instead to secure the return of Blue Lake and its watershed. This was not within the mandate of the claims commission, so the Pueblo turned to Congress.

This is where the argument for religious freedom came in.

(Believe me, I am skipping a lot of great detail here.)

In their dealings with Congress, lawyers working for the tribe began making arguments for the return of Blue Lake based on an explicit appeal to the principle of religious freedom. The people of the Taos Pueblo needed exclusive access to the lake and its watershed to perform the rituals central to their religious practice. It was, so the argument went, their church. Even the need to explain all this placed a double-bind on the tribe, however, because much of the religious symbolism of the lake and the ritual performed there was secret, being known only to leadership in the kiva societies. As each of these societies was responsible for different aspects of the ceremonial system, this meant nobody within the Pueblo had full knowledge the matter themselves, let alone some outsider. Explaining the details of the ceremonial sustem to outsiders would violate their religious interests as effectively as preventing access to the lake. This was a problem that cut both directions. If providing this information was a threat to the religious freedom of the Pueblo, failure to do so was a problem for Congress. They had to be sure they were acting on good faith claims. The solution took the form of outside experts. Anthropologist John Bodine, was particularly helpful in outlining the significance of the lake for the Taos people to the satisfaction of Congress.

To be clear, this was a hard sell. Some folks balked at the notion of 48,000 acre church, let alone one that could not be fully explained to outsiders. Additional concerns were raised about other indigenous peoples with sacred sites of their own. What sort of precedent would this set? All of these questions and more stem from the uneven fit between indigenous ceremonial systems and mainstream American ideas about religious freedom, but how was Taos to answer them? How was Congress? A court might have addressed these issues differently. A court would have had to demonstrate its fairness to an opposing legal team, and a court would have had to think quite seriously about that legal precedent they were setting for future cases. But this was Congress, and Congress could set aside 48,000 acres without answering to an appeal or spelling out a precedent for the future. As a legislative body, Congress had more options than a court would, and that meant it could accept the argument for religious freedom as the basis for a one-time decision.

One-time deal, or not, Blue Lake was a precedent in the moral sense. It established the principle that Native Americans were entitled to religious freedom, and if their traditions were more difficult to address within the context of American legal system, this was no longer an excuse for ignoring them altogether. Congress would later pass The American Indian religious Freedom Act (AIRFA), affirming the principle of religious freedom for Native Americans and arguably mandating that federal officials take that freedom into account in their own policies. This didn’t always go as planned. Courts had a way of finding against native claimants throughout the 70s and 80s, a pattern which included several cases involving sacred sites, and of course Scalia took a wrecking ball to the whole damned free exercise clause in the Smith peyote decision. Compliance with the AIRFA by federal agencies has been a mixed bag. Yet, even these mixed results are a marked improvement over previous eras. Lest this seem like faint praise, one has only to remember the crimes codes and the fact that it was once official U.S. policy that Native Americans could be locked up for practicing their own ceremonies. Today, the notion that Native Americans are entitled to religious freedom, just like the rest of us, is now commonly accepted as a given.

It was Taos Pueblo that brought made this possible.

***

What does a sacred site look like?

In this instance, it looks like a lake that most of us will never see.

That is a kind of religious freedom.

***

A note on sources: At one time or another, I read everything I could on this topic, but that’s ancient personal history. I wrote this mostly from memory, and from an old grad school paper, but my old files aren’t with me. As far as I am aware, the best single source to get a relatively complete version of this story here was written by R.C. Gordon-McCutchan, Taos Indians and the Battle for Blue Lake.

Regarding the pictures, I am still nervous about them. It wasn’t that long ago that visitors to Taos Pueblo were expected to refrain from taking them. A few years back, I remember being told we could take them for personal use, and the last couple times I visited, we were simply allowed to take pictures with no restrictions mentioned. I think I still refrained from taking any pics for at least one visit, and finally snapped a few pics. It is a really beautiful place though, and if it is now okay with the Pueblo, as I believe it is, I thought I’d like to share the few images posted here.

The Declastution, Reconsidered

27 Saturday Feb 2021

Posted by in History, Philosophy, Politics, Religion

≈ 7 Comments

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Have you ever had anyone cite the following words from the “Constitution?”

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Did this strike you as odd?

It should have, because that paragraph is not in the Constitution. It’s in the Declaration of Independence.

To be fair, I have seen people on both the left and the right make this mistake.

Some in the middle too!

Also, to be fair, the left, the middle, and the right are not equally invested in the mistake.

***

When the left confuses this passage from the Declaration with the U.S. Constitution, they are generally aiming at a point not altogether different from that of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Lefties confusing the passage from the Declaration with the U.S. Constitution are trying to establish the importance of rights in the formation of government. Whether these rights are best thought of as ‘individual rights,’ ‘human rights,’ ‘civil rights,’ or even ‘natural rights’ is a rather more complicated question. The left and the right differ on that one, but most will find rights of some kind to be at issue in the nature of American government. Suffice to say the Declaration is content to describe them as ‘inalienable,’ which was enough to put them on the table in 1776. I have yet to see anyone on the left misquote this passage for any reason other than to establish the importance of our rights to the formation of the U.S. Government.

Perhaps, people can be excused for confusing the two passages, at least insofar as they both evoke the importance of government in facilitating the happiness of human beings (ignoring for the moment the gender politics of the passages in question). If there is any difference between the two passages, it lies in the agency involved. The Declaration is a little bit ambiguous as to who creates the governments ‘among men,’ but it does mention a ‘Creator’ as the source of inalienable rights. God is not mentioned in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution; it lays the responsibility for creation of the new government squarely at the feet of the people.

…which is where we get the biggest difference between the left and the right on the misreading of the passage from the Declaration.

***

When the right mistakes the Declaration for the Constitution, they are generally trying to tell us that the passage in question establishes the importance of God in our Constitution. Cultural conservatives will often tell us that God is mentioned in the actual Constitution. The only actual reference to God in the Constitution would be found in the date of its signatures wherein the document says;

done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independance of the United States of America the Twelfth In witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Name

That reference isn’t much to hang your hat on.

Those simply telling us that God is mentioned in the Constitution are most likely thinking about that passage from the Declaration of Independence, which they have confused with the Constitution itself. In their imagination, and that of other confused Americans, the second paragraph of the Declaration is also the Constitution. The two documents are one in the same.

We might even call that document the ‘Declastution!’

When cultural conservatives confuse this passage with the Constitution, they are working a very particular angle. Their point is not the existence of rights (individual, civil, natural, or human); it is the existence of God. What they are trying to show us is that belief in God (or more specifically; belief in Jesus) is essential to the founder’s vision of American government. They wish to instill in American government (and by extension American law) an explicit homage to God in some official or quasi-official form. They like having Him on our money and in our pledge, and they like prayer in public schools and in public meetings, and many will happily seek additional entanglements between religion and government when and where they can get it. To them, the establishment clause of the Constitution is a narrow principle that prevents little more than explicitly sectarian policies (if it prevents even that). A general acknowledgement of God [or the Judeo Christian God (or, frankly; …Jesus)] in the official policies of the U.S. government is to them quite consistent with the Constitution, even required by it.

How do they know it is required?

Because that is how Jefferson wrote it.

Simply put, because the Declastution derives our rights from God, so conservative thinking goes, everything else that follows must hinge on the existence of God. Take away God and we have no rights and hence no government, and no ice-cream for desert, dammit, just go to bed!

(Sorry. I get carried away sometimes.)

Simply put; when the right confuses these two documents, they do so with a purpose.

Now the argument in question doesn’t always begin with a confusion of documents. Another common approach is to tell us that the Declaration is actually the ‘foundation’ of our government, and that everything about the U.S., including the Constitution itself is built upon that foundation. Over-used architectural metaphors aside, the point is to read the Constitution in light of the Declaration. We take the principles from the Declaration, as these guys understand them, and we apply them to the Constitution, so if God is mentioned the in Declaration, then he is implied in the Constitution, right?

Right?

Even if the Constitution itself says very clearly that the authority upon which our government rests derives from the people!

Anyway, that seems to be the point.

***

There are a couple problems with this, of course, and probably a couple more. These include the following:

1: Jefferson is the main author of the Declaration, and his own views on God are far from straight forward. He is often described as a Deist, though this might be a bit strong; he certainly was not an orthodox Christian. It is my understanding that he stopped short of denying the possibility of miracles outright (though he was sufficiently uncomfortable with the idea of miracles to remove them from his own account of the life of Jesus). So, what does the term ‘Creator’ mean in this passage? What could it have meant to Jefferson when he wrote it? There is little reason to believe Jefferson was talking about Jesus. Had he been referring to Jesus, there is still less reason to believe he would have had anything in mind like the present-day Christian understanding of their Lord and Savior.

2) More to the point, this is a political document, not a theological tract. Hell, it’s a propaganda piece! In writing it, Jefferson is committing an act of treason and trying to get enough support to survive the consequences of his own actions. He wants and needs to reach every colonist he can get to support the cause of separation from England. “Creator” is a nice way to reach Christians, Jews, Unitarians, and even the most strident of Deists without inviting any real cause for disagreement between them. I reckon, a few other beliefs could be read into that reference too, but I suspect Jefferson was more interested in reaching people in that range. Simply put, Jefferson wasn’t trying to separate the believers from the unbelievers with that reference, not by a long shot. What today’s Christians are doing when they read this document as an explicitly Christian (or Judeo-Christian) tract is to turn a document aimed at appealing to a broad range of religious views into an instrument for narrowing the range of views relevant to contemporary American politics.

Their fight was not Jefferson’s.

Far from it!

3) Finally, did I mention that this was a political document?

Cause its a political document.

Really, it is a political document!

The point of the passage in question is not to prove that God exists or even that belief in God, or subservience to God (or a Creator of any kind) is essential for public life. No the point of the passage in question to establish the existence of rights and from there to explain the existence of government as an expression of those rights and an instrument for satisfying them. This of course stands in stark contrast to the “divine right of kings,” which was still very influential in the merry Motherland. Jefferson’s point is not that God exists; it is that rights exist. God (or more importantly, a Creator) in this passage is merely a premise used to arrive at his political conclusions. Really it isn’t all that clear that this creator is all that essential to the premise anyway. Hobbes does a pretty good job of making a similar argument without giving a central role to such an entity. Jefferson’s begins with the assumption that people have rights. That they get them from a Creator is not entirely critical to the argument at hand; the point is that they have rights, and that these rights are the foundation of government.

…a theory of government in direct contrast to the notion that God himself had put the King of England in charge of the Bristish people.

Irony of ironies then that conservative Christians wish to read the Declaration as an effort to place God at the center of American government.

Not just ironic.

Perversely so!

***

I suppose the Declastution will live on in American politics for some time to come. People will continue to cite the Declaration while calling it the Constitution, and red the Declaration which they read as though it were a Baptist prayer book, but none of this has much to do with the meaning of the documents in question. It’s a kind of shell game the right wing likes to play with themselves, and with the rest of us.

They aren’t playing this shell game because they are interested in what either document has to say.

Far from it!

Ironic Redemptions and Persistent Crimes

18 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by in Politics, Religion

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indexI’m still trying to get used to seeing Jim Bakker in the news again. I’m old enough to remember when his initial scams were alive and well. I remember how painfully obvious his deceits were. I remember the outrageousness of it all, not just his own lies, but the utter gullibility of his followers. I distinctly remember realizing with some degree of sadness that his followers must not merely have been fooled. To say they believed in this man (and his wife Tammy Fae) required a trace of dishonesty in itself. They couldn’t simply be fooled. They had to be lying too. I remember the scandal that finally broke Bakker’s financial empire, and I remember his statements about Jessica Hahn. Like so many of those uttered by God’s top salesmen, Bakker’s confessions were littered with excuses and self-serving narratives that showed little contrition and plenty of bad faith all around. It may have been a sex scandal that broke his old over PTL ministries, but it was fraud that sent Bakker to prison, fraud perpetrated in the name of Jesus and sold primarily to retired pensioners who could ill-afford to bankroll the lavish lifestyle this man enjoyed at their expense. But here we are. Bakker is back, and he is selling Jesus once again.

Because people never really seem to learn from history.

Not the lessons that matter anyway.

Is this a newer an wiser Jim Bakker? Can we trust him now? Is he a better man than the one who clearly did have an affair, and quite possibly raped the woman he had the affair with? Is he more honest than the one who bilked his followers out of millions with the promise of lifetime memberships in PTL and membership benefits he never even tried to deliver?

***

That’s not really the question to ask though, is it?

Bakker is who is he, who he always was. That should be perfectly clear.

Better to ask if we are a better and wiser society?

Have we done anything to protect ourselves from the likes of Jim Bakker, or is America just as wide open for this sort of scam as we were back in the gullibility jubilee that was the Reagan era? Are we still going to humor two-bit huxters with the miraculous power to turn thoughts of Jesus into perfectly material cash? Do we have any means of holding the likes of Bakker accountable for their perfectly antics?

Or are we still unable to do anything about them?

***

Take no solace in your own intelligence!

People like to imagine that those who fall for the likes of Bakker are simply stupid, that the sort of crime in which he engages amounts to a sort of poetic justice. “Anyone dumb enough to fall for that sort of thing deserves what they get,” so I am often told. But that’s just an evasion.

Critical thinking skills won’t save any of us, especially not in our twilight years. Televangelism is a business that works by catching up on the tail end of our own better judgement. Many of those who give to the likes of Bakker better might have known better at some point in their lives. Many would have laughed him out of the room in their younger days. This is one of the main features of televangelism. It’s a business model that can wait for us to lose our our intellectual edge, to give up some of our skepticism, and to embrace hopes we might once have shunned.

…and to accept the token promise that giving our hard-earned money to some perfectly mortal human with grifter written all over their every word and deed we can somehow make good with a divine force capable of making everything right in the end.

We may know better now.

Make no mistake.

The likes of Bakker can wait until we don’t.

***

Does it need to be said?

Bakker is hardly alone. I don’t know about you, but I’ve long since lost track of the number of times one of God’s surrogates has been caught making off with money meant for him, …pardon me, Him. I can’t easily count the number of His faithful who’ve been caught in the wrong bed, hotel room, or sex club either, to say nothing of the number of those denouncing homosexuality, or offering some cure for it, who found their way into the arms of someone of the same sex. Time and again, it turns out that the message of god just doesn’t fit well in the mouth of its mortal medium.

No, the problem isn’t simply that Christians are just as human, and just as flawed as the rest of us; it’s that Christianity (or at least some versions of it) often proves to be the worst thing about these people. Left to their own vices, many of these people would prove little less than perfectly human, but high on God, they are a hazard to others, and a constant threat to many more harmless than themselves.

I can understand someone whose love life is a train wreck, but when that person makes a living promoting a more perfect vision of what that life should be, damned right I expect them to live up to that vision. Or to give it up when that vision proves fatally flawed. When selling that message becomes a multi-million dollar business, I am just a little less forgiving about the whole thing.

***

Bakker isn’t a fluke. He is poster boy for a type of business that has always been fraudulent to its core.

Yes, I said ‘business’. Televangelism is a business. It may enjoy non-profit status, and it may generate all kinds of god-talk, but it is absolutely a business. The likes of Bakker prove this time and time again. These men are in it for the money. That should be perfectly obvious to all concerned.

Jim Bakker is a business man. His business is Televangelism.

Right now, that business is good. With Kanye West celebrating his new Jesus-flavored branding scheme in Texas with Joel Osteen and Paula White enjoying a gig as the spiritual advisor to Donald Trump, it does seem to be a good year for huxters with open wallets and talk of God falling out of their open mouths. Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Franklin Graham have certainly been enjoying their renewed access to the worldly powers made possible by the Orange man in the White House. Of the course the common element in all these sordid stories (and countless others) is Donald Trump himself.

Few things could be more odd than the way conservative Christians have embraced Donald Trump, this man who has never shown the least bit of interest in anything but worldly pleasures and worldly powers. The allegiance that so many of America’s entrepreneurial Christians have sworn to this man seems like a clear and loud confession to their own hypocrisy. You couldn’t possibly ask for a more blatant condemnation of conservative Christian politics, than the support these charlatans have shown to Donald Trump. It makes no sense at all.

Well it makes no sense if you take their messages seriously.

On another level, it should come as no surprise at all that a man who once bilked countless pensioners out of their life-savings in a fake university would find common cause with an entire industry that thrives on the life savings of the old and infirm. It should come as no surprise that people who spend their entire lives talking about an absolute authority with perfect power to determine matters of right and wrong would jump at the chance to support a man who recognizes no authority other than his own whim. That those who conceive ultimate authority in the form of a ‘Lord’ would prove unwilling to defend the checks and balances of a constitutional republic from a political movement recognizing no power capable of saying no to ‘The Leader’. If you pay any attention to the way that America’s political Christians think about power and authority, their willingness to support Donald Trump should prove no more surprising than the fancy cars and homes enjoyed by evangelical leadership. The Televangelists who turn this mentality into big business are acting in perfect concert with their normal MO when they line up to bend the knee before their perfectly mortal savior. With or without Jesus, Donald Trump is the answer to their prayers, and they know it.

Praise Mammon!

***

Jim Bakker is back, and he is now enjoying a resurgence of his own media popularity. Much like the Reagan era, this is his time. He isn’t back because he has changed his ways, much less because he or any other televangelist gives a damn about Jesus. He is back because the rest of us haven’t done anything about the particular kind of crime at which he excels. If we had, Hell trump would be in jail right now, as would so many other big business pastors.

America is still wide open for any thief smart enough to allude to the promise of eternal salvation instead of foolishly offering a quid pro quo in explicit and concrete terms. We are still willing to watch the elderly lose their life savings to these crack-pot con artists, just as we are willing to tolerate so many other crimes whose victims don’t have enough power and money to matter. They have an ally in the White House now, and these people who sell Jesus for a living grow bolder every day.  What they deliver to Donald Trump is a political base willing to take his word (and theirs) on any of the controversial issues of the day. What Donald Trump offers them is the support of worldly powers, powers left unchecked by the very gullibility of a political base that would donate money to the likes of Jim Bakker or spend it on an institution like Trump University. It’s a good time to be shameless. So, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me to see the likes of Bakker back in the news.

No doubt, we will see much more of him in the future, and of others just like him.

Praise Mammon!

When Good Gods Go Bad

12 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in atheism, Religion, Uncategorized

≈ 13 Comments

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Chick Tracts

The God of Chick Tracts always struck me as something of an asshole.

It’s a common assumption in religious polemics at least, that you can’t really hate someone you don’t believe in. You see this assumption appearing arguments for and against belief in God. Christian apologists often claim that atheists hate God, and that this hatred is proof positive we really know he exists after all. Atheism is little other than rebellion against God, at least according to this view. For our own part, atheists often respond to the accusation that we hate God by pointing out that we actually don’t believe in him. We can’t possible hate God, so the argument runs. We don’t even believe in him. Each of these arguments seem to rest on the assumption that to hate God implies that one must believe in him. At least we we have that in common I suppose, believers and unbelievers. We agree that it doesn’t make sense to hate a being you don’t really believe in.

Except I don’t agree with that either.

To those who insist on this assumption, I have two questions:

Do you watch Game of Thrones?

How do you feel about Joffrey?

Admittedly, this gambit loses a little force when the answer to the first question is ‘no’. Still, t think those familiar with the HBO series or the books it’s based upon will get the point pretty quickly. This hateful little brat prince is hardly unique in fiction. Felix Unger and Frank Burns used to get pretty deep under my skin. I didn’t believe in them either. I certainly don’t believe in Lucy from Peanuts, but when she pulls the football out from under Charlie it makes just wanna reach right into the screen and throttle the little two dimensional mini-troll. Can’t stand the Police Chief in most detective shows or the principle in countless school settings. The list of fictional villains, nitwits, jerks, and outright assholes goes on and on. None of these characters are real. But yeah, I hate them!

(Here, I can practically hear my mother saying; “no, you dislike them intently,” but no, I hate them.)

I really don’t think my feelings about these characters are all that unusual. Joffrey, at least, seems to have inspired quite a few haters out there. Hell, I reckon that’s something else believers and unbelievers can generally agree on. The little bastard was awful. Got off with an easy death!

Anyway, the point is that you can have a strong emotional reaction to a being you know very well isn’t real. People ought to keep that in mind when they opt to battle it out over the existence of God.

I should add that this point can flow in both directions or even (I suppose) at a tangent to the usual stakes. I can love Jesus when he’s preaching tolerance and compassion just as I can be outraged at a God who would tell Abraham to kill his own son. The inconsistently might bother me if I actually believed either story to be true. As it stands  these are just emotional reactions to a being I don’t really think is real, as described by different narrators with different messages at different times in history. Maybe if I expected a degree of literal truth from these stories, I would feel the need to work out my feelings about the big Guy In the Sky, but I don’t. I can accept that stories about this being will trigger different feelings at different times, and no reaction at all in many instances. Consistency might be a desirable property of arguments and theories, but it a square peg to pound in the round hole of emotions.

What makes the difference between a vision of God that inspires me and one that pisses me off may be an interesting question, but the answer to that question is, for me anyway, essentially a function of story-telling.

I suppose a Christian too could acknowledge some role for the story-tellers in his feelings about God in different parts if scripture. There is a certain flat-footed evangelism that runs contrary to such an approach, but not every believer checks their sense at the church door. I’ve known quite a few who could handle such questions with subtlety and care.

I realize this may not be the most serious theme in debates over the existence of God, but it certainly does seem ubiquitous. I think to some degree this is a reflection of the debate-camp subculture that has developed around people interested in haggling out the issue. I’ve certainly engaged in my share of such matters, but one does not live by polemics alone, and not everything that people think or feel about the topic in question comes prefigured for purposes of argumentation. We can argue the rational merits of any given position, but nobody should really be surprised to find that participants in these arguments also have an emotional reaction to the topic.

We’re allowed to be human.

So are they.

***

I know I’ve made this argument before. I just wanted to take another crack at it.

Kavanaugh, Young and Old

01 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in atheism, Justice, Politics, Religion

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270px-Brett_Kavanaugh_Yale_Yearbook_(cropped)330px-Judge_Brett_Kavanaugh

Is it still hypocrisy if your contradictions are separated from one another by decades of your own life? If a moment of ‘yes’ and another moment of ‘no’ have enough time between them, does that mean your off the hook for the difference between them? Could life changing decisions be sufficient to ensue the past doesn’t count against the present? Might someone be excused for having it both ways if they do so in very different chapters of their own biography? Alternatively, supposing time and transformation could be enough to excuse great inconsistencies, might other matters prove sufficient to counteract them? Is it at least possible that time makes the difference in some instances and not others?

It’s common enough to hold moral contradictions against people; it’s also common enough to excuse them when the contradictions can be explained as a clear change of heart. But what if that change is a little too pat? What if it follows a course that’s just a little too obvious?

I am of course thinking about Brett Kavanaugh.

Again.

Watching Brett Kavanaugh struggle to explain his conduct in high school to an audience tasked with judging his fitness for office, I couldn’t help thinking about this very question. If his appointment is confirmed, Kavanaugh will take his place among the many conservative Catholics to hold a position on the Supreme Court of the United States. He will take his place in a judicial voting block that has consistently re-enforced the authority of the state over moral and spiritual matters and the role of Christianity in defining that authority. We can expect him to minimize gay rights and to hammer the final nail in the coffin for women’s reproductive rights as we know them today. If Kavanaugh takes a seat on that court, this will happen regardless of any transformations coming to Congress, even regardless of any possible changes in the White House. This man is poised to impose the moral order of a conservative Christian world view on us all, all of which makes it more than a little ironic to see Kavanaugh sitting there trying to explain the sins of his youth, the very sins he was once proud to proclaim.

I really do wonder what the teenage Kavanaugh would make of the old man now denying all the sexual conquests he was so proud to put in his yearbook?

To say that Kavanaugh partied a lot is to completely miss the point. His high school yearbook alone gives us plenty of evidence that Kavanaugh didn’t just drink and have sex, but that he approached these activities in terms of a toxic masculinity all-too pervasive in some circles. Kavanaugh may have told the world that he refrained some sex until well after high school, but in his yearbook, he wanted the world to know that he’d gotten laid. The story he told in that yearbook didn’t merely recount a sexual encounter, it did so in a manner degrading to the young woman in question. This isn’t merely the excess of a boy enjoying his own life; it’s the cruelty of a young man for whom at least a part of that joy seems to have come from his ability to hurt others, to dominate them.

The problem is plain enough. This is a man who will assert moral authority over our own lives. Make no mistake, that is what he has been put foreword to do! He will assert this authority amidst a number of important questions about his own personal morality.

At least one important defense of Kavanaugh’s character has been the notion that this occurred so long ago that it just isn’t relevant now. Is it really fair, his defenders ask, to impose consequences on the career of a man for things he did so many years ago? There is of course a trace of irony here in that Kavanaugh will almost certainly use the power of the Supreme Court to impose consequences well into the distant future on women for things they’ve done (or in some cases, things done to them) early in life. That’s a problem for Kavanaugh and those who support him. One of many.

The question I mean to raise here is this; is really a clean break here?

If Kavanaugh really had made a clean break with his predatory past, (and let’s be clear, the conduct contained in the yearbook alone is sufficiently predatory in itself to raise questions about his character), …if Kavanaugh really had made such a clean break with his past, then I for one would expect a more honest account for it in the present. When Kavanaugh pretends that his reference to Renate Alumnus was a gesture of respect (a gesture that neither he nor his buddies bothered to convey directly to her), he is lying. When Kavanaugh pretended the notion that this was a reference to sexual conquest is all in the minds of left-wing critics, he dismisses her own reaction to those very words. When he suggested this was all in the imagination of sick critics on the left, he implicated her own reaction to his words. He blamed her too for getting the actual point of his yearbook entry. In effect, Kavanaugh’s testimony in the hearing last Thursday carries foreword the very cruelty that put those words in his yearbook to begin with. When Kavanaugh feigns disgust at the imagination of senators questioning him about the meaning of this and other comments in his yearbook, Kavanaugh shows us that he isn’t at all prepared to own up to the man he once was. Which is one very good reason to question the notion that he is now someone very different.

A different man wouldn’t be afraid to own up to the actions of a childish former self, but a man still caught up in that very childish mindset might.

Of course we can see already ties to the Kavanaugh we see today in the one that wrote all those things in his yearbook. That wasn’t just a young man looking to have fun; that was a rich kid and a star athlete who attended Georgetown Prep, and who would later attend Yale as a legacy student. This kid had a Hell of a head-start in the world and he knew it. You can’t tell me the kid then sowing his oats and bragging about it in his yearbook didn’t have some sense of the future that lay before him, some sense of the role that his faith would play in that future and the potential power that lay within his grasp. Kavanaugh was going places, and his role in the Catholic Church would play a strong role in getting him to those places.

If Kavanaugh really did go to church back in 1982, as he assured us all during the hearing he did, he doesn’t seem to have made much of an effort to live the life envisioned in that church. Still, he had the good sense not to burn his bridges. That faith would serve him well one day, even if he wasn’t all that worried about it while working his way through those 100 kegs he also bragged about.

I can’t say how much of this Kavanaugh consciously thought out, but it’s an awfully common story-line. It’s taken for granted at some ages that some people will not live the life of the faith they profess, and that others won’t expect them to. It’s taken for granted that some people needn’t show common decency to others, let alone great piety, but that doesn’t stop them from endorsing either virtue when doing so won’t obligate them in any real manner. The day sometimes comes when such folks put away their excesses and take up a more conventional role in society, perhaps even a powerful one. In Kavanaugh’s case, this has meant (and will continue to mean) that he will enforce the terms of his own faith on others. It would be easy enough to say that he simply changed; decent enough to say that we should give him the benefit of the doubt as to the matter. And yet, the story remains just a little too pat. A little too convenient.

…and the inconsistently just a little too meaningful.

It would be one thing if the difference between the teenage version of Kavanaugh and the middle-aged man of today held no common thread between them. But is it really that hard to see in a boy who regards a sexual encounter as cause to humiliate the woman he had it with and one who would tell women everywhere that they must simply live with the consequences of their own sexual activity? Is it really that hard to see the connection between a young man for whom an accident of his birth played a key role in his education and one who would insist we should end affirmative action out of concerns over its fairness? Is it really too hard to see in a young man who brags up his party-life the same sense of entitlement shown in an older man who would lie to Congress about his role in the Bush administration or refuse to answer the questions of the opposition party at his most recent hearing? Is it so hard to see the sense of untouchable self-worth in both actions?

Kavanaugh may not be the party boy of his of yearbook, but his sense of his own power doesn’t seem to have much changed. He is still an elitist, and he is still happy to impose his will on others. If conventional (Catholic) morality now guides his actions more than it did back in his high school days, that morality is also now far more critical to the power he would wield over others. What Kavanaugh might once have taken through his own physical strength, he now takes by right of high office and pretense of moral purpose.

In the end, this isn’t even a story about hypocrisy; it is a story about a life blessed with privilege, and a man fully prepared to abuse it.

***

Both pictures were taken from the Wikopeadia page on Kavanaugh, 10/1/18:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh

Alex Jones and the Weaponization of Christmas (An Irritation Meditation)

28 Thursday Dec 2017

Posted by in Irritation Meditation, Politics, Religion

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Surfing the net can be a lot like turning over rocks in the countryside. Every now and then you find something underneath a rock (or a link) so disgusting you just can’t pull your eyes off it. Case in point? This little bit of filth from Info Wars.

To begin with, let me apologize for bringing this shitgasm into the lives of you, my readers. I am sorry.

Alex Jones and his bunch are a special kind of putrid, but sadly, they are a special kind of putrid with a lot more influence than they deserve. So, I reckon it’s worth keeping track of their antics.

…regretful though that task may be.

There is a lot of crap in this video, but what got my attention here is the opening pitch.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated anyone hash-tagging ‘Merry Christmas’, ‘Christmas Eve’, ‘Christmas’, or ‘Jesus’ a far right wing extremist.”

Sounds pretty shocking doesn’t it? What could possibly lead the folks at Info Wars to such an impluasible conclusion? As they go on to explain in the video, the Southern Poverty Law (SPLC) has been tracking these hashtags in their hate tracker. What is the hate tracker? Well let’s take that information directly from the SPLC.

Screenshot 2017-12-28 13.22.50

So, there it is. The hate tracker tracks trends in right wing activity on twitter. It is not a statement about the meaning of any of these terms, nor is it a theoretical account of the trends it identifies. It isn’t even the result of a conscious effort to call attention to specific terms, or the specific use of them in right wing circles. If a hashtag trends in the activities of right wing extremists, it will come up on the tracker.

Simply put, the hate tracker picked up a lot of Christmas tweetage among the right wingers. What that means is an entirely different question. One thing it doesn’t mean is that anyone who uses these terms is a right wing extremist. No, the SPLC was not saying that, and the hackwits at Info Wars know this.

Both the Info Wars video and the Breitbart article on this subject do present a (more or less) accurate account of this in the meat of their stories. The trick here is the mismatch between that substance and the labeling. The folks at Info Wars know very well how the hate tracker works, and they account for it, but then they draw a conclusion totally unsupported by the facts they themselves provide. They are hoping you won’t remember the details, but that you will remember the pitch line they used to start the story. They are hoping you will come away from this thinking that a prominent liberal source has tried to label all talk of Jesus and Christmas as right wing extremism. This is simply not true.

It’s a bit after the bell, but this video is one more shot in the fake war on Christmas. More to the point, it is part of an ongoing effort to weaponize Christmas, to recast the celebration of Christmas as an explicitly political act, a defiance of liberal politics. IN effect, it is an attempt to make the celebration of Christmas into a partisan gesture, one which will divide Americans still further, and pointlessly so.

It may well be that the hashtag trends noted by the SPLC are also part of that effort to weaponize Christmas. Certainly, there have been a lot of people using ‘Merry Christmas’ to say something more like ‘fuck you liberals’, and at least a few of them have been doing this on the net. I expect right wing extremists also wish people Merry Christmas for conventional reasons, like actually wanting them to have a merry Christmas, but I reckon at least a few of those hits the SPLC caught in their tracker were conscious efforts to carry on the war on the eve of Christmas itself. Either way, the Info Wars piece is a conscious effort to spin that narrative up a notch, to pretend that liberals have declared Christmas itself a hateful expression.

The problem is of course that they are lying.

The real question is why? Why tell this particular lie? What does it get the people at Info Wars? I get that the SPLC has its own set of biases, but no, they are NOT trying to crush Christianity. Neither are they trying to steal the Christmas presents out from under your tree. This conscious demonization of the SPLC simply isn’t about correcting bias it’s about enshrining it. It’s about making sure that people do not make careful distinctions between actual hate groups and mere conservatives, or for that matter ordinary Americans of any political stripe. Info Wars wants the public to think the SPLC cannot tell the difference ordinary well-wishing and a racist political agenda. The problem of course is that the SPLC can and does make such distinctions all the time. Alex Jones and his merry band of festering bloodfarts, on the other hand, would love to be thought of as conservative, even patriotic. They would love to have their own brand of lunacy pass for good old fashioned conservative politics, and they would love to have the right wing fanatics who make up their customer base thought of as ordinary people. If they can muddle the distinction themselves, then they can pass all manner of lunatic ideas under the banner of basic American values. That’s their pay-off.

There is always a pay-off for this kind of political charade. For Trump, the War on Christmas was just another effort to brand something (Christmas) to which he contributes absolutely nothing. For the likes of Bill O’Reilly, it was grist for a combative mill that helped keep his ratings high. For Info Wars and Breitbart, it’s the hope for legitimacy. It is an effort by those on the lunatic fringe to pass themselves off as legitimate, to pretend that the ideologically committed racists who regularly consume their products are just ordinary Americans who love Christmas. In effect, they are telling the public that the SPLC and liberals in general cannot tell the difference between a conservative and a deplorable. But we can.

Yes, there is a difference.

Fundamentalism by Proxy and the Guilting of the Godly

09 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by in Religion

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A general suspicion of religion comes to mind easily enough. Hell, even religious people frequently exhibit this suspicion (tempered as it is with whatever thoughts they’ve assembled into their own beliefs). There is something about the whole range of religious beliefs as such that invites a degree of doubt, even contempt. It would be easy to believe religion could be refuted.

Easy.

Just like nailing jelly to a wall.

What makes this seemingly easy task so frustrating is the sense that any generalization one might make about religion will most certainly have its counterexamples, and most of these exceptions are anything but marginal. Even belief in God or gods which seems such a no-brainer falls apart when we consider various branches of Buddhism. Belief in the supernatural is rather complicated by those who think of spirits as part of the natural world. Some of us may regard the notion of spirits in a mountain top as falling outside the natural world, but it doesn’t really work to maintain that belief in a supernatural world is a defining feature of religion if that belief itself isn’t all that universal. The particulars just don’t rescue the narrative. …and so-on with any other effort to sweep the lot of religious beliefs into the same been-there-refuted-that bin. What is religion? Hard to say. Harder still if you’re answering that question in the midst of a polemic moment.

Luckily, this problem is easily solved by focusing on one set of religious traditions instead of trying to drop a truth bomb on the lot of them. Can’t nail down every faith out there with one stroke of the hammer? No problem. Just pick one. Specificity will save us all!

…except that it won’t.

Let’s say you think the God of Abraham is a right cruel bastard, and so that’s your main objection to the whole of Christianity (along with Islam and Judaism). You can even throw in a few scriptures to back this up (cause that seems to be how the Biblical game is played), and we non-believers are often happy to play along, arguendo, so to speak. The godless corners of the net are filled with various references to God’s more dickish behavior, all documented nicely in the ‘Good Book’, and wielded well, these can form the basis for reasonably compelling arguments. We can even extend the critique into any number of horrible things Christians have done in the name of the great big bastard in the sky. We can work up a real parade or horribles and say ‘that’s it1’ That’s why the God of Abraham isn’t welcome in our lives and our thoughts. We can do this. Hell, I have done it. I”ve made this argument quite a few times since going godless many decades ago. And I will say, that I think this approach can be used to skewer a particular brand of believer, one I’m pretty sure I’ve met in person more than a few times.

But what about those Christians who seem to find in the Bible a story of hope, love, and kindness? No, I don’t mean the footnote kind of godly affection that accompanies homophobic politics, paternalistic family norms, or just plain idiotic theodicies. I mean the kind of compassion that actually does put some believers in the streets fighting for the rights of others and defending the dignity of all manner of people. Those Christians do exist and they have their scriptures too, their theories, their angle on God, the universe, and even that annoying wasp nest under the front porch.

What are we to make of these Christians?

The Christian left was once a powerful force in American life, and we could do worse than to see it rise again. Don’t get me wrong; at his best Jesus is an ambiguous story for me, and not one containing a lot of factual weight, but if i was to pick a fight it wouldn’t be with the peace-love-dove set of Christians. When it comes to the things that matter most to me, I am as likely as not going to count them as allies. Damned good ones at that!

For the present, though, the question is what to make of the Christians who don’t fit the yer-a-jerk-and-so-is-yourGod narrative? How do we sort their significance in relation to the buggers who actually make life hard for those ‘sinner’s they claim to love after all. If the notion that God and his fan club are all a bunch of jerks is your go-to argument when explaining active resistance to religion, then these guys are actually kind of a problem.

…which is ironic to say the least.

A believer may have an out for this problem. She can tell us one version of Christianity (presumably her own) is genuine and the other is just bullshit. How we may ask? And scripture, she may answer, which theoretically means the whole issue stands or falls on those passages Christians are find if quoting at each other and the rest of us. A believer can insist that the right answer is contained in those scriptures (or something else in her faith), and that the rest is simply noise. Whether she is right or not about the nature of that correct view is another question, but so long as someone affirms a particular faith, this approach isn’t glaringly inconsistent. But as a man who denies the authority of scripture (among other religious authorities) I’m not really in a position to do that. Sure, I can formulate ideas as to whether or not any given interpretation of scripture is plausible given the text and its historical significance, but I can find no authority with which to say anyone oughtta give a damn about that assessment.

More than that, I see no reason to believe there is any consistency to scripture with which to settle questions about what is and what isn’t a truly Christian take on the subject. Really, I think it far more likely, that the whole mess of scripture really is just that full of contradiction because what the hell else would you expect if a giant text cobbled together from a vast range of different authors writing at different times and places?

…which reminds me of one of those teachable moments a high school student once handed me. (In this case, I was the teachee.) I can’t remember how the subject came up, but I asked an orthodox Jewish kid something about how he viewed some particular theme in the Bible. He responded by telling me that there is no ‘the Bible’. To him, that phrase denoted an odd collection of texts, some of which might bear some relation to those his own people valued and some clearly didn’t, but the notion that the whole collection could be meaningfully referenced as though it were a single book seemed rather foreign to him.

It should have been foreign to me too.

We unbelievers give up far too much ground by speaking about ‘the Bible’ in this way.

This is of course a very incomplete account of the variation, even within Christianity. The whole mess gets meta-messy when we start adding differences of opinion as to whether or not scripture is the sole source of authority on what is right and what isn’t. What do we make of those who recognize the authority of the Pope? …of the Mormon Prophets? …or even the notion that one must be filled with the Holy Spirit to interpret scripture properly? All of these can turn the tables on any attempt to arrive at a fixed notion of just what it is we are rejecting when we say ‘no’ no God.

In any event, I see no reason to believe we can find a consistent message in the myriad scriptures folks are prone to cite in the effort to decide what a Christian ought to believe. For me, there is no ought to the matter. There is only what different believers do in fact believe and the mix of reasons and choices that go into their professions of belief. (Hell, I’m not even sure how much to make of beliefs, to be honest. What counts as doctrine on Wednesday is easily forgotten on Thursday. …on Friday it r-emerges as the subject of debate.) Anyway, I don’t see any hope of resolving questions about which is the true nature of Christianity.

…or of Islam.

…or Buddhism.

…or even pastafarianism for that matter.

I’m not saying the critique of Christian cruelty is a straw man. I am saying its relevance to any given believer depends on assumptions any given Christian may or may not hold.

This is often frustrating for an unbeliever. We have the goods on Tom and Jack, so to speak, so it just seems unfair to let Alice and Eric slide on account of a few disclaimers. But of course mere disclaimers aren’t the issue. It’s the very real possibility that someone’s faith may genuinely differ from that for which we have a ready critique. Of course we can ask any number of questions to see if someone really does envision Christianity in positive terms (as opposed to those who merely parrot the rhetoric of love and compassion all the while wielding the Prince of Peace like a well-balanced weapon, but at the end of the day? Some folks escape the criticism. Some folks really do seem to see in Christ a message that genuinely inspires love and compassion.

So what’s a godless bastard to do?

Unfortunately, I think the temptation exists to force the issue, to pretend we have some way of sorting the real thing from the imitation believer after all. It should come as no surprise that this rhetorical strategy usually means declaring the least defensible version of Christianity that we can imagine to be the real thing. All other variations, and in particular the more palatable variations on belief are then the product of personal whim. The kind Christian, so this narrative goes, is the one who really hasn’t read her Bible. She is the one who hasn’t really thought her doctrines through to their logical conclusions. I expect this kind of narrative from conservative Christians, but it’s a little more odd to hear it coming from the godless. It’s odd, yes, but it’s not rare. Unbelievers often take the view that Christians liberal in theology and politics aren’t the real ones.  Thus, we turn virtues into vices and snub allies away into likely resentment. (Who could blame them?) At worst, the effort to delegitimize moderate or liberal believers may well nudge one or three of them the other direction. It’s a kind of proxy-fundamentalism, a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of people whose views don’t fit the vision of Christianity we mean to attack.

A variation of this approach can be seen in the oft-repeated refrain that the only real Muslims are the militants. Those Muslims (indeed, the vast majority) who seem to get along with the rest of us haven’t got their own faith right, so the argument goes. And thus peaceful Muslims and violent extremists all falter beneath the weight of the same criticism. We can treat every Muslim as a would-be terrorist, so it seems, because those who haven’t come around to it simply aren’t doing their religion right.

Once again this approach assumes an objective limit on the range of legitimate variation within the faith in question. And once again, no such objective limit exists. You can haul out whatever quotes you want in support of it, but once again, the significance of those quotes rests on a number of assumptions, assumptions that just aren’t uniform throughout the Muslim world. So, why advocate for the bastards when we could support decent folks who just want to get through the day.

There is simply no way around it. If ever there was a term for which ‘family resemblance’ provided a more suitable account of its meaning I don’t know what that is (maybe ‘culture’). Religion as a whole can take many different forms, as can just about every individual religion. We can respond to each individual variant as we like, but there is no use shoring up the authority of those who serve as the main targets of our criticism. We certainly shouldn’t be helping the greatest assholes in God’s many fan clubs to marginalize decent people. The plasticity of religion is itself a potential objection in itself, at least to those who think it a bastion of objective morality, but that too is just another subset of believers out there. My point is simply that the variation is there, and that those of us who say ‘no’ shouldn’t be too quick to add our own voices to those seeking to impose orthodoxy on the faithful.

On Chick Tracts

25 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by in atheism, Childhood, Religion

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Chick Tracts

The God of Chick Tracts always struck me as something of an asshole.

I still remember the first time I encountered a Chick tract, but I can’t remember if it was the 4th or the 5th grade. I think I might have been hanging around after school for some reason. I do remember quite clearly that it was one of several that had been left scattered about the boy’s bathroom at my school.

This particular pamphlet contained a pretty generic story of a sinner who died and went to Hell. The pamphlet ended, as always, with a message of hope; we didn’t have to end as the character in the story did. Through Jesus we could be saved. In my charitable moments, I like to think that message of hope is the real point of these pamphlets, but frankly I think that might be giving a little too much benefit of the doubt. On that day it was clearly the message of fear that left its biggest impression on me. I remember the feeling of horror coursing up and down my spine as I read about the suffering of sinners damned to a lake of fire. The mere thought that this could be the world I was born into was enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck and keep it there. The suffering itself and the cruelty of the being who would inflict it stuck with me for days, as did the cruelty of anyone who could say of such a thing that the source of it was good and worthy of praise.

It’s more than a little fitting that my first encounter with a Chick Tract was in a bathroom, because my whole world got a little creepier that day and I don’t think it’s recovered since.

I grew up in a household filled with the ideas of Spiritualism and Theosophy, essentially the forerunners of modern day New Age thinking. I’d heard of people who believed in Satan. I’d heard of people who believed in Hell. In retrospect, I must certainly have known many who believed in the things talked about in that pamphlet, but I hadn’t ever really talked to any of them about it. What I heard of God and Jesus was all love and kindness, and so those who literally believed in Hell were (much like Hell itself) a remote possibility to me. To my family, such people were largely a whipping boy, an image of someone who gets it wrong conjured up mostly for the purpose of telling a story about how more enlightened souls get it right.

The Chick tract was the first time such people became real to me. They became real to me in the most caricatured form imaginable. On that day, the worst things said of organized religion by the adults around me had not come close to the pure malice of the story I held in my hands. Someone had left this with the intent that children would find it and read about it. Whoever that person was believed quite firmly in Hell, and they believed in it strongly enough to want to share that message with others.

…with children.

It didn’t escape me that the chosen mode of delivery was less than honest. Leaving pamphlets in a children’s bathroom is more than a little underhanded, and this fact was the icky icing on a whole cake of ugly. So, there I sat with this pamphlet, trying to wrap my mind around the twin horrors of this vengeful God and the fact that some people actually do believe in Him, and whats more that they love him. Suffice to say those horrors outweighed the significance of any hope the pamphlet might have had to offer. The vision of Jesus might have been the end of the story, but it’s most memorable moment for me (and I suspect others) had clearly been the lake of fire.

Could the world really be so perverse? Could people really be so morbid as to think this way? Those are the questions I kept asking myself after encountering that first Chick Tract. It’s all I could think of for some time afterwards. Eventually, I managed to put the whole thing behind me, but not entirely. It was a bit like some of the dirty stories my friends were beginning to tell at that age, or images of odd porn that somehow crossed my path. I hoped one day to make sense of all these things, but for the time being I found them simply disturbing and I preferred not to think about them much. To me, that pamphlet had always been a kind of pornography.

It still is.

I understand the author of that pamphlet, Jack Chick, has recently passed away, and it reminded me of that day back in school. I don’t wish to celebrate his death, but I’m also quite aware that his passing will stimulate a surge in public interest regarding the man and his work. I take no pleasure in his passing, but I do think his life’s work is worthy of a comment or two, critical as mine most certainly will be.

The next time I had cause to consider Jack Chick’s particular brand of pornography came in the mid 80s when I and my friends took to playing Dungeons and Dragons. “Dark Dungeons” would be Jack Chick’s main contribution to the Satanic panic of the era. I don’t recall when I first became aware of it, but the story-line always struck me as both laughable and deceitful. I didn’t really become fully aware of Jack Chick himself (or of his operation) until I joined a few discussion boards back in the early 2000s. It was odd to me, a bit like learning the name of a creepy caller. This was the man who had written that story from back in my childhood. He was the author of those morbid images, and he was the source of that sick feeling I had upon seeing them.

Good to know.

…but also a little disconcerting.

I recall only one other Chick tract with any degree of significance to me. It was about Navajo Medicine Men. Chick portrayed them as Skinwalkers, thus conflating healers with monsters, and of course ending the whole matter with a familiar pitch to Jesus. It was no more insightful than the hack job Chick did on D&D.

I’ve encountered a few more of Chick’s pieces over the years, but not many have really stuck in my memory. The formula is simple. Some worldly interest will lead a person down a very dark path toward Satan, death, and Hell itself, but Christians will offer them salvation. In the end, the reader is invited to accept Jesus and be saved. I understand others have been doing the work for sometime now, but the essential formula remains largely unchanged. I always wonder at the choices Chick and his successors make in these stories. Do they really believe the details of their claims? It’s one thing, for example, to believe that Dungeons & Dragons is a bad influence on kids, and quite another to believe that it is literally run by a cult as a means of initiating children into arcane magical rites. This is what fascinates me most about such work today. It isn’t testimony to faith, but rather the myopic interest in sordid stories about actual people real world world institutions. What kind of mind spreads stories like this? And how did they decide to produce them? With or without evidence, I can’t help thinking the bottom line is the same. Someone is getting off on these narratives. Whatever their interest in selling the hope of Jesus, someone is reveling in the vision of sinfulness a little too much.

Don’t get me wrong; I have no particular reason to condemn anyone for pursuing their prurient interests, at least if you can do it without harming anyone. What bothers me in this instance is the bad faith and the lack of self-awareness, the sense that someone could play so happily in the very imagery they seek to condemn in others. Perhaps more to the point, what bothers me about Chick Tracts is the sense that this is a pleasure taken in sordidness of others’ lives, a kind of hope that other people might really be worse than you could possibly know, and of course a hope that they will suffer in the end. This sort of thing is not unique to Chick publications, unfortunately, and one can often find preachers indulging in a kind of proxy porn. I suppose that was Chick’s particular genius. He found a particularly vivid way to present that kind of material. Whether that is to his shame or his credit is of course another question. For me the answer is clear enough.

I wish I could find something better to say about Jack Chick than this. It is of course tempting to follow an age old wisdom and say nothing at all, but Chick’s passing reminds me of that moment all those many years ago in which I first found one of his publications. Don’t get me wrong. Worse things have happened to me than the discovery of that creepy pamphlet. Even still, I can’t help thinking it wasn’t a particularly positive experience. For me, that will always be Jack Chick’s legacy.

It isn’t a good one.

Mother Earth, the Invisible Hand, and a Few Eider Ducks

23 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by in Native American Themes, Philosophy, Religion

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standingtallI’ve been thinking lately about the notion of Mother Earth (or Primal Gaia). She figures rather prominently in a lot of the literature I read back in grad school, and I frequently have occasion to revisit some of that material with my students. What has me thinking about this lately is a few discussions on the topic of climate change initiated by a colleague of mine. So, like I said, …I’ve been thinking about her lately.

To say that I find it hard to believe in such an entity is putting it mildly. I don’t literally believe that the earth itself has a will of its own. Even still, I can’t help thinking the notion of Mother Earth has a lot going for it. Near as I can tell, talk of Mother Earth conveys two things about the environment that are all easily lost in Her absence.

The first entailment is a sense of dialogue (or perhaps dialectic) in nature. So long as we think of the world around us in terms of objective data it becomes that much easier to anticipate the consequences of our own actions in terms of an essentially cause and effect sequence. We may recognize that some of the effects of our actions escape us at the moment, but that just doesn’t stop folks from thinking of their actions in terms of a discrete cause and effect sequence based on our present understanding of the world at hand. If I do x, the result is y. That seems to be how people think about objects.

Not other people!

Subjects.

People (and most living things) can be predictable, to sure, but they are never entirely so. My cat is meowing at me as I type this. I expect she will bring me a toy to play in a moment. That’s what I expect her to do, but she may surprise me. Likewise, I may surprise her. Maybe this time I won’t stop typing and toss the toy about for her to chase it. Likewise, my students may not do the assignments I give them; my boss may not count my workload as I expected; and the folks at Amazon may not package my latest order of chili paste as they have so many times in the past. Living things…

hunter(Pardon me. I’ll be back in a moment.)

…

..

.

Anyway!

As I was saying, living things always seem to add something else to the mix when they react to our own behavior. Sometimes, they even start things of their own accord. Therein lies one of the real advantages to thinking of the environment in terms like those suggested by terms like “Mother Earth.” It gets us out of the habit of thinking that we know exactly what She is going to do. …of thinking that the concrete effects we hope to bring about with any given action ever come close to a thorough account of our impact on the world around us. I can think my way to this bit of humility, but talk of Mother Earth suggests that notion from the very outset. If I think of the earth as a living thing, I don’t have to remind myself that burning carbon-based fuels may have unintended consequences. I can be sure of it. In this context and others, I can be sure that Mother Earth will always add something to the mix when she responds to me and others.

Oh sure, we can conceive of particular things in terms of fairly discrete cause&effect relationships. If I leave a Cocacola outside, it’s going to freeze and burst. Hit a ball with a bat and it will fly away.Better yet, hit a cue ball low with a well-chalked cue-stick and it will (hopefully) spin backwards after contacting the object ball. These are things we can imagine in relatively specific terms. But as our account of the object world expands, as we approach aggregate subject matter such as an ecological niche or regional environments, our ability to conceive of things in such neat terms starts to fall apart. Which is precisely what makes the notion of Earth as a subject in Her own right becomes a rather tempting option.

But I did say that the notion of Mother Earth conveys at least two things about the physical environment, didn’t I? Well the second is pretty simple. Thinking of earth as our Mother effectively conveys a sense of nurturing. More to the point, it conveys a sense that we are the ones being nurtured, and that we are dependent on her. Since She is a person, rather than a thing, or even a collection of things, this means we are dependent on Her good will.

The upshot of all this is a kind a moral responsibility, a sense that life itself entails a moral responsibility to earn the good will of the world that makes our lives possible. We could get to that sense of moral responsibility in other ways (even stewardship, perhaps), but I don’t know of any ideas that convey it quite so effectively as notions like those of Mother Earth or Primal Gaia.

For me , at least, She may be little but a metaphor, but for a metaphor, Mother Earth can be damned compelling.

***

featherSo, what has me thinking about this tonight? A film called People of a Feather. This documentary follows the efforts of an Inuit community dwelling on the shores of Hudson Bay (near the Belcher Islands)as to learn why the local population of Eider ducks is in serious decline. Following substantial die-offs in the 1990s, they asked the Canadian Wildlife Service for help in determining the cause. What they got in the way of help was Joel Heath, an ecologist who documented his years of research in this film.

This is a gorgeous film. Heath’s underwater footage of Eider ducks swimming about in search of shellfish is absolutely spectacular.  He also spends a good deal of time documenting the lives of local Inuit and filming the cycles of surface ice on Hudson’s Bay. One of the things I like most about this film is the way Heath leaves much of the detail without comments. He simply lets his camera linger on the scene and leaves us to piece together the details for ourselves. If Heath has done his job well, and he has, the footage alone is often enough to tell a story in its own right.

What the film does take the time to explain is just what is happening to stress the Eider ducks in this region of Hudson Bay. It’s worth knowing at the outset that these ducks do not migrate. Instead, they spend the winter along small patches of open water called Polynyas. The problem of course is that something is happening to the Polynyas. They have become significantly more unstable in the 2000s, effectively leaving the ducks without a dependable means of surviving the winters.

So, why is this happening? The simple answer is that the hydro-electrical systems used to heat the major cities of Canada have altered the currents (along with the salinity) of the bay. The Hydro-electric dams in the region typically release large amounts of fresh water into the bay during the winter, effectively reversing the normal cycles of activity. The increasing instability of the polynyas may be just the tip of the iceberg here (ironic metaphor, I know). Heath’s work, and that of his Inuit friends thus raises questions about the total long range-impact of the power-grids used to support the mainstream communities of Canada. As people who rely on the natural cycles of the region to support themselves, the Inuit who initiated this research are felling the effects more directly than those living in the cities, but this is small comfort to anyone contemplating the long-term consequences of changes in the water system of the region. In effect, the eider ducks may have been a bit of a miner’s canary. Things are happening in the area that no-one really anticipated, and the questions are how much change will the hydro-electric systems brings about? How much will they be allowed to bring about? Are there alternatives?

People of a Feather doesn’t really answer these questions, though Heath does outline a few brief policy considerations as the credits roll. What makes this film great, however, is his patient development of the problem itself, and in particular his ability to help us understand just what this problem means to the Inuit living the area, Inuit who (it must be emphasized) saw fit to initiate the study itself and provided active support throughout its development.

This is one of those times when indigenous people got the details right. It’s a story of indigenous people working closely with scientists to address an important question about the natural environment. I’m reminded of similar efforts to improve the accuracy of whale counts along the coast of the North Slope here in Barrow. When scientists and Inupiat whalers disagreed about the number of bowhead whales in local waters , both groups devised new means of counting the whales. Turns out the Inupiat were right. (You can read about it in The Whale and the Super Computer by Charles Wohlforth.) Simply put, it pays to listen when indigenous communities raise concerns about what’s happening in the local environment. They don’t just give us grand abstractions like Mother Earth and poetic themes for movies, poems, and pastel-laden paintings. Sometimes, they really do provide the best resources for understanding particular things.

That said, I do find myself wondering about the story-line presented in People of a Feather. It’s not the most heavy-handed narrative, to be sure, but in this film it would be fair to suggest the hydro-electric dams appear to be the source of evil, so to speak. That isn’t because the people producing them mean to hurt anyone. It really isn’t. Rather, the problem is an unintended consequence of their function, a consequence felt most particularly by an indigenous population whose livelihood is determined as much by the natural cycles of Hudson’s Bay as it is by those of the modern market. Which reminds me of other narratives that could be told of this same issue, narratives about progress and development, of carving a civilization out of the frozen wilderness. These are the narratives that will be more familiar to people living closer to those power grids, and to most I suspect that will read this blog post.  In these narratives, the dams are good thing, almost a miracle, one that makes possible the lives of countless people. We could probably even point to a few benefits enjoyed by those in various indigenous communities. Those connections are there. How we sort the details, and what people want to do about them is another question. My point is that these grand narratives tend to predetermine the significance of the facts. It may not even be that the policy-considerations demand a choice of one value or another, but in the stories people tell about this such an issue the choice is often already made by time the plot starts to quicken.

…which may be the reason this film has me thinking about Mother Earth. This is one more instance in which something people didn’t anticipate turned out to be critical to the lives of some people (and some ducks). It’s also one case in which people have begun to sort those consequences out, just as we hope to be doing with issues like global, ocean acidification, and so many other issues in which the natural environment as a whole seems to be threatened, and along with it, us. Yet our understanding of these issues is always playing catch-up to the processes we’ve initiated, and frankly, it isn’t clear that this understanding is catching up fast enough. It’s enough to make us wish we had a way of talking about these issues that reminded us from the outset of just how much we don’t know about the impact of humans on the environment.

The temptation to call for Mother aside, it’s worth noting that comparable metaphors typically guide popular thinking (and policy) on the subject as it stands. Here I am speaking of the invisible hand of the market. Hell, the very notion of a market is a bit of a metaphor, an image that transforms known tendencies, tendencies with variable strength and effective) into a kind of thing that we can depend on. Do people in cold climates want a means of keeping warm? Supply will rise to meet the demand. The market will sort its way to a kind of equilibrium. One could easily apply such thinking to the process which puts all those dams on Hudson’s Bay to begin with, and it would help us to understand a few things. But this thinking too relies on the turn of a metaphor, and it too seems to distorts the facts in a few subtle ways.

One of the most interesting things about the invisible hand of the market deity is just how effectively it can be used to remind us of just how little we know about the economic impact of government policies. Time and again, market theorists remind us that each and every regulation (such as laws mitigating fresh water release in the Canadian hydro-electic system) will have unanticipated consequences. Time and again, free market fundamentalists will tell us to be wary of efforts to correct social ills. We may just make them worse! They are right, of course, except on the main point, because those truly devoted to this metaphor consistently tell us to let the market work itself out. It’s easy to think of this as a kind of humility, a recognition that being mere mortals, human beings cannot anticipate all the consequences of our own actions. The problem of course is that free market fundamentalists will only carry this logic as far as the market itself. How those unintended consequences will affect the balance of human relations to the environment is typically beyond the scope of their reckoning. Any humility we may learn from tales of the invisible hand seems ironically to leave us with an odd certainty in its own right, a mandate to leave unquestioned most anything done in the name of profit. For a lesson in humility, this takes us to a place that looks awful lot like hubris.

Stories of the invisible hand bid us to exercise caution less the market come back to bite us for every effort to legislate our way to a better world. They don’t do much to address the externalities piling up in the environment around us. In vie of these externalities, it is becoming increasingly clear that just about every cost-benefit analysis ever computed in human history has fallen short of a proper reckoning. I don’t see an adequate account of this coming from those devoted to the image of the invisible hand. If such is to be had, it will either come from painstaking empirical research, or from the language of another metaphor entirely.

***

…a trailer for you!

And Context Wept: Islam and its Net-Critics

11 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by in Politics, Religion

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Let’s say I post a criticism is Islam (or of some Muslims) somewhere on the net. What is the most likely impact of this action? I know. Crickets chirping, right? But let’s think about the possibilities. Even if it is an e-drop in the digital ocean, I, like others who add their comments to countless social media accounts are trying to communicate something to someone. That may or may not happen, but as it is the point of posting in the first place, it’s worth thinking about it. So, my question is, what kind of impact will my criticism have?

If I say something about the mistreatment of women or homosexuals in Islamic countries, will my words have any positive impact on the lives of vulnerable people in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, or those living in ISIS controlled territories? Or will my criticism simply add to the din of anti-Muslim rhetoric in the west? Will I in some small way help to ease the pressure on those oppressed by Muslim strictures? Or will I in some equally small way help others to make a case for bombing runs abroad and discriminatory policies at home? If I complain that Muslim women are oppressed through the need to wear a burqa, will this help to give some poor lady the right to bare her face in public? Or will my comment be just another insult to Muslims in general, even the women wearing those burqas? If I complain about female circumcision, will I help to spare woman this procedure, or will my comments serve simply denigrate those who have already had it? If I simply disagree with something Muslims believe, will my comments to that effect give them something to think about? Or will they just add to the stigmas already placed upon Muslims now living in the west? Might my comments (whatever the specifics) help to inspire some nutcase to go scapegoat a random Muslim on some random street corner in America?

And by random Muslim, I could well mean a Sikh, not because I’m unaware of the difference, but because those inspired to such random violence generally don’t.

Could my criticism have more impact on the lives of Muslims actually living in the west? Perhaps. But what would that impact be? Will I inspire people in a predominantly Muslim community to be more accepting of some of some of their own members? Will I make them a little less likely to entertain acts of terrorism? Is that even a real concern, much less a real hope? Or will my criticism simply provide one more signal that the western world is truly hostile to their own ways? Will I give them one more reason to insulate themselves against the rest of us, and live apart even as they live nearby?

I can do some things to increase or decrease the likelihood of positive impact. I can study-up to make sure I have a reasonable point, or I can pass along a meme with a real gotcha kinda gut-punch? If I choose the former route, what then? A reasonable criticism presupposes a basis for constructive dialogue, even a willingness to listen to the response. Sitting up here on the northern edge of northiness, I’m not sure I have such a basis for constructive dialogue, and I suspect your average Muslim (whether living in the  West or otherwise) will have even less reason to give a damn that some random guy has a bone to pick with his or her religion. There may be inroads to make such conversations possible, but they don’t begin with the criticism. They don’t begin with me sitting down and saying; “I’m gonna take Islam down a notch today.”

I write this because some people seem to think criticism of Islam is a moral obligation. They can often point to bad things happening in Muslim circles, and I can often agree that some of those things really are bad. But how the Hell do I express concerns about things without making life more miserable for the countless Muslims here or abroad who just want to get through their day?

Much as I do.

It’s not at all uncommon to see net-warriors goading certain parties to be more critical of Islam. This is often coupled with an effort to minimize criticism of some other interest. Evangelical Christians, for example, will sometimes complain of atheists that we criticize Christianity while ignoring Islam. (A common gambit here is to suggest that we are too scared to criticize Islam. …chicken if you don’t, so to speak.) Voices within the right wing echo chamber frequently ask why the left complains of homophobia in their own circles when the executioners of ISIS literally throw gay men from rooftops. The answer frequently strikes me as obvious. No-one from ISIS gives a damn what I type. The far right here in America probably doesn’t either, but they are a lot closer to it than anyone living in ISIS-controlled regions of the world. Net battles are all sound and fury, this is true, but there is a lot more cause for hope when speaking to people with more cultural baggage in common and less political baggage piled up between them.

I used to hear and read similar games played on the subject of communism. Some folks would wonder out loud how the American left could be so critical of our own nation when we have so little to say about the crimes of the Russians. Why didn’t we protest their policies, I recall a few folks saying. I always thought the answer was damned obvious. The

The political context of such conflicts simply don’t give us a clear line from a criticism to a positive outcome or even a constructive dialogue. More to the point, the criticisms themselves suffer in this case from a lack of attention to context. It isn’t just that Muslims are unlikely to listen to a random criticism from a random non-Muslim; that criticism is unlikely to be worthy of consideration in the first place, still less so if it is made under the illusion that the value of such a criticism could be determined in the abstract.

All in all, it’s a pretty childish game, I am talking about, but it’s one that seems to have extra traction as applied to Islam. The right wing has done a good job of generalizing the sense of war in our present age. In the days immediately following 9-11, George Bush was careful to tell the public that we were not at war with Islam or with Muslims in general. That didn’t ensure authorities would treat Muslims with anything near the respect deserved by any human being or even with the respect that should simply go with due process, but at least the man did make an effort to define America’s wars (reckless as they were) in ways that didn’t make innocent Americans into the enemy. The right wing echo chamber has been working damned hard to change that in the years sense then. Whether it was the fight over the so-called Mosque at ground zero or the constant drum-beat of professional bigots such as Pamella Geller, Ann Coulter, or virtually the entire Fox News Network, they consistently nudged the nation (and the world) toward a vision of one grand apocalyptic battle between the western world and the Islamic World. To be sure, there are voices within the Islamic world that agree with them on the terms of this war, but the mating calls of violent people will always resonant with those of their own enemies. The bottom line is that an awful lot of people see Islam itself as a force to be reckoned with, an enemy to be defeated with rockets abroad and with rhetoric at home.

This situation has the effect of skewing a number of general conflicts between Islam and its would-be critics. The philosophical arguments fielded against Islam by atheists, Christians, and others take on the significance of a political agenda. Sam Harris, for example, has suggested that 9-11 inspired him to become a vocal atheist. At the end of the day, atheists and Christians will have our disagreements with Muslims. If there have ever been paths to constructive dialogue between these communities, the notion that violence rests on the consequences doesn’t help much. Too often those of us on the other end forget just how much of that violence falls on Muslim communities. As the question is framed in popular culture, it is almost always about what they might do to us. What we have done to them never really seems to be on the table. Muslim and an atheist (or a Christian) could theoretically have a thoughtful discussion about their beliefs. Such debates are not the norm.

It wasn’t too log ago that I encountered a white nationalist on twitter claiming that Islam was a virus. He didn’t want that virus to infect the western world, and so his tweets on the subject moved back and forth between the notion that Islam itself was a virus and the notion that Muslims were the virus, that they must be kept out of western nations. To say that this was dehumanizing rhetoric would be putting it mildly. I have always regarded the dangers of comparing people to diseases (mental or otherwise) as one of the legitimate lessons of Nazi history. What surprised me about this example was the number of people who joined the conversation in order to defend the notion that Islam was a mental illness. Their interest in the argument, of course, stemmed from Richard Dawkins notion of religion as a kind of mental virus. That the specific comments in question were nowhere near so abstract was lost on the majority of those chiming in to defend the man’s comments. That the man producing them was a committed white nationalist was also lost on his many defenders. And thus a group of philosophy dude-bros came to the aid of an outright bigot without ever realizing the point at hand was more than a theoretical matter about the nature of religion.

Sometimes a philosophical discussion is anything but.

A second, and perhaps more serious problem lies in the nature of human rights abuses carried out by Islamic regimes or by militants under the expectation that such regimes will protect them. These deserve a response of some kind, but the countless war-mongers  spreading news of every atrocity ever committed in the name of Allah certainly aren’t doing anything to promote respect for human rights. (Honestly, I think some folks suffer from terrorist-envy.) I often pass along what I take to be credible news accounts of atrocities, and I am happy to support the efforts of organizations such as Amnesty International or other such organizations working to prevent human rights abuses. That may sound weak, but at least it doesn’t strike me as adding fuel to a fire. If there are better ways to address such atrocities, ways that don’t amount to promoting violence and prejudice in their own right, then I am open to reading about them.

All of this may be much ado about less than nothing. Someone wrong on the net and all, but to degree that any of these criticisms matter, my point is that telling the world you don’t like Islam isn’t all that helpful. Being helpful at this point in history is a little more difficult than usual, but a good number of people could stand to try a little harder.

Cue comments about the “regressive left” in 3, 2, 1…