Why I oppose the figurative use of the term "militant" in all contexts

Uh oh, I go and call Bruce Hood a "nice guy", and Bruce himself responds in the comments unfortunately triggering one of my big pet peeves.

No, it's not that Bruce thinks the outspoken atheism strategy is "misguided" and that he doesn't "understand" it -- reasonable people can disagree, and I stand by my point that there is a difference between Bruce, who simply favors a softer approach towards religion, vs. folks like Mooney, Rosenau, etc., who spend a sizeable fraction of their time talking about why other people's approaches are wrong.

What bugs me is Bruce's use of the phrase "militant atheism". The problems with this phrase have been pointed out time and time again, but I'm going to go a step further: I do not think it is appropriate ever to use the phrase "militant" in a figurative/non-literal manner, no matter what group you are talking about.

My reasons for this are threefold: First, the original literal usage -- meaning engaged in or favoring actual military action -- is still quite common. Second, which usage of the word is intended is largely determined by the group to which it is attached. Third, and most importantly, it seems to me that when the group in question is advocating in favor of a historically oppressed classification, they are far more likely to get the figurative usage. And that to me sounds like an attempt to slander and squelch.

If we are talking about a militant Islamist, it is clear we mean one who advocates violence; we do not call Harun Yahya a militant Muslim, even though he is very aggressive about promoting Islam. It would seem incongruous and even libelous to label him as such. This is true for pretty much any religious group one attaches the word "militant" too, as well as for most types of purely political causes, e.g. a "militant separatist" is not simply someone who advocates strongly for independence, but who endorses and/or participates in military action in order to achieve it.

On the other hand, if we are talking about a "militant feminist", it is obvious we do not mean a woman who literally endorses violence against men or against misogyny. That's just absurd. The same goes for "militant atheist" and "militant homosexual", etc. Although I did hear that the Queer Eye guys were thinking about forming a paramilitary group to assassinate public figures with a poor fashion sense. Oh no wait, I didn't.

Now, maybe part of this is simply because there really aren't any militant atheists, feminists, or LGBT people. It just generally doesn't work that way. (Side note: Obviously in some places atheistic communism used violence to enforce atheism, but typically we would not identify those folks as "atheists" first and foremost, but rather as communists/Marxists/Stalinists/etc. If you wanted to call Mao a militant atheist, however, I would not argue with you.)

The situation is somewhat murkier for groups where there are true militants, but which sometimes get the figurative usage anyway. An example might be civil rights activists. Certainly I would not object to labeling some members of the former Black Panther Party as "militant civil rights activists" (although "militant black supremacists" might be more appropriate in that case). But you hear "militant" being used here sometimes just to refer to people who are outspoken and/or uncompromising in their views. Other examples would be animal rights activists or environmentalists, although it seems to me that in those cases, the usage of "militant" is predominantly literal. (Surprise surprise, since they don't deal with a historically oppressed group) I think I've heard non-violent people referred to as "militant environmentalists", but if I have, it hasn't been very often. That term is generally reserved for people who firebomb SUVs and such.

In any case, while the figurative usage of the term is quite common (in fact it is the first definition at Dictionary.com), it still feels terribly incongruous when it is applied figuratively to one of the groups for which the usage is normally meant literally. It would seem odd to call James Dobson a "militant Christian", for example, even though he is at least as strident in his beliefs as "militant atheists" like PZ Myers.

(Interesting side note: I googled for "James Dobson militant christian" just to see if anybody actually calls him that -- and in fact many do, for what it's worth -- and the first link that came up quotes James Dobson referring to "militant homosexual groups". I think my point has been made...)

Until that discrepancy in application of the term is resolved, I think the figurative meaning should be avoided altogether. Only call someone "militant" if they specifically endorse or participate in violence. Otherwise, you are falsely equating them with those who do. As long as "militant Islamist" implies someone who kills for Islam, you can't call someone a "militant atheist" without implying the same things about them.

Cultural relativism: Mullah-ing it over

Much has been made -- appropriately, I think -- of the fact that the shameful murders of UN workers in Afghanistan was not directly in response to Terry Jones' burning of the Koran (which initially did not make that much press this time around since it was after all just some crazy fundamentalist kook holding a dumb little ill-attended show inside his church), but rather in response to Afghani president Hamid Karzai's very public announcement and condemnation of Jones' actions, and subsequent incitement by some very angry mullahs. I immediately spotted the parallel to the Danish cartoon affair, which barely made the news outside of Denmark until a couple of imams decided to tour the Mideast a year later stirring up anti-Danish sentiment (I was not the only one to make this observation, by the way).

So in both cases we have a Western nation experiencing an otherwise rather short-lived and mostly harmless free speech controversy, in which freedom of speech ultimately triumphs despite widespread condemnation of the message (which is just great; that's how liberal democracies are supposed to work) -- which was later turned into an international incident when some mullahs deliberately tried to make an issue out of it and fan the flames of violence. To me, it seemed easy to see where the blame lies: with the mullahs, not with the dumb bigot pastor or the controversial cartoonists.

That is, until I realized that unless one rejects cultural relativism (which, thankfully, I do) that argument falls apart, or at the very least undermines some other moral statements we'd very much like to make.

Take for example the problem of child witchcraft accusations in parts of Africa. Ophelia Benson's blog is a good resource to find out about this, but in a nutshell, there is a problem in certain parts of Africa where bad events are blamed on local children practicing witchcraft, and the children are then exiled or murdered in the most brutal ways. Terrible stuff.

Of course, like the Terry Jones book-burning and the Danish cartoons, locally it is not that big news. Sadly, that's not too far out of bounds for how things are done in those regions.

Perhaps this is a poor example because, shamefully, this travesty hasn't gotten much press in the West. But if we did want to do something about this, the way to do so would be to publicize what had been only a minor local issue, get people over here angry about it and motivated to do something. In other words, do exactly what the mullahs have done in regards to perceived slights against Islam in Western nations.

Don't misread me here. I am not drawing a false equivalence. I happen to think that murdering children in the name of superstition and scapegoating is not even comparable to the questionable exercise of free speech. And I happen to think I am right about that in some objective sense, not just as a matter of cultural or personal bias.

But that's just the point I am making. Without a strong statement that, in this particular case, one culture has got it right and the other one has just plain got it wrong, we cannot blame the mullahs for inciting violence. They simply drew public attention to what, in their cultural perspective, was an unacceptable event taking place elsewhere -- an event so unacceptable that they felt, just as I feel about the child witchcraft stuff, that they could not turn a blind eye to it just because it is happening halfway across the world. From their cultural perspective, burning a Koran is as bad or worse than murdering children. And so, unless we reject cultural relativism, the mullahs were perfectly justified in what they did.

As much as a sick fuck as Terry Jones is, it's baffling and enraging to me that people want to put as much blame on him as they do on the mullahs who directly incited violence, or on the angry mobs who murdered innocent UN workers in their infantile rage. But maybe it's because of cultural relativism run amok. After all, unless we flat-out reject the idea that it's okay for another culture to be as angry about their holy book being desecrated as we Westerners might be about murdered children, then we have no leg to stand on in condemning them.

We should not make the leap from a long overdue rejection of our history of cultural imperialism and an appropriate humility about our own cultural perspective and its potential flaws, into a pure ungrounded cultural relativism. There is nothing inherently superior about Westerners that ought to make our culture always superior; and when culture does not warp people's values into a twisted caricature of morality, cultural variation is part of the rich tapestry of human experience. But none of that changes the fact that there can be issues on which another culture is just flat-out objectively wrong, no ifs ands or buts.

The "Draw Nothing" Protest

The New Humanist reports that "satire appears to be dying, as editors go one step further by displaying a fear of publishing anything that comes close to satirising the widespread fear of publishing anything that comes close to depicting the Prophet Muhammad." A cartoon which did not depict Mohammed, but whose punchline was "Picture book title voted least likely to ever find a publisher… ‘Where’s Muhammad?'" was rejected by upwards of 20 newspapers.

Unfortunately, I am not an influential cartoonist. Or an influential anything, for that matter. But if I were, the protest I would suggest is for established cartoonists to pick a "Draw Nothing Day". For your cartoon that day, turn in an empty panel or panels. That's it.

There are many people who support free speech but who feel uncomfortable drawing Mohammed, not just for fear of getting blowd up, but out of a genuine respect for others' religious sensibilities. (That would not be me, of course) So we would not ask these people to draw Mohammed, and in any case, even if it were realistic, getting major US newspapers to publish cartoons of Mohammed would probably result in copious death and violence. (Fucked up, eh?) But surely an empty captionless frame could be drawn?

Anybody like this idea? How would we get cartoonists on board?

The difference between the book-burning Florida pastor and Crackergate

Much ado lately about the douchebag Florida pastor who is going to burn a bunch of Qurans this Saturday. Inevitably, the anti-gnu atheist crowd has occasionally drawn comparisons to PZ's infamous cracker mutilation. And indeed, the analogy had occurred to me even before I heard it invoked by critics. In both cases, we are looking at the desecration of a religious symbol. If we are going to view one of them as a vicious act of bigotry and the other as a legitimate act of protest, we ought to have our reasoning clear. So I think this is worth examining.

On a purely practical level, it ought to be obvious that one act is simply far more dangerous than the other at the present point in time. At the time of Crackergate, the US was not in the process of trying to extricate itself from a foreign war involving Catholicist guerrillas and terrorists. There was no open war between a militant form of theocratic Catholicism and American universities. And if there had, one probably could have argued that PZ's actions would have been reckless. If there were a serious possibility that PZ's cracker abuse could have resulted in, say, a Catholic terrorist group bombing a university... well, I'm not saying we should self-censor out of fear, but this does factor in.

More importantly, though, is that PZ was specifically protesting something -- the death threats and over-the-top rhetoric surrounding Webster Cook's fateful curiosity about the Eucharist -- in a targeted and specific way. There was a clear message to Catholics: You can believe what you want, but what you cannot do is force the rest of us to take your symbols seriously.

The Florida pastor, on the other hand, does not really seem to have a point, other than "Islam is bad, mmm'kay?" If the protest had a specific goal -- protesting female genital mutilation, or the practice of taking child brides, for example -- then a protest along the lines of what the pastor is proposing might make sense and, though perhaps still ill-advised, would not necessarily be hate speech. (Though surely these cretins must be aware of the history they are invoking when they choose to use book-burning as their medium... Yeesh!)

And that's exactly why I get so frustrated when people leave out the important details of Crackergate. If PZ had just woken up one morning and said to himself, "You know, I really hate Catholics. I'm gonna stab myself a Eucharist!", then I think that might count as hate speech. Though even if that had been the case, the public reaction was still way over-the-top. And surprise, that's exactly the point PZ was making!

In fact, if this pastor's point was that people get way too upset about Quran abuse, then although I would still find the planned protest to be ill-advised, I would not necessarily find it hateful. Indeed, it's very silly how apoplectic people get about their religious symbols, and the Islamic reverence for the Quran is no exception. I am wracking my brain to try to think of any symbol that I hold so dear that if someone were to desecrate it I would do much more than call them an asshole. The closest I can think of is if somebody befouled a picture of my family, but that's different because a personal threat is implied.

I think the very closest I can come is an example like Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. But even then, it's the captive-ish audience that is the problem. (Not technically a captive audience I suppose, but are you going to leave your own son's or daughter's funeral? Please.) If Phelps and his spawn simply planned their disgusting protests on the same day as military funerals, but across town, it wouldn't warrant much more than a shrug at the existence of yet another sick malicious fundie.

There's just no way that somebody could desecrate a symbol, that did not relate to me personally, in a venue where I was not forced to watch it, and really manage to bother me all that much.

But let's remember: That's not the point this Florida pastor is trying to make. He is simply making a blanket criticism of Islam, which due to the protest's violent overtones and undirected nature, translates to a blanket indictment of Muslims themselves. And that's when it crosses the line from legitimate critique into hate speech: When you stop criticizing the philosophy and start dehumanizing or threatening the people.

Sam Harris: Right message, wrong topic

Sam Harris describes what truly moderate Muslims ought to be saying about their faith. And he's not wrong. But tying this in with the Not-at-Ground Zero Not-a-mosque is unwise at best. If as "Gnu Atheists" (that seems to be the new in vogue term) we don't want people to mistake our forthright criticism as bigotry, then we should not be cheering on the voices of bigots!

I'm so disillusioned right now. Harris, Hitchens, Susan Jacoby, to a certain extent Coyne and PZ... they are all jumping on the "Muslims have a constitutional right to build a mosque"-(which is not a mosque)-"at Ground Zero"-(which is not at Ground Zero)-"but they shouldn't!" bandwagon, failing to see that they are playing right into the hands of Christianist theocrats and partisan demagogues. Judging from the links on RichardDawkins.net, I suspect he may have fallen for it too.

Now is not the time, folks. The opposition to Park51 is primarily based on xenophobia and "Christianofascist" activism, not on high-minded critiques of Islamic theology. Those who truly value secularism and liberalism need to be speaking out against the former, because that's the threat right now.

I'm glad Harris invoked the "Danish cartoon controversy", because it occurs to me that the atheist community is making the same misstep that the moderate Muslim community made in the wake of that whole brouhaha. When there are people burning embassies and making death threats over a fucking cartoon, even mentioning that you happen to find the cartoons distasteful makes you look like a grade-A asshole. Similarly, when there are angry mobs hassling dark-skinned construction workers near Ground Zero, when there are mainstream candidates for Congress declaring that Muslims are not protected by the First Amendment -- bringing up your philosophical positions on the dangers of Islamic theology in that context makes you come across like a real jerkoff.

Priorities, people. Fight the theocratic xenophobes first. Then worry about whether Imam Rauf -- who may be many things, but is clearly not a theocrat -- is doing enough to promote moderation among his fellow Muslims.

It just hit me...

There are more Americans who believe Obama is a Muslim than there are gay Americans. Though I am not a member of either group, I find that pretty stomach-churning.

"Listen, I'm fine with Stupid people, as long as they don't flaunt it in public. I take a Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell policy towards Stupid."

If you are liberal or atheist and you oppose the Park51 community center, you have been bamboozled

It's infuriating, but probably not too surprising, how many conservatives don't understand the First Amendment. Regardless of how you feel about the Park51 community center, you cannot mount a legal challenge to it. This should be obvious to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with what it's (supposed to be) like to live in America.

What is equally infuriating, but far more surprising, is how many liberals and atheists/skeptics, while at least understanding the constitutional aspects of this case, have expressed disapproval with the community center. They say they recognize the right of the builders to go ahead with the project, but they say it's a bad idea, it's "in bad taste", it's "insensitive" to the victims of 9/11.

If you are one of those people, you have probably been bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of a towering minaret, its spire casting an ominous shadow over the ashes of the World Trade Center, you have been bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of a more modest building, but still with a Middle Eastern architectural style that some might find provocative as it stands across the street from the site of the 9/11 tragedy, you have been bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of this modest Middle Eastern-style building, it's spire just barely visible between two skyscrapers as one stands at the sight of Ground Zero, you have been bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of a completely Western very modern inviting building, a corner of it just barely poking over the top of another nearby building, you have been bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of this nice modern building, completely invisible from the World Trade Center site and not anywhere you are likely to pass going to and from Ground Zero, housing a fire-and-brimstone style Muslim-equivalent-of-American-Evangelicals congregation, you have been bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of this nice modern building, far removed from Ground Zero, whose primary purpose is to allow a congregation of a few hundred very progressive New York Muslims to peacefully come together for their weekly worship, guess what, you have still been bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of a nice modern building, far removed from Ground Zero, whose primary purpose is to provide Muslim families with wholesome activities they can do right in downtown Manhattan, such as basketball, swimming, i.e. all the things you'd expect to find at your local YMCA, you are still being bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of a nice modern building, far removed from Ground Zero, whose primary purpose is to provide all New Yorkers with wholesome activities like basketball, swimming, etc., just like the way your local YMCA is open to the public and, though it might have a small chapel, has barely anything to do with Christianity whatsoever... ding ding ding, you've got it right!

And if you are still opposed to that, and you call yourself a liberal, or you call yourself a secularist? I don't know what to say...

Everything that ever needed to be said about the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque"

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The Mathematics of Demagoguery

From Politico via Ed Brayton:

A recent CNN poll showing that 68 percent of Americans oppose the construction of the mosque also found that about half think there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. No political genius is required to decide which issue to run on.

Argh. The GOP has truly become the Party of Stupid. "A majority of Americans are no longer fucking retarded bigots on the same-sex marriage issue? Oh noes, what are we Republicans to do! Oh snap, look at this, a majority of Americans now believe in repealing the First Amendment just to piss off some Muslims! We're saved!"

James Fergusson: "You must understand the lopping off of a young girl's nose in its proper historical context!"

In CiF, James Fergusson argues that human rights violations, and the brutal violation of women's rights in particular, are not a reason for the British military to remain in Afghanistan.

The first two-and-a-half paragraphs are perfectly reasonable. He initially seems to be arguing that, as important as the rights of Afghani women are, that is not and has not been the purpose of the military mission, and that the military mission is unlikely to succeed in bringing about reform in this regard. This is a fair argument. Frankly I personally have not made up my mind as to whether I think we should stay on the ground if Afghanistan trying to fight for human rights, or if, in a heartbreaking but perhaps necessary stroke of realpolitik we should just get the hell out while we can. These are difficult questions, and both sides can be honestly debated.

At the start of the third paragraph, for a flickering moment it even seems as if Fergusson will avoid the sickening cultural relativism that has poisoned some elements of the Western left with shockingly illiberal beliefs:

This does not mean the west should stand by in silence. On the contrary, it is our duty to go on arguing the case for gender equality and to keep Afghans engaged in that old debate.

Indeed. If we must, in the interest of expediency and self-preservation, withdraw militarily from Afghanistan, we must at least continue to speak out and advocate for reform.

But then we get the first indication that in the end this is not at all the message Fergusson wishes to get across:

But we have no right to be shrill...

Ex-fucking-scuse me?!?

A girl gets her fucking nose chopped off for trying to escape a forced marriage, a pregnant woman is brutally flogged and shot to death in front of a cheering audience for the crime of adultery while her partner in "crime" gets off scot-free, and you tell me not to be shrill?!?!?

Fuck you, James Fergusson.

From there, he just continues to spiral into the faux-multiculturalism trap that tricks otherwise liberal minds into defending the most brutal oppression:

It might help if we understood the Taliban better. The harshness of the punishments they sometimes mete out only seems incomprehensible to the west.

Indeed, it does seem incomprehensible to the West. And at the risk of coming off as a moral absolutist, we are fucking right. I believe it is wrong, objectively wrong, to cut off a young girl's nose just because she doesn't want to be forcibly fucked by an older man she doesn't even know night after night after night. Don't you?

So tell me, James Fergusson, how can "understanding the Taliban better" change my mind on this issue?

The strict sexual propriety the Taliban insist upon is rooted in ancient Pashtun tribal custom, the over-riding purpose of which is to protect the integrity of the tribe, and nothing threatens the gene pool like extramarital relations.

Oh, I see. The Taliban's brutal oppression of women is okay, you see, because it is necessary to uphold their ancient custom of racism. Now I see the light! In the New Multiculturalism, misogyny is wrong -- unless you the misogyny is result of trying to protect against miscegeny. Then it's just dandy!

See, we in the West see a young girl who wanted to make her own choices and, you know, not be raped and all that. But the Taliban see a vile strumpet who is trying to pollute their pure gene pool! The Aryan Pashtun race must not be tainted by lesser blood!

The maltreatment of women is by no means exclusive to the Taliban, nor even to Pashtuns. It is practised all over Afghanistan...

And if all your friends jumped off a bridge shot a woman to death, would you do it too?

In fairness to Fergusson, I took the above quote slightly out of context. After the ellipses:

...including by the state that Nato troops are currently dying to support.

This is indeed a problem, and if Fergusson had stuck to a narrow thesis of abandoning the military mission, this might have been a good bit of evidence to bolster his case that military action cannot be effective in saving the women of Afghanistan. Coming as it does, however, after a plea for us to "understand the Taliban better" so that we can see why it's A-ok after all to replace Monday Night Football with the much more entertaining Monday Night Pregnant Woman Flogging, I just can't take it that way. It comes off less as "the military operation is propping up a regime that is also unacceptably poor on women's rights" and more like "everybody in Afghanistan is doing it, so what's the big deal?"

It seems a paradox, but in the 1990s the Taliban leadership did not see themselves as oppressors of women but as their defenders. Westerners forget the historical context in which the Taliban emerged in 1994, although no Afghan ever will. The Taliban's first purpose was to bring law and order to a country that had been devastated by five years of vicious civil war... To many Afghans, including many Afghan women, oppression was a small price to pay in exchange for an end to the wholesale rape and slaughter of the preceding years.

See, the Taliban are the good guys, because they rape and slaughter fewer women than their predecessors. Hooray for the Taliban! They treat women less like dog shit and more like cattle. What nice fellows!

And just for good measure, let's throw in a nice helping of tu quoque:

The west views gender equality as an absolute human right and so we should. But no country, certainly not Britain, has yet managed unequivocally to establish that right at home; and we tend to forget both how recent our progress towards it is, as well as how hard the struggle has been.

Ah yes. We still have workplace discrimination, a gender imbalance in politics, etc., so who are we to criticize someone for shooting a woman in the head? We really ought to get our own house in order first, eh?

Fergusson might have had a convincing piece if he had just left out this "we need to understand the Taliban" nonsense. There is no historical context that justifies this kind of violence and oppression towards women (or anybody). Maybe he's right that the military mission ought to be abandoned. But when he tells we "have no right to be shrill" when we speak about these atrocities, he can take that sick moral relativism and shove it up his postmodern asshole.

Guardian epic fail in word choice

The Guardian has a mostly-great article out that describes in gory detail the horror of female genital mutilation (FGM). That's just about the sickest fucking shit I've ever heard. In any case, they fell down hard in this one sentence:

Even girls who suffer less extreme forms of FGM are unlikely to be promiscuous. One study among Egyptian women found 50% of women who had undergone FGM "endured" rather than enjoyed sex.

(emphasis mine)
Oof. I understand the point they are trying to make, and really, "promiscuous" ought not to be a slander. But unfortunately, it is. Some worthless sadistic sexually repressed fucks are going to read this and be like, "Oh, lookie, less extreme FGM is a good thing because it helps girls stay chaste."

Instead, the Guardian should have used a phrase like "are unlikely to have normal biological functions" or something.

Goddamn, I have to stop writing about this right now. There really isn't much about religion that makes me angrier than FGM.

Hint to Muslims: Jehovah's Witnesses do not have great PR

I happened to be poking around old articles linked to from RichardDawkins.net, and in an article about atheist bus ads in Melbourne, I stumbled across this mostly unrelated but hilarious quote:

The Ahmadiyya community, sparked by a survey that found a quarter of the population regarded Islam as the ''worst religion on earth'', also plans to knock on 3 million doors in a campaign to prove otherwise.

Yeah, good plan, guys. "Our religion has a major public image problem... so in order to fix it, we're going to bother people at home." That's a facepalm if I ever heard one...

The tedious semantics of "compatible": Empirical or Philosophical?

Oh boy, the ever-tedious accomodationism debate is flaring up again. I don't know who really fired the first shot (sounds like it was Rosenau, but who can ever tell).¹ But really, can't we just lay this one to rest? It's really very simple, and the difference between accomodationists and non-accomodationists can be neatly summed up by critical examination of the following quote from John Wilkins:

...the data is that science and religion coexist nearly all the time – most of those who support scientific views are religious.

And herein lies the heart of the confusion, and I can't believe that folks like Wilkins are still putting their fingers in their ears and saying "Lalalalalala I can't hear you." What us non-accomodationists mean when we say that science and religion are not compatible is not an empirical claim -- it is a philosophical claim. Ultimately there are empirical underpinnings that drive this philosophy, but in the end it is a philosophical claim.

And what is that claim? We are asserting that two epistemologies which consistently yield different results for the same truth claims are inherently incompatible. By definition. That is how we are defining the word "compatible" -- for two epistemologies to be compatible, they must usually yield the same or similar answers to the central questions they seek to answer.

Given that definition, there is of course vast empirical support for the contention that science and religion -- and in this case, I mean "religion" to signify a collection of histories and dogma, rather than a vague notion of spirituality or our good old friend apophatic theology or anything -- are not "compatible". We can see time and time again that they yield different values for the same truth claims. Was Jesus born of a virgin? Science says this is impossible², Christianity says it is true. Did Mohammed ascend into heaven on the backs of winged horses? Science says no, Islam says yes. Are there beings known as avatars running around on earth appearing human but wielding supernatural powers? Science assumes no without extreme proof, Hinduism assumes it must be true because some dusty old books said so.

The accomodationists typically ignore this line of argumentation altogether, and simply point out that lots of people believe in both science and religion. We know that. I'm so tired of hearing that repeated like it is a refutation of the philosophical claim of incompatibility. It would be like if somebody was trying to argue that music piracy was wrong, and the rebuttal was "but so many people do it!" So what? Yes, we agree, many people simultaneously subscribe to incompatible epistemologies, and the human mind has proved impressively deft at reconciling and dealing with this. There's a reason the idea of doublethink in 1984 was so plausible -- we all already do this, all the time.

That goes for me, too, and Larry Moran, and PZ Myers, and Richard Dawkins, and Josh Rosenau, and every other homo sapiens on this planet. We all engage in a bit of doublethink now and then. Some of us do it more than others, but anybody who denies ever doing it is a liar or a fool. Whether it's rationalizing a minor ethical lapse, convincing yourself that a recent expensive purchase was the right choice, or devotion to a family member even when a cold calculating approach might dictate otherwise... holding contradictory positions is part of being human, and that's okay.

This does not mean that if a particular set of contradictory positions is held by a large number of people that we are forced to stop saying they are contradictory, or else we are being "unscientific" by ignoring the empirical data. That's just inane beyond all comprehension. Yes, absolutely, lots of people are both scientific and religious. This empirical claim is beyond a doubt. The philosophical claim that the two epistemologies are incompatible is a whole separate issue. Care to debate that one, accomodationists? Or do you find the strawman you've constructed too tempting?

¹After re-reading Rosenau's original post, I have decided that in one respect he was right on the money: Far too much of the accomodationism debate has centered around who picked the fight. Was it the accomodationists when Mooney et al started saying that Coyne et al were damaging the fight for science education? Or was it Coyne et al when they harshly criticized the NCSE for their stance on science/religion compatibility? I have an opinion about this, but on this point I think Rosenau is right: Who fucking cares. There have been so many shots fired at this point that it is irrelevant who started it. As a result, I regret having commented about that in my original post, and have struck it out.

²Yes, I realize that some people have made the claim that science cannot comment on the truth or falsity of individual claims of supernatural events in the distant past, because there is no way to repeat the experiment or observe it or what have you. Hogwash. By that some logic, science cannot comment on the truth or falsity of the claim that "the sun will rise tomorrow". Nobody has observed that, we can't perform the experiment right now... but I think it's clear that science can say that, in all likelihood, the sun will rise tomorrow, with such a degree of confidence to be essentially true. By the same token, science can properly assert that a virgin homo sapiens cannot become pregnant, with such a degree of confidence that the proposition is essentially false.

Religious leaders in Belfast object to "Don't label me" billboard

I guess this is no surprise. There is no atheist/humanist billboard innocuous enough that it won't draw protests. If an atheist organization put up a billboard that merely said, "Have a nice day!", I'm sure there would be all sorts of objections. "We don't need that in our community -- God decides what kind of day it is!"

Anyway, the final phase of the BHA's bus campaign, in which a billboard with a picture of a child simply reads, "Please Don't Label Me. Let Me Grow Up And Choose For Myself," surrounded by a bunch of possible "labels" that people might wrongly apply to a child ("Christian child", "Muslim child", "Mormon child", "Atheist child", etc.), is drawing fiery objections from religious leaders in Belfast. You'd think that asking people not to label their children would be uncontroversial, but I guess not.

Most of the objections miss the point -- "How dare you tell us how to raise our children!" -- but one which does take the point head-on also happens to be the most disturbing. From Sheikh Anwar Mady of the Belfast Islamic Centre:

We believe that every child is born as a Muslim. Religion is not given by the family, but it is a natural religion given by our God at birth. The role of the family is to teach the traditions of the faith. But that faith is implanted at birth.

So yeah, his contention is that every child ought to be labelled a "Muslim child". Egads.

Religion will eat itself

The BBC reports that "[a] leading Egyptian scholar has demanded that people caught importing a female virginity-faking device into the country should face the death penalty." (The device works by releasing some blood when the vagina is penetrated.)

So let me get this straight: Egyptian women are trying to obtain this absurd device so they can appear to conform to a ludicrous, oppressive, misogynist religious prohibition, and this fucktard "scholar" wants to issue yet another ludicrous, oppressive, misogynist religious prohibition to stop them from doing so?

What a world!

A Comforting thought about Islam

In his intro to Origin of the Species, Ray Comfort outlines his beef with Islam:

Interestingly, Islam acknowledges the reality of sin and Hell, and the justice of God, but the hope it offers is that sinners can escape God’s justice if they do religious works. God will see these, and because of them, hopefully He will show mercy—but they won’t know for sure. Each person’s works will be weighed on the Day of Judgment and it will then be decided who is saved and who is not—based on whether they followed Islam, were sincere in repentance, and performed enough righteous deeds to outweigh their bad ones.

In other words, Ray's main complaint about Islam is that it incentivizes people to be good -- unlike his twisted version of Christianity, in which "accepting Christ" (whatever the hell that means) is the only thing that matters.

Wow, good going Ray. You are actually convincing me that the religion of Osama might be somewhat less objectionable than yours.

LOLGODZ

My picture I cooked up for my post yesterday about the censoring of a book on the Danish cartoon controversy gave me an idea for a new twist on an old Internet meme: LOLGODZ.






What do you think? Too much?

Update: One more...

Breaking News: Terrorists Win

As reported by the NY Times, an upcoming book on the Danish cartoon controversy will not be allowed to actually depict the Danish cartoons. In addition, a number of other depictions of Mohammed -- ones that are widely available and previously uncontroversial -- will be removed from the book.

That's right: People are so afraid of these images that you can't even reprint them in a book about it.

Sigh.

Via richarddawkins.net.

Finally, a piece of Islamic oppression that I can support

I've been tough on Muslims and on Sharia law in particular, but I think Sudan might have an idea here. I mean, maybe it's a little sexist to say so, and maybe even it's an egregious human rights violation, but I have to admit it would be pretty cool if I

Is this the new face of Islam?

was surrounded by attractive women not wearing any pants.

Oh? What's that you say? I've got this all wrong? They actually wanted the women to wear below-ankle-length traditional dresses? D'oh...

To summarize, a group of women in Sudan were arrested earlier this month for wearing pants, because that's like "indecent attire" or something, and while most of the women took a very reasonable plea bargain that only involved them being fined and then brutally flogged ten times in a row, this one troublemaker had to go get a lawyer and stage a defense because she has some crazy ideas about pants being perfectly acceptable attire, and corporal punishment maybe being medieval and barbaric or something.

Nope.

The Sudanese authorities wanted to make this go away by finding an exemption for her -- she is a UN employee and therefore has immunity -- but this brave woman chose to resign from the UN so that the court case could continue, in the hopes of getting the law changed. She faces 40 lashes if convicted.

I'm not crazy about her comments about how she thinks this isn't consistent with Sharia law (who fucking cares? The whole premise behind Sharia law is absurd, so why not just throw the cancer out with the bathwater, so to speak?) but she is incredibly brave nonetheless and worthy of our respect.

Let's play "Guess the Intolerant Religion!"

Absolutely terrible story in the news right now... an 8-year-old girl in Arizona, the daughter of Liberian immigrants, was lured into a shed by a group of boys aged 9 to 14 and repeatedly raped. As if that weren't bad enough, her family decided that the girl had "shamed" them, and basically refused to do anything to take care of her in the aftermath of the rape, leading the girl being taken into custody by CPS.

Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the reason they feel like a rape victim brings shame in the family probably has to do with religion. I mean, I've never heard of secular humanist saying, "Since I abhor dogma and hold reason in the highest regard, I'm'a go honor-kill mah daughter!" However, none of the news reports say anything about the parents' religion, though, so I'm not sure which sickening delusion I should be criticizing today. What a quandary!

According to Wikipedia, Liberia has a plurality of Christians (40%), so playing the odds that would be most likely. They do have a non-trivial Muslim population (20%), and I gotta say, this type of shenanigans has the earmark of being inspired by the Religion of Peace... but who knows, it could just as easily be Christianity, or even an indigenous Liberian belief system (20%).

Now accepting bets!