Monthly Archive for September, 2011

Varieties of Irreligious Experience

Published on September 27, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Jonathan Rae, New Humanist

The idea of atheism has never been as clear as you might expect. Etymologically, it ought to refer to the idea that there is no such thing as God, or an attitude of indifference or defiance even if there is. In practice, however, it has usually been used by religious sectarians to hit out at anyone suspected of doctrinal deviancy, or – in one version of a message received by Moses – those who “go a-whoring after strange gods”. Socrates, for example, was denounced as atheos by his fellow Athenians, though they knew he was a believer in his way, and when he tried to defend himself he felt, according to Plato, as if he was “fighting with shadows.” When St Paul talked about “atheists” (“strangers … without God in the world”) he did not mean unbelievers, but traditionalists who had not heeded the gospel of Christ; and Christians got a dose of their own semantic medicine when they found themselves arraigned as “atheists” under the provisions of Roman law.

There is a parallel with anarchism – a term which, until its adoption by Pierre Proudhon in the 1840s, was always used to disparage rather than describe. Take the contrarian poet Percy Shelley: today he might well be classified as an anarchist, but he himself would have repudiated the description. Following the Peterloo massacre in 1819, he turned on Castlereagh and the British government – “I met Murder on the way, he had  a mask like Castlereagh” – but as far as he was concerned the root of political evil was anarchy: “anarchy … on a white horse … trampling to a mire of blood the adoring multitude.”

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The Paradoxes of the Re-Islamization of Muslim Societies

Published on September 16, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Olivier Roy, The Immanent Flame

This essay is one of nearly three dozen original contributions included in 10 Years After September 11, a digital collection launched today by the Social Science Research Council. In the days immediately following 9/11/01, the SSRC invited a wide range of leading social scientists to write short essays for an online forum. Ten years later, these same contributors have been asked to reflect on what has changed and what remains the same. The result is an extraordinary collection of new essays, with contributions from Rajeev Bhargava, Mary Kaldor, Barbara D. Metcalf, Saskia Sassen, Veena Das, Richard Falk, and many others.—ed.

The 9/11 debate was centered on a single issue: Islam. Osama Bin Laden was taken at his own words by the West: Al-Qaeda, even if its methods were supposedly not approved by most Muslims, was seen as the vanguard or at least a symptom of “Muslim wrath” against the West, fueled by the fate of the Palestinians and by Western encroachments in the Middle East; and if this wrath, which has pervaded the contemporary history of the Middle East, has been cast in Islamic terms, it is because Islam is allegedly the main, if not the only, reference that has shaped Muslim minds and societies since the Prophet. This vertical genealogy obscured all the transversal connections (the fact, for instance, that Al-Qaeda systematized a concept of terrorism that was first developed by the Western European ultra-left of the seventies or the fact that most Al-Qaeda terrorists do not come from traditional Muslim societies but are recruited from among global, uprooted youth, with a huge proportion of converts).

The consequence was that the struggle against terrorism was systematically associated with a religious perspective based on the theory of a clash of civilizations: Islam was at the core of Middle East politics, culture, and identity. This led to two possibilities: either acknowledge the “clash of civilizations” and head toward a global confrontation between the West and Islam or try to mend fences through a “dialogue of civilizations,” enhancing multiculturalism and religious pluralism. Both attitudes shared the same premises: Islam is both a religion and a culture and is at the core of the Arab identity. They differed on one essential point: for the “clashists,” there is no “moderate” Islam; for the “dialogists,” one should favor and support “moderate” Islam, with the recurring question, what is a good Muslim?

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Pushing the Right Beliefs, for the Wrong Reasons

Published on September 12, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Julia Galef, 3 Quarks Daily

For a crash course in the tactics of persuasion, you can’t do much better than religion. Religious rhetoric is thick with arguments that win people over despite being logically flawed. Just a few of the most common:

Appeals to authority: “Believe in God, because your parents and teachers tell you to.”
Appeals to consequences: “You should believe in God because without Him, people would be wicked.”
Anecdotal evidence: “I prayed for my mom who had cancer, and she recovered.”
Ad hominem: “People who don’t believe in God are wicked.”
Appeals to fear: “Believe in God, or you will suffer for eternity.”

Atheists, skeptics, and rationalists complain about arguments like these, and rightfully so. None of the above constitutes good evidence for the existence of a God. But there’s a reason religions use those appeals to authority, consequences, and fear — they work. The unfortunate truth is that people seem to be more susceptible to certain irrational arguments than they are to rational ones, which raises a troubling question for those of us who would like to combat false beliefs in society: Should we make the argument that constitutes the best evidence for the true claim, or the argument that’s most likely to persuade the person we’re talking to?

To be clear, I’m not talking about lying. I’m talking about making an argument which is true but which isn’t good evidence for the claim you’re trying to advance. So for example, let’s say I wanted to convince a Catholic of the truth of the theory of evolution. My first instinct might be to lay out the evidence for the theory, showing them examples of natural selection at work, pointing to examples of transitional fossils, and so on. If my goal is to change their belief, however, I’d probably be better off explaining that the Vatican’s position is that evolution is consistent with Catholic dogma. That appeal to authority is going to be more persuasive, for someone who already trusts the authority in question, than an appeal to the relevant evidence.

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Is There a Crisis of Secularism in Western Europe?

Published on September 9, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Tariq Modood, The Immanent Flame

Even quite sober academics speak of “a contemporary crisis of secularism,” claiming that “today, political secularisms are in crisis in almost every corner of the globe.” Olivier Roy, in an analysis focused on France, writes of “The Crisis of the Secular State,” and Rajeev Bhargava of the “crisis of secular states in Europe.” Yet this is quite a misleading view of what is happening in Western Europe.

Each country in Western Europe is a secular state and while each has its own distinctive take on what this means, there are, nevertheless, two main historical strands of secularism, a main and a lesser strand. The latter is principally manifested in French laïcité, which seeks to create a public space in which religion is virtually banished in the name of reason and emancipation, and religious organizations are monitored by the state through consultative national mechanisms. The main Western European approach, which I call moderate secularism, however, sees organized religion as a potential public good or national resource (not just a private benefit), which the state can in some circumstances advance—even through an “established” church. Its public benefits can be direct, such as a contribution to education and social care through autonomous church-based organizations funded by the taxpayer; or indirect, such as the production of attitudes that create economic hope or family stability, or that contribute to conceptions of national identity, cultural heritage, ethical voice, and national ceremonies.

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The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning, By Jonathan Sacks

Published on September 7, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

Rex Features Champion of religious variety: Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Reviewed by Ziauddin Sardar, The Independent

We need all of our brain to understand and appreciate the world around us. The left-brain, associated largely with scientific activity, and the right hemisphere concerned with religious matters, must work in unison. But they also have to be kept apart. The logic of one does not apply to the other. The challenge of our time is to keep the two separate but integrated and in balance. This, in essence, is the main message of The Great Partnership.

The learned and humane Jonathan Sacks normally speaks from within the Jewish tradition. But here he is much more inclusive, drawing from Judaism, Christianity and, he claims, Islam. He emphasises that the foundations of all three faiths rests on a personal God who created the universe in love and endowed all of us with the dignity of His image. His erudition is extensive. We are leisurely taken on a tour of sacred and poetic texts of Judaism and Christianity, as well as the thoughts of noted atheists and old-fashioned and postmodern philosophers.

Sacks is not interested in proving the existence of God. He engages in a conversation, “a sustained argument for the sake of heaven”, to demonstrate that it is quite possible for a rational person to hold religious beliefs. Writing in the tradition of 18th-century religious philosophers, such as William Paley, Sacks hopes to promote tolerance and civility. The real urgent conflict, he suggests, is not between different kinds of belief and non-belief, but between militant dogmas, and their champions, of all varieties.

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Anglicanism and Homosexuality

Published on September 2, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Faith, Belief, and Scripture: Anglicanism and Homosexuality by Rob James is now available as part of the Religion in Society series.

The Anglican Communion has been tearing itself apart over the issue of homosexuality since the Lambeth Conference in 1998 and rumblings of discontent stretch back years before that. Most Anglican debate on homosexuality focuses the argument on the Bible. Does the Bible allow homosexuality or not? This book begins by taking one step back from the argument. It looks at what it means to approach a text as scripture, from the standpoint of faith. It then examines why the Bible is used to claim such radically different positions and why those who argue for either position can legitimately claim to find their argument supported by reading the Bible. Anglicans (and others) who disagree about what their scriptures claim need to understand why there is a disagreement. It is only by stepping back from the argument and trying to understand why it exists hat any sort of resolution can ever be found.

Rob James began his studies of religion at the University of Kent at Canterbury, gaining a first class degree in 2001. He then studied Eastern Christianity at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London and then at Cambridge. He then returned to SOAS to write his PhD on modern African Christianity. Rob teaches undergraduates as a visiting lecturer at the University of Wales, Newport and is a member of the part-time tutor panel of Oxford University.