Science Junkie-April 10, 2011
With characteristic wit and sarcasm, H.L. Mencken had this
comment on the prevailing social norm granting respect to religion:
“We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the
sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful
and his children smart.”
Like so many of Mencken’s cynical bon mots – and you’ll
thank me for this link – this one was the product of much careful thought. He barely concedes a
grudging, limited respect to religious faith and only for the implied,
pragmatic reason that it’s good to try to get along with others when discussing
emotion-laden subjects where argument is pointless.
It sounds like Mencken was advocating toleration rather than
respect. He certainly did not favor anything like genuine and sincere respect
for religion based on admiration, honor, or deference. He was, in fact, a
staunch atheist who often skewered creationism, fundamentalism, organized
religion, and theism.
I certainly agree with the notion that we should as a rule try
to refrain from expressing opinions that may cause offense or hurt others’
feelings. Keeping quiet about certain topics is generally the way to go in any
normal, mutually respectful society.
Ah, but there’s the rub: I hate to tell you we no longer live
in that kind of society (not that we ever did). These days we’re deep in the
throes of a destructive culture war that was started by ignorant, arrogant, and
aggressively intolerant people on the religious and political right. Given this
nasty, menacing reality, a more apt analogy for our times would sound more like
this:
Those other fellows on the religious and political right not
only believe that their wives
are beautiful and their children smart, but they openly complain that we and our wives and children are
ugly and dumb, and moreover we brought it on ourselves and we’re a threat to
all decent, respectable people. At least to my ear that’s how the Beckian
melodrama comes across from bigoted, repressive, right-wing religious and
political leaders and their media shills. (This time I won’t even discuss their
endemic hypocrisy.)
So Does Religion Deserve Respect?
In a word, no. And here I’ll begin to explain why. In this
country religion has a huge and, in my view, generally negative influence on
culture and politics and is undeserving of sincere and genuine respect.
However, in the interest of not offending more people than necessary, I want to
make a few important distinctions – call it a disclaimer, if you will:
First, I have lost interest in debating the existence of a god
or gods. I paid my dues long ago and made up my mind about supernatural
entities, and I have not encountered any arguments worth thinking about in a
very long time. So on that subject I’ll go along with Thomas Jefferson, who
famously said, “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are
twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” With so
many strongly held beliefs and shades of belief out there in the teeming
marketplace of U.S.culture, religious tolerance is essential to the maintenance
of a peaceful society. But it goes without saying that tolerance must be mutual, and in this country it’s not.
Second, I have no quarrel with moderate believers who uphold
Jefferson’s dictum regarding the absolute necessity of maintaining a strict
wall of separation between church and state. I just wish those moderate
religious folks could join us infidels in denouncing the menacing theocratic
trend in one of our two major political parties. Or one and a half, if you
count the loony Tea Party. (Just because they’re ignorant lunatics doesn’t mean
they won’t prevail. I’m starting to think almost anything is possible in this
crazy-quilt nation. Anything, that is, except rational, evidence-based
decision-making.)
Third, it distresses me that my conclusions about the religion
of Islam are at odds with the position taken by so many Western liberals, truly
progressive people whom I admire and consider to be comrades in the great
culture war raging across this country. I’m sorry, but contrary to disingenuous
Muslim propaganda and conventional progressive wisdom, Islam is not a religion
of peace whose reputation has been sullied by a minority of violent extremists.
In his book, The End of Faith,
Sam Harris provided five pages of quotations from the Qur’an that he called “a
litany of sacred hatred.” He added that those quotations were far from
exhaustive and far from the worst.
The bottom-line point of my lengthy disclaimer is simply this:
It would never occur to me to write a column like this if religion were a
benign matter of individual conscience accompanied by genuine tolerance across
the broad spectrum of belief and non belief. Believe me, I don’t want to be in this place. But the
problem is that a politically powerful religious faction – the religious
right – is trying to
break my leg. They are exploiting the social norm of respect for religion to
their own advantage while using their scary political power to undermine
virtually everything I value about this country. And in that matter I think I
speak for the great majority of progressives. We understand the corrosive
nature of the army of fanatics who place their Bible-based religious certainty
far above their respect for the laws and democratic traditions of this country.
Most believers – notably Muslims worldwide and their
fundagelical counterparts here on the religious right – think their
religions deserve special treatment. Call it a sacredness exemption – not
only from taxes and other legal requirements, but from any form of criticism. This immunity is lethally
enforced by law in Islamic nations; it is aided and abetted by discriminatory
customs, laws, and court decisions in the U.S. Christianity is unquestionably
privileged in this country in a great many ways that strain or violate the
First Amendment. But as I said, they put their version of “God’s word” above
their loyalty to the Constitution.
In the view of Muslim and Christian fundamentalists –
and Muslim is tantamount to fundamentalist – their faiths come directly
from the creator of the universe and deserve to be placed on a higher plane
than mere mundane considerations like reason, evidence, and constitutional law.
Their highest loyalty, under threat of everlasting punishment, is to their
version of the all-knowing and all-seeing creator-god as interpreted by their
chosen religious leaders. The perfect word of God (or Allah) as recorded in the
Bible (or the Qur’an) trumps everything. Given that mindset, they demand respect for their ridiculous superstitions, respect in the
sense of honor and deference. In Islamic countries this is enforced in the form
of harsh blasphemy laws that favor Islam and keep other religions in check. In
the U.S. Christianity is privileged by virtue of its majority status and
through prejudicial laws and court decisions. And it almost certainly will get
worse.
I’m running out of allotted words for this column, so I’ll
focus on Islam, which is depressingly in the news once again following the
murderous rampage that took place in what has been called one of the most
peaceful areas of Afghanistan. Why did enraged Muslim hordes overrun a United
Nations compound and murder guards and workers? Apparently those infantile
lunatics were frustrated because they couldn’t find Americans to murder, so
they went after anyone associated with the hated U.S.
And why the sudden spike in hatred? They learned via their
corrupt President Karzai that the infamous Reverend Terry Jones burned a copy
of the Qur’an in Gainesville Florida (which, FYI, was my home for nine years).
Islamic government and religious leaders are now calling for the arrest,
conviction, and punishment of Jones, never mind that he committed no crime,
that his act was protected free speech. And just as in the case of the infamous Danish cartoonists, I’m sure
that many influential Western liberals will focus their condemnation on Jones
while making excuses for the rampaging, murderous, Muslim religious idiots.
And what about those moderate American Muslims? Do they even exist?
Sam Harris gets to the nub of it when he asks if “moderate
Muslims” will defend Jones’s right to burn a Qur’an. And make no mistake about
it, that is the issue, an issue that has long been settled in the U.S. When I
say settled, I mean this: Jones, or any U.S. citizen, has the right to burn a
Qur’an. Or a bible. Or any other damn book they please. Jones is an asshole,
but that’s beside the point – it’s a free-speech issue. Free speech,
which is nothing less than the foundation of all our other freedoms.
Muslims could care less about free speech. As Harris points out, "A recent poll showed that
thirty-six percent of British Muslims (ages 16-24) believe that a person should
be killed for leaving the faith. Sixty-eight percent of British Muslims feel
that their neighbors who insult Islam should be arrested and prosecuted, and
seventy-eight percent think that the Danish cartoonists should have been
brought to justice. And these are British Muslims."
That’s right, British –
i.e., Western – Muslims! How do you think that poll would turn out in the
U.S.? Just where are all those moderate Muslims we keep
hearing about? What I’ve been hearing from Western Muslims sounds more like a
public-relations conspiracy to downplay the prominent, hate-filled themes that
appear throughout the Qur’an, themes that regularly become manifest in violence
and abuses of fundamental human rights around the world. And it is a conspiracy
that far too many Westerners are happy to promote.
Just last week, under strong diplomatic opposition from the
U.S. and other Western nations, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic
Conference (OIC) agreed to suspend its twelve-year campaign in the United
Nations that was aimed at criminalizing “defamation” of religion. For more than
a decade the OIC had consistently won majority approval in both the U.N. Council
on Human Rights and in the General Assembly for a series of resolutions
condemning defamation of religion. While those resolutions did not have the
force of law outside of Muslim countries, they were clearly intended as a step
in the direction of a worldwide ban on speech critical of religion.
So for now, anyway, the U.N. has restored a measure of sanity
in the form of an alternative resolution calling on member nations to protect
the individual human rights of believers. But the whole episode makes me wonder
why Islamic nations are even members of the U.N., considering that their
actions in their own countries and elsewhere routinely fail to comply with the
United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
Let me wrap this one up with two quotes, the first from Sam
Harris:
“There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The
position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be:
Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you.
Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it
ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we
peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers
and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your
journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend
the bulk of our energies criticizing you for ‘racism’ and ‘Islamophobia.’ “
And this from H.L. Mencken:
"Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told.
Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right."