A pleasing fantasy.

[I]t would be a simple matter to send out for professional reinforcements, thus demonstrating to King Abdullah that, whatever the Prince of Wales may have told him in the dunes, our shared values do not, currently, feature male supremacy. Instead of Prince Charles fawning on the airstrip, one pictures, say, Sandi Toksvig, heading a welcoming party composed of adulterers, gays, Jews, Catholics, apostates, immodestly dressed women and a variety of other law-abiding sinners who would be dead, or at least severely incapacitated, if they lived in King Abdullah’s country. After inspecting a battalion of beautifully turned out slags (replacing the Welsh Guards), he and his companions would be driven – by women drivers of Filipina extraction – to a special performance of the Vagina Monologues, after which a female journalist (replacing John Simpson), would explore the extent of our shared values on behalf of the BBC.

Then some rather pointed questions.

From Prince Charles, with his history of woman trouble, one has come to expect this creepy respect for an absolute ruler with 30 wives. From Howells, who presumes, no doubt, to be a progressive politician, the reflexive, Foreign Office cringe is more disturbing. What if the more persecuted half of the Saudi population were black? Would he have talked about “shared values” in the days of Pik Botha? Is it because only half its population is oppressed that we share values with Saudi Arabia, but none with Burma?

Umm…yes. It’s democracy, you see. Women are only half the population and they’re oppressed in so many places – that it would be undemocratic to make an issue of it. Colonialist and undemocratic. Pik Botha different, Pik Botha bloody Boer, King Ab not a bloody Boer.

Of course Howells is not alone in considering the complete subjugation of Saudi women to be a kind of quirky, cultural difference, rather than an outrage…With the advance of young British veil wearers, proudly declaring their right to be invisible and their love of extreme modesty, this and many other forms of faith-related female subjugation have become complicated areas for liberal protest. If, as we’re often told, many British Muslim women love their jilbabs, how can we be sure Saudi women do not also rejoice in their coverings, accepting, in the same dutiful spirit, total exclusion from civic life and physical chastisement by their devout partners? How can we be sure their would-be liberators are not – like women who adorn themselves and women who cut their hair short – just a few more Women Who Will Go to Hell?

We can’t, so let’s talk about something else, shall we?

So as part of this here ‘Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week’ the very scholarly and thoughtful Ann Coulter spoke at USC.

“There’s always a conflict of interest when people who hate America are asked to lead it,” Coulter said about the Democrats’ midterm election victory…Organizers of the week, both at USC and across the country, said the goal of such speeches is to increase discourse on an issue of national importance.

By inviting Ann Coulter? She’s a (bad) stand-up comic; she doesn’t do discourse, she does silly trash-talk.

Though organizers praised Coulter for her brash personality and bold, attention-grabbing statements, some critics say these characteristics are a detriment to promoting thoughtful discourse on controversial issues…Some attendees said Coulter’s polemic remarks are appropriate for a political pundit. “She’s not a centrist,” Ceren said. “Her job is not to persuade; it is to speak to the faithful … Her job is to express a conservative viewpoint.”

Her ‘job’? She doesn’t have a job, at least not at USC she doesn’t. And what’s a political pundit? And what makes her one? She’s not a ‘pundit,’ she’s just an entertainer.

And a somewhat confused one.

Coulter, self-admittedly notorious for making controversial and offensive remarks,…addressed the threat of religious fundamentalism….Coulter has recently been in the press for comments on converting Jews to Christianity that many interpreted as anti-Semitic. Coulter told CNBC anchor Donny Deutsche that Jews need to be “perfected” by becoming Christian.

Well, that’s the threat of religious fundamentalism dealt with then.

On the one hand, it’s a very good thing that Cherie Booth QC is saying that culture and religion cannot be used as an excuse for discriminating against women. (Mind you, she could have waited for JS and me to write our book saying that and then used the opportunity to plug our book, but never mind.) On the other hand she says some absurd counter-factual things in the process.

The human rights lawyer, wife of former PM Tony Blair, said all the major world faiths shared “an insistence on the dignity of all God’s people”.

The hell they do. They share the opposite, that’s what they share. Yes, Christianity too – there are places where it decidedly fails to insist on the dignity of Jews or women. All the ‘holy books’ have passages commanding the smiting of those other people over there; none of them forbids slavery; all of them carve up the world into the good people who Believe and the bad people who don’t. If all the major world ‘faiths’ did share an insistence on the dignity of all God’s people, then why did the first genuine idea of human equality coincide with the Enlightenment? Why, not to put too fine a point on it, did it take so long? Why have all theocratic societies throughout history been so extremely hierarchical?

In a speech, she said discrimination on religious grounds was a “distortion” of the true message of some faiths.

No, it isn’t; it’s obedience of the literal, written-down message of all ‘faiths.’ It’s no good divining what the ‘true message’ is by matching it up to what you want it to be; it is what it is, and that doesn’t happen to be egalitarian or rights-based.

“It is not laid down in the Koran that women can be beaten by their husbands or that their evidence should be devalued, as it is in some Islamic courts,” she said.

Uh…yes it is. Has she been reading a prettied-up version? Is she just deluding herself?

II.282 “Call in two male witnesses from among you but if two men cannot be found, then one man & two women whom you judge fit to act as witnesses; so that if either of them commit an error the other will remember.” IV.34: “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. God is high, supreme.”

And then there’s Sharia.

“It is important for judges and political leaders to remind everyone that the philosophical purpose of the Sharia is to protect and promote human welfare.”

No it isn’t. It is important for judges and political leaders to remind everyone that Sharia is a nightmare and we want none of it.

Check this out.

In the past few years, the students and faculty of Columbia University have found themselves in the midst of a culture war. They’ve seen their Middle East Studies department targeted as “anti-Israel”…And at the start of this school year their own president, Lee Bollinger, seemed to pander to this right-wing pressure by slamming Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the name of “the modern civilized world.”

That’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s in The Nation, of all places. Apparently Esther Kaplan, who wrote a book called With God on Their Side: George Bush and the Christian Right, thinks that it’s ‘right-wing’ to be critical of Ahmadinejad. Because…what? Ahmadinejad is a lefty hero, another Che or perhaps Trotsky?

Maybe not, maybe it’s just that she thinks ‘slamming’ Ahmadinejad is part of the Cheney war-juggernaut. But if that is what she thinks, she could have said that; what she did say looks more as if she thinks only right-wingers are critical of Ahmadinejad.

This week they’ve got David Horowitz…His “Islamofascism Awareness Week” descended this week on dozens of college campuses across the country…At Wednesday night’s Oppression Panel, some eighty students and assorted gadflies had the chance to see a self-satisfied panel of Ibn Warraq (Why I Am Not a Muslim), Phyllis Chesler (The Death of Feminism; The New-Anti-Semitism) and the American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers (Who Stole Feminism?) apply Horowitz’s patented PC-bashing technique.

Self-satisfied yourself, Kaplan. I consider Ibn Warraq a friend, and self-satisfied is one of the last things I would call him. But wait – there’s more.

Thus we had Warraq telling us that it was Edward Said, by means of his book Orientalism, who “encouraged Islamic fundamentalism” by teaching “an entire generation the art of self-pity.”

And? That’s wrong because…? Don’t wait too long for an answer, because there isn’t one. Edward Said is an icon, and that’s all there is to it; he is Not To Be Criticized.

That these self-annointed opponents of Islamofascism claim to speak on behalf of women, gay people and Jews only deepens the Horowitzian irony.

Well here’s some irony for you – has Kaplan ever read a single word Ibn Warraq has written? She can’t have, or she wouldn’t sneer such an ineffable sneer at his speaking on behalf of women, gay people and Jews.

The Nation is often clueless (or worse) about this stuff. That’s unfortunate.

Okay what about dear Saudi Arabia with whom we share all these ‘values’? What about all these ‘values’ that we share? Which ones are those then? People are asking.

As Gordon Brown faced mounting criticism yesterday over the state visit of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the Foreign Office minister Kim Howells called for Britain and the Saudi monarchy to work more closely together on a basis of “shared values”…The statement by Mr Howells drew an angry reaction from the Labour backbenches. “I am astounded that a government minister can identify shared values with a regime that is world-renowned for its abuse of human rights and civil liberties,” said John McDonnell, the left-wing MP co-ordinating protests at the Saudi embassy tomorrow.

Well there’s always money. And monarchy. Will those do?

Perhaps not.

A dossier on executions, prolonged detention of peaceful critics without trial, and discrimination against women was issued yesterday by Amnesty International who said that it was “extremely concerned” at the extent and severity of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. This year, at least 124 people have been executed, the majority by beheading, said the group.

Well how about ‘faith’ then? That’s a shared value, surely.

Maybe not.

Material urging hatred of other religions can be found in mosques across Britain, most of it linked to Saudi Arabia, according to a new investigation…Researchers uncovered propaganda calling for homosexuals to be murdered, women to be subjugated and denouncing Jews and Christians as the enemies of Islam…Many publications urged British Muslims to segregate themselves from non-Muslims and for “unbelievers” to be regarded as second class. Most of the material is produced by agencies closely linked to the Saudi regime, according to the investigation. It included virulently anti-Semitic propaganda produced by the Saudi ministry of education. Some of the literature discovered espoused the creation of a separate state for Muslims, governed by sharia law.

McDonald’s? Starbucks? Oil? Sunshine? There must be something…

From Tea, in comments on ‘Contemplative wonder is doomed, doomed, I tell you’.

I went to the Baltimore aquarium last week, and I saw a most amazing species of fish (whose name I unfortunately don’t remember at all). It took me a while to actually see it: the tank looked like it contained nothing but water and some algae-covered rocks. An employee approached me and asked me if I can see the fish. “No”, I replied. “It’s right here”, he said, pointing his finger at a rock. “Where?” “Right here.” I just couldn’t see it – until I noticed that the rock blinked at me slightly with its big black eye. It was truly amazing – I still couldn’t tell where the rock ended and the fish began, its “skin” looked exactly like the algae leaves that surrounded it. I had to be dragged away from the tank after 15 minutes or so, but I still can’t stop thinking about it. Of course I’ve seen examples of mimicry many times before, but I was usually able to figure out which were the real plants, and which the animals pretending to be plants. But I’ve never seen anything quite like this before. AWEsome.

Now, if someone were to tell you that this fish was created by a guy with considerable talent in making sculptures that look exactly like rocks, that would be hardly awe-worthy, and there would certainly be little left to wonder about. You might be a little more amazed upon being told that this guy can also breathe life into such “sculptures”, but your amazement would vanish as soon as you’d learn that this guy also happens to be omnipotent. There’s nothing very wonder-inspiring about intelligent beings creating things they have always been able to create with ease.

However, learning that this incredible thing happened through the process of natural selection – now, that is truly amazing. That is the reason why I had to be dragged away – it just blows my mind that such stuff comes into being without an omnipotent guy creating them on a whim. Instead, it just slowly evolves from next-to-nothing, and that without any intelligence and omnipotence behind it – and yet, there you go: a fish that looks exactly like a rock. If you ask me, very few things are more awe-inspiring than that. I still can’t fully wrap my mind around it; I keep “wondering” about it. On the other hand, there’s no place left for wonderment when a guy who can create anything happens to create something.

I’m told by more than one witness that Mark Vernon is a nice guy (and I don’t doubt it) – but he does talk the most godawful crap.

Do you need to be religious to truly experience wonder at the world? This question lurks behind much of the ongoing debate about atheism. If everything can be explained by science, what is worthy of awe?

That’s a ridiculous question, and also a sinister one. It’s ridiculous because of its gormless assumption that explanation is for some reason inimical to awe. But why should it be? Think of the first atomic bomb, dropped in the desert at Alomogordo. The physicists and engineers watching knew how it worked, obviously; they could explain it; but they were certainly awed by it. The question is sinister because of its primitive fear of explanation. I don’t think the world is in need of people urging us to remain ignorant. Ignorance is easy, and there will always be plenty of it; I can command whole oceans of it myself; explanation is harder, and needs all the encouragement it can get.

For some atheists modern science can ask all questions worth asking and find answers: there are still mysteries in the world, but they are more like puzzles that can and one day will be explained by natural processes. The wonder that someone with such a belief might feel at these things could be said to be instrumental…This wonder is different in quality from contemplative wonder, which does not undo but lets be. It involves a conception of science that extends knowledge but admits its limits. Some things are beyond its comprehension and remain intrinsically mysterious. Consciousness, morality and existence itself are obvious candidates – the things that the artistic, religious and moral imagination are so well equipped to ponder.

Contemplative wonder does not ‘undo’ but lets be. Well, fine, Mark; if you want to contemplate, go ahead; but your desire to contemplate doesn’t necessarily translate t a general rule. And then, what do you mean ‘the artistic, religious and moral imagination are so well equipped to ponder’ morality and existence? That they’re all able to just sit down with slack jaw and stare? Maybe they are, but so what? Or do you mean (in contradiction to your ‘does not undo but lets be’) that they are well equipped to ponder such things to some purpose? If so, leaving aside your self-contradiction, I would love to know how they are well equipped to do that, and to what purpose. What can the ‘religious imagination’ tell us about morality or existence by way of its ponderings? I realize it can make up fictions and then dogmatically assert them and demand allegiance to them – but that doesn’t seem to be what you have in mind.

[Bacon] also knew that this magisterium of experiment did not overlap with the magisterium of religion, which “extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value”, in Stephen Jay Gould’s famous formulation.

Famous and profoundly mistaken. Religion has no genuine ‘magisterium’ because it doesn’t go about the work in the right way. Religious morality is command morality, derived from revelation and authority; it is fundamentally worthless.

It is when you deny the separate domains of these magisteria that you erode the capacity for contemplative wonder. When scientific knowledge is thought to be effectively without limit there is nothing much to stop contemplative wonder dissolving into instrumental wonder too. This must be what people sense when they fear that science is unweaving the rainbow. The worry is that it leaves nothing sacred.

And if it’s not what people sense when they fear that science is unweaving the rainbow, you’ll do your best to talk them into fearing it. Not a good or wise thing to do.

Jean has an eloquent comment on the subject.

Haleh Esfandiari and Robert S. Litwak point out some ironies of Ahmadinejad’s visit.

While in New York, President Ahmadinejad, at a dinner arranged by the Iranian Mission to the United Nations, met with American scholars who work on U.S.-Iranian relations and with representatives of nongovernmental organizations. Yet the Iranian president failed to explain why he was inviting comments from this group even as his government was curtailing the activities of Iranian NGO’s and preventing their members from attending workshops outside Iran. The Ahmadinejad government’s broad crackdown on Iran’s civil society, described by some observers as a cultural revolution, has essentially criminalized the activities of academics, journalists, and activists for women’s rights and human rights.

And labor unions, I believe; in other words all the engines of reform and improvement. And, very unfortunately, all such groups (except probably unions, which is perhaps why they weren’t mentioned) are suspected of entanglement with Bush administration plans for regime change via ‘velvet’ revolution – which makes international support very tricky. I’ve mentioned before that I worried about this to Maryam Namazie when she interviewed me for her radio programme last year. It’s a terrible (though unsurprising) situation when international solidarity risks compromising people.

Polly Toynbee went to the abortion rights meeting. ‘Some of us had to pinch ourselves, time-warped back to old 1967 arguments against women’s same old enemies.’

Joining the Catholics and evangelicals, that pathetic weather-vane windbag, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has now dithered his way into the debate…His contribution was yet another intellectual contortion to mollify his church’s woman-hating, gay-bashing, Daily Mail wing…Women’s bodies are always the issue – too unclean to be bishops, and dangerous enough to be covered up by Islam and mikvahed by Judaism. All the Abrahamic faiths find the key to morality in keeping women and their fertility under control. So it will be that 26 male bishops in the Lords will help decide on this law.

Naturally. Maleness and faithyness join up to tell women what to do, as they always have. Women don’t belong to themselves, they belong to the fetus, the family, the husband, the father, the community, the god, the clerics; anyone and everyone except themselves.

Hitchens says why it’s valid to compare fascist and jihadist ideology even though ‘it’s quite the done thing, in liberal academic circles, to sneer at any comparison between fascist and jihadist ideology.’

Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. (“Death to the intellect! Long live death!” as Gen. Francisco Franco’s sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined “humiliations” and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression – especially to the repression of any sexual “deviance”—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

He left out the fact that both are obsessed with purity, which is important, because that obsession is probably foundational to some of the other obsessions, and to the overall strenuosity and humourlessness of both.

He points out that there are also differences; but the commonalities are decidedly worth paying attention to.

Dang, I’m always falling behind in my saint-memorization. I don’t know who the saints are. I don’t even know who all those crazy saints all over California are! I haven’t got a clue. Saint Rose – who? Saint Clement? Saint Diego? Saint Joe? Saint fucking Barbara? I don’t know these people! I’ve heard of Saint Francis, I can deal with that all right, but all these other ones – I suspect some map-makers just took them out of the Oakland phone book one day. And I’d never heard of Padre Pio – I’m happy to say. Padre Pio, indeed; the very name makes the toes curl. Yuk.

And for good reason, it turns out; the guy flounced around the place saying he had ‘stigmata’ when he only had them because he kept dumping carbolic acid on his hands. And for that they made him a saint? Well jeez – I have this fingernail that I squashed in a car door when I was ten and it’s had a slight flaw in it ever since – can I be a saint? I’m bad-tempered and slothful and occasionally violent, but can I be a saint anyway?

Oh never mind, I wouldn’t want to dress properly for it. But Padre Pio did, and now this book has spilled the beans about the carbolic. (Maybe he didn’t really dump it on his hands. Maybe he needed it just to give his comb a really good cleaning.) The Catholic Anti-Defamation League isn’t taking it lying down though – it’s saying the writer is ‘spreading anti-Catholic libels,’ the bastard.

Pietro Siffi, the president of the League, said: “We would like to remind Mr Luzzatto that according to Catholic doctrine, canonisation carries with it papal infallibility.”

Well quite! Canonisation carries with it papal infallibility, and therefore, if any evidence turns up later that the saint actually wasn’t all that saintly, well, it’s too late, because the papal infallibility works at the sub-atomic level, you see, to transform the saint retroactively into an infallibly saintly…person. So the evidence is beside the point, because the infallibility, like, trumps it. The infallibility is like an ace and the evidence is just like maybe a seven. ‘We would like to suggest to Mr Luzzatto that he dedicates his energies to studying religion properly’ – so that he would know stuff like that.

Oh look, Theocracy in America.

A collection of major Religious Right groups is seeking to flex some muscle this weekend, screening Republican presidential hopefuls and demanding they show fealty to the fundamentalist political agenda. The so-called “Values Voter Summit” in Washington, D.C., is sponsored by the Family Research Council Action, Focus on the Family Action, the Alliance Defense Fund, American Family Association Action and Gary Bauer’s American Values group. Every major GOP presidential hopeful is slated to appear. “This may be the biggest collection of theocrats in one room since the Salem Witch Trials,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “Their goal is simple: to consolidate their power within the GOP and elect a president who is in their pocket. They want to ramp up their efforts to run everyone else’s lives according to a narrow and rather hateful definition of Christianity.”

Well if they can’t run everyone else’s lives, where’s the fun in belonging to one of those crapulous outfits? Who would want to hang out with the Family Focus on Family American Values Defense Action Focus Action Group if there were no opportunity to tell other people what to do? What else are they going to be doing? Having interesting conversations? Boogying? Drinking and telling jokes? Humping? Seems unlikely! No – the only fun those people know of is the fun of Coercion and Regimentation, with a little Exhortation and Excoriation thrown in. Poor bastards.

We had a good time (I did anyway) with Roger Scruton’s review of Anthony Grayling’s new book, so now let’s have a different but related kind of good time with another look at Anthony Grayling’s review of John Gray’s latest book. I flagged it up here last month but it’s so relevant to the Scruton review that I feel like flagging it up again.

Now let us ask whether secular Enlightenment values of pluralism, democracy, the rule of independently and impartially administered law, freedom of thought, enquiry and expression, and liberty of the individual conform to the model of a monolithic ideology such as Catholicism, Islam or Stalinism. Let us further ask how Gray imagines that these values are direct inheritances from Christianity – the Christianity of the Inquisition, which burned to death any who sought to assert just such values. Indeed, the history of the modern European and Europe-derived world is precisely the history of liberation from the hegemony of Christianity. I shall be so bold as to refer the reader to the case for this claim in my forthcoming full-length discussion of it, Towards the Light.

The very book Scruton tried so hard to patronize the other day.

As to the weary old canard about the 20th-century totalitarianisms: it astonishes me how those who should know better can fail to see them as quintessentially counter-Enlightenment projects…They were counter-Enlightenment projects because they rejected the idea of pluralism and its concomitant liberties of thought and the person, and in the time-honoured unEnlightened way forcibly demanded submission to a monolithic ideal…Most of what was achieved in the history of the West from the 16th century onwards – most notably science and the realisation of the values listed above – was wrested from the bitter reactionary grip of religion inch by painful and frequently bloody inch. How can Gray so far ignore this bald fact of history as to make the modern secular West the inheritor of the ideals and aspirations of what it fought so hard to free itself from (and is still bedevilled by)?

Having a book contract probably helps with the ignoring.

I don’t think this is quite right. I think it misses the mark.

I’d like to say his heart is in the right place, unlike the current crop of atheist propagandists, but the trouble is that, as with many Episcopalians, it is more mind than heart…I have no use for anti-Darwinian campaigners, but I do have a lot of respect for popular skepticism. The people do not trust those who present themselves as elite…[R]ead any of the self-indulgent, virulent atheists in circulation today – Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens being just two. Contrary to their professed intentions, such writers buttress the faithful; their loathsome arrogance shields evangelical churches from doubt. That part of the American population that believes God made man in His own image has a heartfelt contempt for know-it-alls. I am inclined to say, God bless the people, even when they get it wrong.

Harris and Hitchens being just two; two out of perhaps five; but Ian Hacking (for it is he), like so many people, gives the impression that there is a crowd. It’s all too familiar – first poison the well by mentioning ‘atheist propagandists’ and saying their hearts are not in the right place, then imply that there are hordes of them, then call them self-indulgent and virulent, then refer to their loathsome arrogance and imply that they are know-it-alls. Well – who is the propagandist here?

But more precisely – does the theist part of the American population really have a heartfelt contempt for know-it-alls? I would say it doesn’t. Why? Because believing ‘God made man in His own image’ tends to correlate with voting for Bush, and what is Bush if not a know-it-all? And the worst kind of know-it-all at that, the kind who in fact doesn’t know anything. I’m not making a joke here, I’m flat serious. I think there’s something badly skewed about calling a tiny handful of atheist academics know-it-alls while flattering fans of the most blatantly arrogant and self-indulgent know-it-all in the country, if not the world. Bush is orders of magnitude more arrogant and know-it-all than any of them or all of them put together, because he has the arrogance to think he knows enough to do the job he went after. So – why is Ian Hacking enraged at the ‘loathsome arrogance’ of five atheist writers but apparently approving of the people who think Bush is adequate? If theists really had a heartfelt contempt for know-it-alls, how could they possibly vote for such a glaring example of one? (Surely Hacking isn’t fooled by the ridiculous folksy airs and syllable-dropping (‘I kspect Merkans to…’) into thinking Bush really isn’t a know-it-all? Surely he can’t be so silly as to confuse pseudopopulist fakery with genuine humility?) I really wonder. I find it odd.

This is not necessarily to say that the atheists in question are not arrogant, but it is to ask if they are more arrogant than, say, know-nothing fundamentalist preachers. I don’t think they are. Fundamentalist preachers pretend to know things that they can’t possibly know, while atheists merely point out that they can’t know what they pretend to know. The two are not equivalent.

This is appalling.

Sabrina Rahim doesn’t practice any particular faith, but she had no problem signing a letter declaring that because of her deeply held religious beliefs, her 4-year-old son should be exempt from the vaccinations required to enter preschool. She is among a small but growing number of parents around the country who are claiming religious exemptions to avoid vaccinating their children.

And by doing so, to put countless other children and adults at risk – a small but growing number of parents who feel entitled to endanger other people for no good reason.

[P]ublic health officials say it takes only a few people to cause an outbreak that can put large numbers of lives at risk. “When you choose not to get a vaccine, you’re not just making a choice for yourself, you’re making a choice for the person sitting next to you,” said Dr. Lance Rodewald, director of the CDC’s Immunization Services Division. All states have some requirement that youngsters be immunized against such childhood diseases as measles, mumps, chickenpox, diphtheria and whooping cough. Twenty-eight states, including Florida, Massachusetts and New York, allow parents to opt out for medical or religious reasons only. Twenty other states, among them California, Pennsylvania, Texas and Ohio, also allow parents to cite personal or philosophical reasons.

I didn’t know that. I’m staggered. There’s a public health law, intended to prevent the spread of infectious disease, and twenty-eight states allow people to refuse for religious reasons? Forty-eight of the fifty states give exemptions for religious or ‘philosophical’ reasons? Well you might as well just give blanket exemptions ‘if you don’t want to’ – and say the hell with public health.

Unvaccinated children can spread diseases to others who have not gotten their shots or those for whom vaccinations provided less-than-complete protection. In 1991, a religious group in Philadelphia that chose not to immunize its children touched off an outbreak of measles that claimed at least eight lives and sickened more than 700 people, mostly children. And in 2005, an Indiana girl who had not been immunized picked up the measles virus at an orphanage in Romania and unknowingly brought it back to a church group. Within a month, the number of people infected had grown to 31 in what health officials said was the nation’s worst outbreak of the disease in a decade.

One of God’s little jokes, was it?

And while we’re on the subject of strange readings and stranger arguments, Mark Vernon offers some more of those.

I have sometimes wondered why no enterprising journalist, as far as I know, hasn’t had a dig around in Richard Dawkins’ past in order to find the cause of his revolt against religion. But perhaps there is no need. It is all there in The God Delusion. A little analysis draws attention to three psychoanalytically significant things that stand out in the book. The first, that one can be certain God does not exist. With science, Dawkins has killed him. This, of course, is for Freud an Oedipal slaying of the God/Father.

Except that Dawkins not only doesn’t say ‘that one can be certain God does not exist,’ he says that one can’t. He says that explicitly and at some length. So…what is psychoanalytically significant about Mark Vernon’s misreading, I wonder? No actually I don’t wonder, because I don’t think it is psychoanalytically significant. I think it’s intellectually and as it were politically significant – as yet another example, among a great many, of people – including, bafflingly, atheists – who misread Dawkins in much the same way. Who keep endlessly recycling the same mistakes no matter how many times Dawkins disavows them and quotes what he actually did say in the book.

[I]n the preface Dawkins begins with a reference to his wife (the quote is ‘As a child…’ which is to say that, like the Mother, she is innocent of any actions of the God/Father)…This excessive exercise (twice) in objective assurance (‘a reader other than myself’) from an innocent, consolatory female (his wife) is the maternal figure, and completes the picture in Dawkins’ religio-psychic drama.

That’s a creepily condescending and profoundly silly misreading of the reference to Lalla Ward. That ‘As a child’ is not at all to say that like the Mother etc etc – Vernon makes it sound as if it’s an echo of First Corinthians 13, but it’s just a factual declaration. The full sentence is ‘As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave.’ The anecdote is about the fact that she was miserable, her parents never knew, they later asked her why she never told them, she said “But I didn’t know I could.”‘ It’s got nothing to do with evoking innocence or ‘the Mother’ – on the contrary, it’s more to do with the general human condition of helplessness under authority. The ‘I didn’t know I could’ is the key point, and that’s not the point Vernon is giggling over.

And that’s what’s so supremely annoying about this kind of critic – their perpetual refusal to engage with the actual book and its actual arguments, and their insistence on engaging with invented issues of their own manufacture.

There’s an irony there, if they could only see it. The more people churn out silly straw-grasping inaccurate irrelevant retorts, the worse they make their ’cause’ look. They keep adding to the stack of evidence that they simply can’t think properly, or even read carefully. Is that what they want to convey? I wouldn’t think so.

The analysis? Dawkins’ atheism is grounded in a psychological murder of the God/Father…For Dawkins, the Oedipal counter-current manifests itself not in hearing divine voices but in an unquestioning commitment to a new paternal figure/institution, namely modern science (note the element of trust in science that is necessary to make this commitment, since science alone does not disprove God/murder the Father, only makes God’s existence/Father’s survival improbable). Science is Dawkin’s adoptive Father figure now that he has done away with the old one.

Uh huh. Sure. Now let’s ask about the analysis of this goofy exercise of Vernon’s. Let’s note the irony – of the heavy weather he makes of ‘trust’ in science, while at the same time and apparently without noticing it, he trusts the pseudoscience of Freudian psychoanalysis. He patronizes Dawkins for ‘unquestioning’ commitment to a new paternal figure, Daddy Science, while himself trusting unquestioningly in that discredited fraud Daddy Sigmund. Anybody out there got time to do a Jungian analysis of Mark Vernon?

Roger Scruton, with an eyebrow (if not two, or six) lifted in amused skepticism, reads Anthony Grayling. Oh these funny little people who prefer mental freedom to the other thing – how droll they are, but in the end how tarsome.

While treating us to some agreeable ventures in the history of ideas, he recycles the Victorian notion that the West has progressed from oppressive superstition to enlightened liberty.

Dear me, does he really, how very old hat. (But then if we think progress from this to that is a silly idea, why does it matter that it’s old hat? Well because my dear you know ‘Victorian’ – they never got any sex, so it always pays to throw them in by way of eyebrow-raising.) How could anyone think that we had progressed from oppressive superstition to enlightened liberty? Because there used to be laws requiring church attendance? Because atheism got the death penalty? Because of the Inquisition? Because of witchcraft trials? Pffff – nonsense. Simply because we’ve left all that behind, is no reason to think we’ve gained any enlightened liberty. It’s Victorian to think we have. Prudish, sentimental, and above all girly.

Grayling’s scholarly account…makes up for his one-dimensional view of Western history, in which the Good forces of liberty, secularism, democracy, equality and enlightenment are locked in “struggle” (how I hate that word!) with the Bad forces of religion, authority, hierarchy, inequality and darkness. Grayling is surely right to believe that people aspire to freedom and light; but he cannot see, from his ivory tower, that they also need obedience and shadows.

Oh do they. Obedience to what, exactly, on whose terms, for what reasons, in pursuit of what ends, according to what criteria? He doesn’t say. He doesn’t even say why people need obedience. Check out Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the joy of escaping obedience, and then ask yourself what on earth Scruton has in mind.

Grayling sees all liberal ideas as summed up in a single moral imperative, which is the defence of “human rights”. His hostility to Christianity causes him to ignore the church’s defence of natural law, from which the idea of human rights derives. The rights defended in secular terms by John Locke were spelled out more thoroughly by Thomas Aquinas, who is given only fleeting credit. For Grayling, the political influence of the medieval church is symbolised not by Aquinas but by the Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada. Why not say, rather, that, while Torquemada disgraced the Dominican Order, Aquinas redeemed it? Aquinas stands to Torquemada roughly as Condorcet stands to Robespierre.

Allow me to quote a comment by Ronald Lindsay, Director of Research and Legal Affairs of the Washington D.C. Center for Inquiry.

For its shameless intellectual dishonesty, this assertion must rank among Scruton’s 10 best distortions. Leaving aside the point that, with the possible exception of Jacques Derrida, Aquinas is the most overrated “philosopher” in the West (and Derrida had better hair), Aquinas expressly endorsed what Torquemada carried out. In the Summa Theologica, Tommy argues that it is imperative that heretics be killed as quickly as they are convicted. ST II-II, Q. 11.

Condorcet, of course, opposed Robespierre. Aquinas would have applauded Torquemada.

That’s probably why not say that while Torquemada disgraced the Dominican Order, Aquinas redeemed it: because he didn’t.

Grayling concludes his book with an extended warning against the way in which the hard-won liberties of the subject are being eroded in Britain and America. He makes a strong point with good-natured grace. But…The right to hunt – on which the way of life of my neighbourhood depends – was recently taken away by a dictatorial House of Commons.

The right to hunt. The right to preserve foxes so that they can be hunted under the pretext that they prey on chickens – that right. Nothing Victorian there – that’s pure Regency. Butch, dressy, exhibitionist, and expensive. Darling Prinny, how we do miss him.

The headline gets it wrong: ‘Amis launches scathing response to accusations of Islamophobia.’ No he doesn’t, he doesn’t mention the word, and neither does Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the piece Martin Amis is responding to. Both of them talk more sensibly and precisely. Alibhai-Brown says ‘the Muslim-baiters and haters’ and Amis says ‘anti-Muslim measures.’ But no, we mustn’t use language in such a finicky careful way, we must use it sloppily, so that people will keep on getting the idea that dislike of Islam is exactly the same thing as mindlessly impartial hatred of Muslims. We must do it twice in the space of two sentences: ‘Martin Amis defended himself yesterday against allegations of Islamophobia.’ We must do our stupid little bit to make criticism of Islam more difficult and socially suspect.

Eagleton doesn’t seem to have gained a lot of fans though – that’s something. Philip Hensher seems to find him pretty thoroughly meritless.

We could be cruel, and point out that Marxists of Professor Eagleton’s stamp have to justify their existence in a way they didn’t when, for instance, I used to attend his lectures at Oxford in the early 1980s. Let us resist the temptation. We should probably treat them with the same respect and mild curiosity that we should of a man who still worshipped at the shrine of Woden.

But Richard Lea is still worried. He thinks Amis is not off the hook yet.

The novelist went on to “declare that ‘harassing the Muslim community in Britain’ would be neither moral nor efficacious”, but made no apology for making remarks describing an “urge” that the Muslim community should “suffer”, nor any attempt to respond to wider concerns over his views concerning Islamism

That final phrase is interesting. Wider concerns over his views concerning Islamism (oy, where was his editor? concerns concering? please) – what concerns would those be? What views concerning Islamism is Martin Amis supposed to have? What are the right-on okay acceptable views concerning Islamism? That it’s maybe a little brutal around the edges but you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs? That it’s not to everyone’s taste but then revolutions aren’t for the genteel? What? What views is it possible to have about Islamism other than fear and loathing?

The ‘Militant atheists are wrong’ mould has turned out another cookie.

In the last few years, so many books have rolled off the presses challenging God, belief and religion itself (by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger and Christopher Hitchens, among others) that a visitor from another planet might think America was in the iron throes of priestly repression.

Yes – four or five books, maybe even six or seven if you count Stenger and Onfray. Gee wow. Compared to how many books celebrating God, belief and religion itself? Any guesses as to the number? Something tells me it’s more than six, or even seven.

If anything, you could imagine these assaults on religion becoming infamous in the Muslim world, confirming for fundamentalists that the West is every bit as godless – and hostile to Islam — as they thought.

Ah well now that’s a compelling argument. The Islamists will think we’re godless, so shut up.

Voltaire and his colleagues attacked the dominant values of their day, at great risk to themselves. By almost comical contrast, the new anti-religionists are safely needling the dominant liberal culture’s favorite bete noire.

Meaning what? You’re not supposed to attack (or, more accurately, argue against) something unless doing so puts you at risk? That’s a strange (and demanding) criterion.

But they make me concerned nevertheless, because I think they strike a blow against something more important (at least to me) than belief in God. In their contempt for any belief that cannot be scientifically or empirically proved, the anti-God books are attacking our inborn capacity to create value and meaning for ourselves.

No they’re not. They are not contemptuous of ‘any belief that cannot be scientifically or empirically proved’; that is a grossly stupid misunderstanding – an endlessly recycled one, but that doesn’t make it any better.

When our anti-religionists attack the mechanism of religious faith by demanding that our beliefs be underpinned by science, statistics and cold logic, they are, in effect, attacking our right to believe in unseen, unprovable things at all. Their assault on religious faith amounts to an attack on the human imagination.

No, it doesn’t, because they are not demanding proof, and because ‘God’ is not just any old ‘unseen thing.’

The leap of faith is really a very ordinary operation. We take it every time we fall in love, expect kindness from someone, impulsively sacrifice some little piece of our self-interest. After all, you cannot prove the existence of truth, beauty, goodness and decency; you cannot prove the dignity of being human, or your obligation to treat people as ends and not just as means.

Yes, yes, yes. But (again) ‘proof’ is not the issue, and God is not the same kind of thing as ‘truth, beauty, goodness and decency.’ Some theists like to claim it is when they’re cornered, but the rest of the time it’s a spiritual person who answers prayers.

For that reason, when you lay scientific, logical and empirical siege to the leap of faith at the core of the religious impulse, you are not just attacking faith in God. You are attacking the act of faith itself, faith in anything that can’t be proved. But it just so happens that the qualities that make life rich, joyful and humane cannot be proved.

And Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and the rest are not disputing the qualities that make life rich, joyful and humane, much less demanding that they be ‘proved.’

But then – I’d forgotten this, but a reader reminded me: Lee Siegel is the infamous sock puppet, ‘sprezzatura’ – the one who posted on The New Republic’s blog saying how brilliant and wonderful Lee Siegel is. TNR suspended him for awhile, then let him come back. Acute embarrassment; exile; return; then before long, back to writing fatuous dreck, without a blush in sight. Not one of the great minds of the century, perhaps.

The same silly trope was deployed in a debate with Dawkins just the other day. They don’t get tired of it, do they.

Some of the exchanges were funny, as when Mr. Lennox suggested that his opponent believed that his wife loved him even though it’s not scientifically provable.

Oh very droll, very fresh, very original. Sparkling as the dew on the grass.

Wish I’d been there. Norm was there – perhaps I could have sat with him and we could have elbowed each other at exciting moments.

The motion ‘We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values’ was proposed by the author Ibn Warraq. He contrasted the West’s openness and flexibility with the ossified ‘closed book’ culture of Islam. ‘Easterners flock to collect their degrees from Oxbridge, Harvard and the Sorbonne,’ he said. Traffic in the other direction is minimal. Rejecting the ‘mind-numbing certainties’ of Islam in favour of the ‘liberating doubt’ of Bertrand Russell, he asked us if Islam would tolerate an equivalent of The Life of Brian.

I wish the values had been called liberal rather than Western, because 1) that is what was meant 2) they are universalizable rather than parochial and they are not unknown outside the West 3) ‘the West’ hasn’t always lived by liberal values, as people of course lost no time in pointing out 4) the point is surely not hemispheric loyalty but merit and 5) the very idea of prancing around asserting the superiority of Western values makes me feel like a prize turkey. But, all the same, the hemispheric aspect is not completely irrelevant, as Ibn Warraq’s comment above highlights.

[Tariq Ramadan] surprised us with a list of Islamic mediaeval thinkers who had espoused the cause of free debate. We struggled to recognise their names. And that was the point. Western history is too blinkered and exclusive to admit the tradition of liberal Islam.

Yes but with all due respect, what’s that got to do with now? Not much. Taner Edis talks about this – the irrelevant defensive resort to past glories:

Today, it’s something of an impediment for the Muslim world to continually look back to the glories of the past and keep saying that the Islamic world used to be a world leader in science. This tends to obscure some very important differences between modern science and medieval thinking. They did some very interesting things in medicine and optics. But all of this was mixed in with astrology and alchemy and what today we would consider dead ends.

Ibn Warraq (whom I am proud to call a friend) rounded things off with a flourish.

The winning majority howled with pleasure when Ibn Warraq summed up the debate: ‘I don’t want to live in a society where I get stoned for committing adultery. I want to live in a society where I get stoned. And then commit adultery.’

David Thompson has more. Douglas Murray asks how a ‘dialogue’ might begin:

Where does [the dialogue] start? Would it start, for instance, with making a joke? Contra Mr Khomeini – not a funny man. Or, would it start with an article, perhaps? Would it start, perhaps, with a film? It did, a few years ago, with Submission, and Theo van Gogh was killed. Could it start with making a joke, perhaps? A joke in a cartoon? Well, apparently not, because we know there were burnings and killings and lootings and rioting across the globe in reaction to those cartoons. If you’re going to start a dialogue, what could you do that would be smaller than drawing a cartoon? This dialogue which we keep on being offered is not [reciprocal].

Smaller than drawing a cartoon…hmm…conversion, perhaps? Would that do?