Pat Condell censored by google/youtube for his video “Welcome to Saudi Britain” – he supported the petition against Sharia law in the UK with his video Welcome to Saudi Britain.
As a result of his usual brave and dignified stand in favour of freedom of speech his video has been removed.
He merely criticised the Saudi-based Islamisation of the UK. He did not incite violence nor hatred of Muslims.
The email I received from Pat said this:
patcondell has sent you a message on YouTube:
My video has been removed
Just got this from dhimmitube:
The following video(s) from your account have been disabled for violating the YouTube Community Guidelines:
•Welcome to Saudi Britain – (patcondell)
Your account has received one Community Guidelines warning sanction, which will expire in six months. Additional violations may result in the temporary disabling of your ability to post content to YouTube and/or the termination of your account.
Let’s do two things:
1. Continue to sign the petition to stop Sharia law gaining more ground in the UK
“WE THE UNDERSIGNED PETITION THE PRIME MINISTER TO STOP ISLAMIC SHARIA LAW BEING USED IN GREAT BRITAIN.”
2. Leave a comment below http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePXxVCOWEQM that demands Pat’s video Welcome to Saudi Britain be reinstated immediately – do this in honour of our greatest possession, freedom of speech, something that we will allow to slip a little more from our grasp if we do not do all we can to support Pat Condell in this instance.
I for one will cease to use Google as my search engine if YouTube (owned by Google) does not reinstate Pat’s video within the next 7 days.
Use your voice on this video to persuade YouTube to overturn this lamentable decision.
We do not live in Saudi Arabia. We do not adhere to Islamic rules about non-criticism of Islam. We are free to criticise Islam. If Pat Condell’s video is not reinstated, I will do all I can to peacefully but firmly fight YouTube and encourage as many people as possible to cease using their products for the foreseeable future.
If a voice as humorous and high profile as Pat Condell’s can be silenced when asking people to sign a legal petition, who’s going to hear our voices?
“Would she be so ready to describe as an act of courage a decision to publish a book denying the Holocaust, or advocating paedophilia, or race hate, or antisemitism, or violence against women? Probably not.”
Except for Holocaust denial, that’s the Quran and Hadith in a nutshell. Plus–for those who wish to invoke Christian Sensibilities–Mohamed’s denial of the resurrection, his assertion that the Virgin Mary was Moses’ sister, and the definition of the Trinity as God the father, God the son, and God the Mother!
I will applaud Random House for refusing to print any works so offensive as to endorse Islam.
I think that before accusing Karen Armstrong of prejudice, you should re read your own post. You will find yourself prejudiced against Islam. The Quran was not wriiten by MOhammed; he was illiterate and didnt know how to read and write. Secondly, jihad means struggle. In a famous hadith, Muhammad had said after returning from a compaign that ” We return from the smaller jihad to the greater jihad”, meaning the struggle against evil in your own self, to subdue yourself to the will of God.There are only five pillars of Islam as is evident from the well-authenticated ahadith in Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. These are Belief in one God and Muhammad as his final messenger, salat, fasting in the month of ramazan, paying alms to poor and pilgrimage to makkah one in life if a person can afford it. Nowhere does it mention jihad. And the prophet’s words hold more weight than that of any scholar.
Also, the 1400 year old history of Islam shows much tolerance towards jews. Do you forget that at the time of the Muslim invasion of Jerusalem, not a single inhabitant was killed. Caliph Umar allowed Jews to come back to Jerusalem from where the Christians had banished them. When the Christians invaded Jerusalem in 1099, 10,000 Jews were killed but when Saladin invaded it, not a single Jew or Christian died.Saladin’s personal physician was a Jew. Jews thrived in Muslim spain, but were hounded and persecuted in Christian Spain.
Islam is not inherently hostile to Jews and Christians. Some people cannot blemish the whole faith
Re: “Can we look forward to a ruling allowing women to enter mosques freely?@
Thank you, Jahahshah Rashidian, for all your insightful knowledge on Mahram and Non-Mahram – and for sharing it with us on B&W. I, personally, have learned so much from reading your excellent article.
I would also like to extend my thank-you to the one and only Gina Khan. What ever more can I say – except to keep those ever so brilliant articles of yours rolling in to B&W.
Jahahshah Rashidian’s piece on mahram and non-mahram in islamic cultures helped me to make more sense of the kind of gender apartheid common in those cultures. But underlying such mores is the even deeper-seated and probably ultimately biologically-based
phenomenon of male fear and jealousy, leading to the desire for utter control of women and women’s sexuality.
This appears to have reached neurotic proportions in these cultures. We can’t hope for improvement, until both women and men wake up to the true nature of the psychology underlying mahram/non-mahram, and reject these absurdities.
In response to Reiki “cannot do harm” – or can it?
By Christopher Moyer
We can not claim to know everything and have the cure to everything ever… There are a lot of things out there that we humans do not even know we do not know…
All we can do is use everything that is seemingly helpful to ease out the pain and sufferring of humankind…
Does that mean these methods will work all the time? Does anyone have complete knowledge of the past present and future to claim they know the answer to that question for sure?
Once we know and accept this fact we shall understand that the risks people take or decide not to take is what shapes their lives… There is no scientific method to question alternate healing methods… We simply do not have complete knowledge to know one way or another..
To use them or not to use them is a personal choice. No one can ask someone else to make a choice because it worked for someone else… No one should follow just because it worked for someone else…
Each one has to make his or her own decision… Only time will tell if worked for them or it didn’t…
“Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Health and Medicine, and Science and Technology Policy.”
In reply to article on reiki healing, i ask: “What if it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck? Indeed, it must be a duck! In a desperate effort to refute Hayden Roulston’s account of being healed from ARVD, Mr. Moyer says that HR’s doctors may have made a misdiagnosis, that HR may have spontaneously recovered from illness that doctors say is incurable, or that doctors may be wrong in finding that HR no longer suffers ARVD. What if these are doctors that give the “sound medical advice” that Moyer refers to?
I daresay, it’s better to accept reiki as the source for healing Roulston than to reject it outright because it can’t be pseudo-“scientifically proven.” To do otherwise is mindful of believing that the earth is flat and is at the center of the universe.
Almost a year after two teenage girls were found dead — allegedly executed by their father — in the back seat of a taxicab in Texas, the FBI is saying for the first time that the case may have been an “honor killing.”
Sarah Said, 17, and her sister Amina, 18, were killed on New Year’s Day, but for nine months authorities deflected questions about whether their father — the prime suspect and the subject of a nationwide manhunt — may have targeted them because of a perceived slight upon his honor.
The girls’ great-aunt, Gail Gartrell, says the girls’ father killed them both because he felt they disgraced the family by dating non-Muslims and acting too Western, and she called the girls’ murders an honor killing from the start.
But the FBI held off on calling it an honor killing until just recently, when it made Yaser Abdel Said the “featured fugitive” on its Web site.
‘john’ – I think you missed the point: there is little reason to think that Roulston has been cured at all. ‘Ominously, though, the most likely explanation of all is that Roulston still has ARVD, but that it has not interacted with his strenuous training and competition to kill him. Yet.’
Review of C S Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
On the one hand, a transcendent, personal, omniscient, omnipotent God must be held responsible not only for all the pain and misery in the world but also for the moral evil perpetrated by human beings. The Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim Gods are equally culpable. Monotheism is morally inferior even to the polytheisms of the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, etc.
On the other hand, I do not find atheism philosophically satisfying. I know that there are highly intelligent persons who find rest in the idea that life and mind have come out of matter (suitably defined). But to me, that life and feeling and understanding should have come out of lifeless and unintelligent stuff is puzzling. And while I share with agnosticism the conviction that we can never have cogent answers to ultimate metaphysical puzzles, I cannot be content with agnosticism as a final stance. I need a framework of ideas in which the reality of feeling, understanding, love, the sense of beauty is intelligible.
To my mind, the reality of all that we, human beings, hold most valuable is only intelligible if we see life and intelligence as features of the ultimate source and origin of all things. That is why, while I find much fault with all forms of theism, I also find fault with atheism when it is identified with materialism (however named or however defined). I would say with Spinoza that just as there is no mind that is not embodied so also there can be no body that is not infused with life and intelligence.
‘His polemical passages have a characteristically jokey tone, a “palpable delight” in setting up straw men and knocking them down, a “slightly superior air of dispelling nonsense and putting the embarrassed opposition to flight”‘.
A contemporary example of this approach is found in the writings and sermons of Nicky Gumbel, founder of the Alpha movement. There’s a good critique of Gumbel on Dawkins here: http://tinyurl.com/6zm7ww.
You haven’t really made clear what your ‘framework of ideas’ is.
You say ‘that life and feeling and understanding should have come out of lifeless and unintelligent stuff is puzzling’ but then go on to say that ‘we can never have cogent answers to ultimate metaphysical puzzles’.
At this point I would say, OK, so leave it at that then. Existence is puzzling, but, by your own admission, this puzzle cannot be solved, so there’s really nothing more to say on it.
But then you go on to say that ‘I need a framework of ideas in which the reality of feeling, understanding, love, the sense of beauty is intelligible’, despite having said we can have no ‘cogent answers’ to such issues.
You then assert that ‘the reality of all that we, human beings, hold most valuable is only intelligible if we see life and intelligence as features of the ultimate source and origin of all things’. Which seems to me to boil down to precisely nothing, other than a vague kind of pantheism or mysticism.
What you seem to be saying is that, in your own words, you have a ‘need’ to be ‘satisfied’. But, as with CS Lewis, you are assuming that this need *can* be satisfied; that there *is* some ‘ultimate reality’ to make sense of it all. At the same time, you haven’t provided any argument for there actually *being* an ‘ultimate meaning’ to life other than the assertion that you feel there ‘needs’ to be one, in order for things to be intelligible.
I see no ‘framework of ideas’ here at all, just wish fulfillment: ‘I want life to have meaning, so it does’.
I know it was foolish of me to try to sum up a complex philosophical position in a few lines. But here I go at it again.
The world and human life are mysteries that we will never fathom. But we human beings are constrained by our nature to try to make sense of things. Willy-nilly we live in ideal worlds of our own creation. The realist, the materialist, the atheist, all equally with the follower of dogmatic religion live in worlds of ideas.
All art, all poetry and all philosophy give us dream worlds to live in. What constitutes the difference between the follower of dogmatic superstition and the artist or the poet is that these latter know their dreams are of their own making. I know that my philosophy, my particular ‘framework of ideas’, is no better than that.
Perhaps if Mr Standing or any reader would care to have a look at my weblog (not a regular blog but a collection of essays actually), my nonsense may begin to sound like sense. My weblog is at: http://khashaba.blogspot.com
I have found Lewis’s argument by desire to be an incredibly powerful one.Reading John Beversluis’s mocking criticism of the idea made me feel almost embarrassed for him. If you have never experienced what Lewis has referred to as sehnsucht then say so, but don’t confuse adolescent desires with the kind of yearning Lewis spoke of. I am far from being a church going, God fearing man but from my earliest days of childhood I have been haunted by this longing or yearning for “Home” for want of a better word. I love my life and the people in it. I aam very happy to live a long life and enjoy the pleasures on offer. Nevertheless, I have had an overwhelming sense that I am journeying home. Two years ago, I decided to have the words “Iens Domus” tattoed on my arm. In English it means “Going Home”. A few months after having these words tattooed on my arm I was in a Bendigo bookshop when I came across a boo about C S Lewis. I read a chapter on this argument by desire, something I’d only heard bout but nver read or understood. As I sat in the bookshop I felt this man had read my deepest thought s and yearnings and written them down. I was electrified by his descriptions of this feeling which sits with me to this day.
I had many adolescent yearnings and desires and they had absolutely nothing to do with the desire Lewis refers to.He actually says that if you speak openly about this desire you will leave yourself open to mockery and people will be uncomfortable or embarrassed. They will tell you that you are confuding sentimentality or nostalgia with a desire for something beyond this world. This book proves his point. This desire was never consciously sought or pursued by me. It has been within me from childhood. I can’t explain it. It proves nothing. But the yearning is real and Lewis’s explanation for it made more sense than any I have heard.
Such horror before so called ingnorance of the majority is not quite justified. To understand the problem we must understand the mechanism of the culture first. Culture is the systematized information about the exchange opportunities (exchange rates of goods and services and procedures of conducting negotiations about excunges)any person can realize in this culture. And for a person belonging to some culture knowledge of the exchange rate of some good is as a rule of much more importance then his personal opinion of that good’s value. All persons belonging to some society or community take as a threat any attemp of somebody (outsider or insider) to change (devaluate) the values of the goods they consider as their assets. Etc… So they are interested in adherring to a prevailing superstision (by their experience) much more than to some abstract truth…
The article has unfortunately disseminated a number of half-truths and is quite inaccurate.
First, of all to categorise Usama bin Ladin as being a ‘Salafi’ is a gross misrepresentation. For Bin Ladin does not refer himself as being a ‘Salafi’ and is known for detesting the Salafi tradition. Also, well known Salafi scholars from Saudi Arabia, such as Imam Bin Baaz, gave fatwas regarding bin Ladin from as long ago as 1994! More on this can be seen here: http://www.salafimanhaj.com/pdf/SalafiManhaj_Saudi.pdf
Secondly, Gina Khan suggested in her article that “we need” to start listening to the likes of Ayan Hirsi Ali and Maryam Namazie. The former being a self-confessed immigration and known for her ipse-dixitisms, while the latter was member of the Communist Party of Iran! So these elements are neither trustworthy reference points nor credible individuals to speak on a vast and intricate subject such as ‘Shariah’.
Thirdly, Gina Khan ignorantly claimed that she had never ever seen “South Asian Muslims here carry the Qur’an and recite it in public areas”! Come on now! Where has she been for the last few years! She definitely doesn’t known East London and London in general! For I live in East London and I see this neraly every week by Muslims with origins as diverse as: Pakistanti, Bengali, Somali, Algerian etc. So either what was mentioned by Gina Khan is a blatant distortion or Khan is absolutely ignorant! To assert that only converts in some way a monopoly on actions which are seen as being sanctimonious shows of piety are in many instances misunderstood. Linked to this is the fact that programmes such as ‘Undercover Mosque’ – which has serious questions raised about its methods, filming, editing, cutting and pasting – was mentioned by Gina Khan, even though it is clear that mere quotes taken out of context, provide us nothing in terms of understanding the impact of such statements on those listening.
Fourthly, the story that Gina Khan mentioned about the mother Carol from Birmingham is interesting as is the so-called ‘Imam’ who opened an Islamic booksore on Slade Road in Erdington. We would like to known more details on this and thus I personally should like to see further evidence of that. It is sad that, presumably, this guy had a nervous breakdown, yet this is not the general pattern for all of the thousands of Salafi converts within the UK! So why Gina Khan referred to this anomalous example and totally neglected looking at the majority positive example is beyond me. Equally duplicitous is how Gina Khan uses this bad example as the general norm for Salafis, and this is absurd. For most of the Salafi converts have outstanding relationships with their families and community and Brixton in London is a good example of that. Refer example to this documentary about Salafis which was aired on national TV in 2005 about the Salafi community in Brixton Mosque, London: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=AWzm4o9ChhE&feature=related
Finally, it is utter folly for Gina Khan to suggest that the likes of apostate feminists, secularists or the discredited Quilliam Foundation are in someway sound voices for Muslims to take heed to for issues related to extremism and the likes. Not only does this indicate that Gina Khan is totally out of touch with the Muslim youth, but also demonstrates that Khan is distant from the Muslim community. Any action against extremism can only come from within the community whether we like it or not, and as for it coming from surrepticious ‘foundations’ looking for publicity stunts and book deals, then these are not serious players in the discussion of extremism and radicalisation. As a result, there has to be a serious assessment of these matters coupled with evidence-based study and research, sadly the article by Gina Khan has only indicated the dearth of knowledge that some writers have in regards to Salafism, the Muslim community in London and issues related to extremism and radicalisation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePXxVCOWEQM
Pat Condell censored by google/youtube for his video “Welcome to Saudi Britain” – he supported the petition against Sharia law in the UK with his video Welcome to Saudi Britain.
*~*~**~*~*~**~*~*~**~*~*~*
SIGN THE PETITION + ASK OTHERS
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/sharialawuk/
*~*~**~*~*~**~*~*~**~*~*~*
As a result of his usual brave and dignified stand in favour of freedom of speech his video has been removed.
He merely criticised the Saudi-based Islamisation of the UK. He did not incite violence nor hatred of Muslims.
The email I received from Pat said this:
patcondell has sent you a message on YouTube:
My video has been removed
Just got this from dhimmitube:
The following video(s) from your account have been disabled for violating the YouTube Community Guidelines:
•Welcome to Saudi Britain – (patcondell)
Your account has received one Community Guidelines warning sanction, which will expire in six months. Additional violations may result in the temporary disabling of your ability to post content to YouTube and/or the termination of your account.
Let’s do two things:
1. Continue to sign the petition to stop Sharia law gaining more ground in the UK
“WE THE UNDERSIGNED PETITION THE PRIME MINISTER TO STOP ISLAMIC SHARIA LAW BEING USED IN GREAT BRITAIN.”
Deadline 4th October 2008.
Link:
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/sharialawuk/
2. Leave a comment below http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePXxVCOWEQM that demands Pat’s video Welcome to Saudi Britain be reinstated immediately – do this in honour of our greatest possession, freedom of speech, something that we will allow to slip a little more from our grasp if we do not do all we can to support Pat Condell in this instance.
I for one will cease to use Google as my search engine if YouTube (owned by Google) does not reinstate Pat’s video within the next 7 days.
Use your voice on this video to persuade YouTube to overturn this lamentable decision.
We do not live in Saudi Arabia. We do not adhere to Islamic rules about non-criticism of Islam. We are free to criticise Islam. If Pat Condell’s video is not reinstated, I will do all I can to peacefully but firmly fight YouTube and encourage as many people as possible to cease using their products for the foreseeable future.
If a voice as humorous and high profile as Pat Condell’s can be silenced when asking people to sign a legal petition, who’s going to hear our voices?
Charlie Gere/Free Speech
Gere writes:
“Would she be so ready to describe as an act of courage a decision to publish a book denying the Holocaust, or advocating paedophilia, or race hate, or antisemitism, or violence against women? Probably not.”
Except for Holocaust denial, that’s the Quran and Hadith in a nutshell. Plus–for those who wish to invoke Christian Sensibilities–Mohamed’s denial of the resurrection, his assertion that the Virgin Mary was Moses’ sister, and the definition of the Trinity as God the father, God the son, and God the Mother!
I will applaud Random House for refusing to print any works so offensive as to endorse Islam.
I think that before accusing Karen Armstrong of prejudice, you should re read your own post. You will find yourself prejudiced against Islam. The Quran was not wriiten by MOhammed; he was illiterate and didnt know how to read and write. Secondly, jihad means struggle. In a famous hadith, Muhammad had said after returning from a compaign that ” We return from the smaller jihad to the greater jihad”, meaning the struggle against evil in your own self, to subdue yourself to the will of God.There are only five pillars of Islam as is evident from the well-authenticated ahadith in Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. These are Belief in one God and Muhammad as his final messenger, salat, fasting in the month of ramazan, paying alms to poor and pilgrimage to makkah one in life if a person can afford it. Nowhere does it mention jihad. And the prophet’s words hold more weight than that of any scholar.
Also, the 1400 year old history of Islam shows much tolerance towards jews. Do you forget that at the time of the Muslim invasion of Jerusalem, not a single inhabitant was killed. Caliph Umar allowed Jews to come back to Jerusalem from where the Christians had banished them. When the Christians invaded Jerusalem in 1099, 10,000 Jews were killed but when Saladin invaded it, not a single Jew or Christian died.Saladin’s personal physician was a Jew. Jews thrived in Muslim spain, but were hounded and persecuted in Christian Spain.
Islam is not inherently hostile to Jews and Christians. Some people cannot blemish the whole faith
Also, does the wri
Re: “Gender inequalities in Islam.”
Re: “Can we look forward to a ruling allowing women to enter mosques freely?@
Thank you, Jahahshah Rashidian, for all your insightful knowledge on Mahram and Non-Mahram – and for sharing it with us on B&W. I, personally, have learned so much from reading your excellent article.
I would also like to extend my thank-you to the one and only Gina Khan. What ever more can I say – except to keep those ever so brilliant articles of yours rolling in to B&W.
Jahahshah Rashidian’s piece on mahram and non-mahram in islamic cultures helped me to make more sense of the kind of gender apartheid common in those cultures. But underlying such mores is the even deeper-seated and probably ultimately biologically-based
phenomenon of male fear and jealousy, leading to the desire for utter control of women and women’s sexuality.
This appears to have reached neurotic proportions in these cultures. We can’t hope for improvement, until both women and men wake up to the true nature of the psychology underlying mahram/non-mahram, and reject these absurdities.
In response to Reiki “cannot do harm” – or can it?
By Christopher Moyer
We can not claim to know everything and have the cure to everything ever… There are a lot of things out there that we humans do not even know we do not know…
All we can do is use everything that is seemingly helpful to ease out the pain and sufferring of humankind…
Does that mean these methods will work all the time? Does anyone have complete knowledge of the past present and future to claim they know the answer to that question for sure?
Once we know and accept this fact we shall understand that the risks people take or decide not to take is what shapes their lives… There is no scientific method to question alternate healing methods… We simply do not have complete knowledge to know one way or another..
To use them or not to use them is a personal choice. No one can ask someone else to make a choice because it worked for someone else… No one should follow just because it worked for someone else…
Each one has to make his or her own decision… Only time will tell if worked for them or it didn’t…
What is the point of questioning the is?
“Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Health and Medicine, and Science and Technology Policy.”
Finally the US has a broad science lobby: http://www.sciencedebate2008.com
In reply to article on reiki healing, i ask: “What if it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck? Indeed, it must be a duck! In a desperate effort to refute Hayden Roulston’s account of being healed from ARVD, Mr. Moyer says that HR’s doctors may have made a misdiagnosis, that HR may have spontaneously recovered from illness that doctors say is incurable, or that doctors may be wrong in finding that HR no longer suffers ARVD. What if these are doctors that give the “sound medical advice” that Moyer refers to?
I daresay, it’s better to accept reiki as the source for healing Roulston than to reject it outright because it can’t be pseudo-“scientifically proven.” To do otherwise is mindful of believing that the earth is flat and is at the center of the universe.
eventually
Almost a year after two teenage girls were found dead — allegedly executed by their father — in the back seat of a taxicab in Texas, the FBI is saying for the first time that the case may have been an “honor killing.”
Sarah Said, 17, and her sister Amina, 18, were killed on New Year’s Day, but for nine months authorities deflected questions about whether their father — the prime suspect and the subject of a nationwide manhunt — may have targeted them because of a perceived slight upon his honor.
The girls’ great-aunt, Gail Gartrell, says the girls’ father killed them both because he felt they disgraced the family by dating non-Muslims and acting too Western, and she called the girls’ murders an honor killing from the start.
But the FBI held off on calling it an honor killing until just recently, when it made Yaser Abdel Said the “featured fugitive” on its Web site.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,437502,00.html
‘john’ – I think you missed the point: there is little reason to think that Roulston has been cured at all. ‘Ominously, though, the most likely explanation of all is that Roulston still has ARVD, but that it has not interacted with his strenuous training and competition to kill him. Yet.’
Review of C S Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
On the one hand, a transcendent, personal, omniscient, omnipotent God must be held responsible not only for all the pain and misery in the world but also for the moral evil perpetrated by human beings. The Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim Gods are equally culpable. Monotheism is morally inferior even to the polytheisms of the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, etc.
On the other hand, I do not find atheism philosophically satisfying. I know that there are highly intelligent persons who find rest in the idea that life and mind have come out of matter (suitably defined). But to me, that life and feeling and understanding should have come out of lifeless and unintelligent stuff is puzzling. And while I share with agnosticism the conviction that we can never have cogent answers to ultimate metaphysical puzzles, I cannot be content with agnosticism as a final stance. I need a framework of ideas in which the reality of feeling, understanding, love, the sense of beauty is intelligible.
To my mind, the reality of all that we, human beings, hold most valuable is only intelligible if we see life and intelligence as features of the ultimate source and origin of all things. That is why, while I find much fault with all forms of theism, I also find fault with atheism when it is identified with materialism (however named or however defined). I would say with Spinoza that just as there is no mind that is not embodied so also there can be no body that is not infused with life and intelligence.
D. R. Khashaba
http://khashaba.blogspot.com
‘His polemical passages have a characteristically jokey tone, a “palpable delight” in setting up straw men and knocking them down, a “slightly superior air of dispelling nonsense and putting the embarrassed opposition to flight”‘.
A contemporary example of this approach is found in the writings and sermons of Nicky Gumbel, founder of the Alpha movement. There’s a good critique of Gumbel on Dawkins here: http://tinyurl.com/6zm7ww.
D R Khashaba –
You haven’t really made clear what your ‘framework of ideas’ is.
You say ‘that life and feeling and understanding should have come out of lifeless and unintelligent stuff is puzzling’ but then go on to say that ‘we can never have cogent answers to ultimate metaphysical puzzles’.
At this point I would say, OK, so leave it at that then. Existence is puzzling, but, by your own admission, this puzzle cannot be solved, so there’s really nothing more to say on it.
But then you go on to say that ‘I need a framework of ideas in which the reality of feeling, understanding, love, the sense of beauty is intelligible’, despite having said we can have no ‘cogent answers’ to such issues.
You then assert that ‘the reality of all that we, human beings, hold most valuable is only intelligible if we see life and intelligence as features of the ultimate source and origin of all things’. Which seems to me to boil down to precisely nothing, other than a vague kind of pantheism or mysticism.
What you seem to be saying is that, in your own words, you have a ‘need’ to be ‘satisfied’. But, as with CS Lewis, you are assuming that this need *can* be satisfied; that there *is* some ‘ultimate reality’ to make sense of it all. At the same time, you haven’t provided any argument for there actually *being* an ‘ultimate meaning’ to life other than the assertion that you feel there ‘needs’ to be one, in order for things to be intelligible.
I see no ‘framework of ideas’ here at all, just wish fulfillment: ‘I want life to have meaning, so it does’.
I don’t find that very satisfying, I’m afraid.
I know it was foolish of me to try to sum up a complex philosophical position in a few lines. But here I go at it again.
The world and human life are mysteries that we will never fathom. But we human beings are constrained by our nature to try to make sense of things. Willy-nilly we live in ideal worlds of our own creation. The realist, the materialist, the atheist, all equally with the follower of dogmatic religion live in worlds of ideas.
All art, all poetry and all philosophy give us dream worlds to live in. What constitutes the difference between the follower of dogmatic superstition and the artist or the poet is that these latter know their dreams are of their own making. I know that my philosophy, my particular ‘framework of ideas’, is no better than that.
Perhaps if Mr Standing or any reader would care to have a look at my weblog (not a regular blog but a collection of essays actually), my nonsense may begin to sound like sense. My weblog is at: http://khashaba.blogspot.com
I have found Lewis’s argument by desire to be an incredibly powerful one.Reading John Beversluis’s mocking criticism of the idea made me feel almost embarrassed for him. If you have never experienced what Lewis has referred to as sehnsucht then say so, but don’t confuse adolescent desires with the kind of yearning Lewis spoke of. I am far from being a church going, God fearing man but from my earliest days of childhood I have been haunted by this longing or yearning for “Home” for want of a better word. I love my life and the people in it. I aam very happy to live a long life and enjoy the pleasures on offer. Nevertheless, I have had an overwhelming sense that I am journeying home. Two years ago, I decided to have the words “Iens Domus” tattoed on my arm. In English it means “Going Home”. A few months after having these words tattooed on my arm I was in a Bendigo bookshop when I came across a boo about C S Lewis. I read a chapter on this argument by desire, something I’d only heard bout but nver read or understood. As I sat in the bookshop I felt this man had read my deepest thought s and yearnings and written them down. I was electrified by his descriptions of this feeling which sits with me to this day.
I had many adolescent yearnings and desires and they had absolutely nothing to do with the desire Lewis refers to.He actually says that if you speak openly about this desire you will leave yourself open to mockery and people will be uncomfortable or embarrassed. They will tell you that you are confuding sentimentality or nostalgia with a desire for something beyond this world. This book proves his point. This desire was never consciously sought or pursued by me. It has been within me from childhood. I can’t explain it. It proves nothing. But the yearning is real and Lewis’s explanation for it made more sense than any I have heard.
Such horror before so called ingnorance of the majority is not quite justified. To understand the problem we must understand the mechanism of the culture first. Culture is the systematized information about the exchange opportunities (exchange rates of goods and services and procedures of conducting negotiations about excunges)any person can realize in this culture. And for a person belonging to some culture knowledge of the exchange rate of some good is as a rule of much more importance then his personal opinion of that good’s value. All persons belonging to some society or community take as a threat any attemp of somebody (outsider or insider) to change (devaluate) the values of the goods they consider as their assets. Etc… So they are interested in adherring to a prevailing superstision (by their experience) much more than to some abstract truth…
The article has unfortunately disseminated a number of half-truths and is quite inaccurate.
First, of all to categorise Usama bin Ladin as being a ‘Salafi’ is a gross misrepresentation. For Bin Ladin does not refer himself as being a ‘Salafi’ and is known for detesting the Salafi tradition. Also, well known Salafi scholars from Saudi Arabia, such as Imam Bin Baaz, gave fatwas regarding bin Ladin from as long ago as 1994! More on this can be seen here: http://www.salafimanhaj.com/pdf/SalafiManhaj_Saudi.pdf
Also see: http://www.salafimanhaj.com/pdf/SalafiManhaj_NYPD.pdf
Secondly, Gina Khan suggested in her article that “we need” to start listening to the likes of Ayan Hirsi Ali and Maryam Namazie. The former being a self-confessed immigration and known for her ipse-dixitisms, while the latter was member of the Communist Party of Iran! So these elements are neither trustworthy reference points nor credible individuals to speak on a vast and intricate subject such as ‘Shariah’.
Thirdly, Gina Khan ignorantly claimed that she had never ever seen “South Asian Muslims here carry the Qur’an and recite it in public areas”! Come on now! Where has she been for the last few years! She definitely doesn’t known East London and London in general! For I live in East London and I see this neraly every week by Muslims with origins as diverse as: Pakistanti, Bengali, Somali, Algerian etc. So either what was mentioned by Gina Khan is a blatant distortion or Khan is absolutely ignorant! To assert that only converts in some way a monopoly on actions which are seen as being sanctimonious shows of piety are in many instances misunderstood. Linked to this is the fact that programmes such as ‘Undercover Mosque’ – which has serious questions raised about its methods, filming, editing, cutting and pasting – was mentioned by Gina Khan, even though it is clear that mere quotes taken out of context, provide us nothing in terms of understanding the impact of such statements on those listening.
Fourthly, the story that Gina Khan mentioned about the mother Carol from Birmingham is interesting as is the so-called ‘Imam’ who opened an Islamic booksore on Slade Road in Erdington. We would like to known more details on this and thus I personally should like to see further evidence of that. It is sad that, presumably, this guy had a nervous breakdown, yet this is not the general pattern for all of the thousands of Salafi converts within the UK! So why Gina Khan referred to this anomalous example and totally neglected looking at the majority positive example is beyond me. Equally duplicitous is how Gina Khan uses this bad example as the general norm for Salafis, and this is absurd. For most of the Salafi converts have outstanding relationships with their families and community and Brixton in London is a good example of that. Refer example to this documentary about Salafis which was aired on national TV in 2005 about the Salafi community in Brixton Mosque, London: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=AWzm4o9ChhE&feature=related
Finally, it is utter folly for Gina Khan to suggest that the likes of apostate feminists, secularists or the discredited Quilliam Foundation are in someway sound voices for Muslims to take heed to for issues related to extremism and the likes. Not only does this indicate that Gina Khan is totally out of touch with the Muslim youth, but also demonstrates that Khan is distant from the Muslim community. Any action against extremism can only come from within the community whether we like it or not, and as for it coming from surrepticious ‘foundations’ looking for publicity stunts and book deals, then these are not serious players in the discussion of extremism and radicalisation. As a result, there has to be a serious assessment of these matters coupled with evidence-based study and research, sadly the article by Gina Khan has only indicated the dearth of knowledge that some writers have in regards to Salafism, the Muslim community in London and issues related to extremism and radicalisation.