1. Long live satire

Comment #24410 by mantel on March 6, 2007 at 1:18 pm

I am new here, but have been visiting this site and reading comments since reading The God Delusion just bfore Yule. I think it is a great book, particularly concerning the evidence for God and morality, and it has been both amusing and frustrating to see all the negative reviews and comments unable to tackle the arguments. Having long been somewhere between agnostic and atheist, it nudged a bit further towards atheism. The book is also quite good when it comes to morality when pointing out immoral passages in the Bible, asking how believers actually separate the good passages from he bad. These are water-tight arguments which no negative commentors have successfully addressed (the latter they have even avoided to mention. For obvious reasons, I might add, you needn't think hard to realize it completely undermines the widespread belief in "no faith, no morality".)

The reason I dislike religion because it causes people to act immorally when they base their ethics om pleasing a higher power rather than being good to the people around you, following humanistic values and human rights. (Obvious examples include how you treat homosexuals, women, etc.) Of course, I am also annoyed at the extraordinary ability believers have to ignore basic facts about the world, ignoring evidence in favor of a supernatural world for which there is no evidence, and the negative consequences this has for humanities quest for true knowledge.

The book does have some weaknesses, though. How religion has evolved is one question that deserves a more thorough (and less biased) discussion than there is room for in TGD. There is also the matter of what role religion plays in society and politics, a matter that is also handled too briefly. Psychology, even evolutionary psychology, sociology and political sciences aren't exact sciences, and can't be handled in the same ease as the other arguments.

Dawkins refer to the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland as an example for religion being negative. This conflict has other dimensions as well, political, social, ethnic, historical. What role does religion play among these other factors? It is a question with a highly complicated answer. What role does religion play in other human conflicts compared to other factors? Again, not easy to answer.

Which brings me to Islam. Western commentators on the left, who are often atheists, seem to have a more negative view of Islam than of Christianity. Why is that? Being a leftist when it comes to international politics myself, I thought I try and comment upon this. I may not be correct, I would like thoughtful comments on this.

Islam, of course, is not favorably view by many in the West these days. September 11, suicide bombers, the Mohammad cartoon issue have, of course, helped shape this view. Islamic radicalism is increasing. But we should ask ourselves how to battle this, and to do that we need to know the context. Historically, Islamic civilization has been a more tolerant society to Christian civilization. When Europe persecuted and Jews and Muslems, Islam let them live inside their borders, although of course not with the same status as Muslems when it came to taxation and political and legal positions. Jews were forbidden in Spain before and after the Muslem rule there, and the Jews in Jerusalem were much more tolerated when the city was under Muslem rule than during the part of teh Crusades when Christians were in control. Europe eventually become more tolerant than Islam, due to the Reformation (which made it necessary to tolerate both Protestants and Catholics in order to not have constant warfare) and the Enlightenment and secularization. (Which, of course, shows how rationality and secularization is good for a society's tolerance). Islam didn't have this development, even thoug Jews were still more welcome in the Arab world than in the European. This however, changed during the 20th century, especially after WW2. Europe's bad conscience changed the perceptions of Jews for the better there, Israel's brutal occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian land and suppression of the Palestinian people changed the perceptions of Jews for the worse there.

All this shows that there is nothing in the Christian religion that makes it inherently morally better than Islam, but developments, particularly humanistic developments, have made the Christian civilization morally (in my opinion) better, and that is one of the reason the fight for rationality is so important.

But how to fight Islmic radicalism? A criticism of religion just doesn't suffice. The Islamic civilization is under the impression that they are besieged and oppressed by the west. And, of course, they do have a point. The Israeli occupation of Palestine, abhorable as it is, murder of civilians that far exceeds Palestian attacks on Israel, gains a support from the west that no other country which behaved in the same way would have got. (Much of the legitimacy of Israel's human rights abuses, and the west supporting it, is based in Jewish and Christian relgion, by the way, one other reason religion is bad). The west has supported many authoritative regimes, Saddam's Iraq in the 80s, Saudi-Arabia today; as well as doing warfare not to help the people there, but for control and resources. The shah's dictatorship in Iran is one example, it was a western-backed (and made) secular dictatorship in which women wearing hijabs were beat up by the police because it was forbidden. The brutality led to the Islamic coup in 1979. Afgahnistan, of course, was under siege by the Sovjet Union. Egypt, Lebanon, other Gulf States of course are under western influence. And, of course, let's not forget the Iraq war, and neither should we forget that after Palestinians recently had democratic elections (which the west had been crying about for years), the Palestians were condemned to poverty due to economic sanctions from the west because they elected the wrong party, Hamas, instead of the corrupt Fatah. Israel still got massive aids, despite continued documented human rights abuses.

So, of course, this is a civilization that feels itself being under siege. In such conditions, religious radicalism is sure to rise. Islamists are the ones offering security, fighting back. What is western values worth when the west wants democracy, yet starves when you go through with it? That promises freedom but supports oppressive regimes and goes to war killing tens of thousands innocents? Of course, this will make people not trust these values.

Isreal and the west are by far the stronger parts in this conflict. The Arab and Islam civilization is the weakest, in terms of relative power and in terms of loss of innocent lives. What is rightly perceived as suppression has to stop, for two reasons: One is that it is immoral, it hurts a lot of people. The other is that it will be the first step of a long way against the Islamic religion, to help the homosexual Palestinian, the Iranian woman. But getting there is a long way, and criticism of the Islamic religion coming from the West today will, obviously, be viewed as coming from an immoral (due to all the suffering it has caused in the Middle East) civilization. To preach a moral and rational superiority, we also have to show it.

This is why the fight against Islamic radicalism must be fought very differently than against the Christianity, which has been and often still is in power, or Jedeaism, which certainly now has the upper hand and exploits that position brutally. (Of course, radical Islam would do the same if they were in the same position, which is another reason it should be fought.) Islamic criticism should come from within Islamic countries. If it is to come from the west, it should be very clear to all that it isn't seen as another aspect of negative western interference. But it is, and as long as the West's Middle East and Israel policies remain as they are, it will continue to be seen this way.