What Is It Like To Be A Theist?

For those who like this kind of thing ─ I confess to a mild and occasional weakness for it myself ─ here is atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel (What Is It Like To Be A BatThe View From Nowhere) reviewing a book by theist Alvin Plantinga, not altogether unsympathetically.  Sample:

The interest of this book, especially for secular readers, is its presentation from the inside of the point of view of a philosophically subtle and scientifically informed theist — an outlook with which many of them will not be familiar. Plantinga writes clearly and accessibly, and sometimes acidly — in response to aggressive critics of religion like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. His comprehensive stand is a valuable contribution to this debate.

I say this as someone who cannot imagine believing what he believes. But even those who cannot accept the theist alternative should admit that Plantinga’s criticisms of naturalism are directed at the deepest problem with that view — how it can account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves, capable of discovering those laws and understanding the universe that they govern. Defenders of naturalism have not ignored this problem, but I believe that so far, even with the aid of evolutionary theory, they have not proposed a credible solution. Perhaps theism and materialist naturalism are not the only alternatives.

Best sentence:

My instinctively atheistic perspective implies that if I ever found myself flooded with the conviction that what the Nicene Creed says is true, the most likely explanation would be that I was losing my mind, not that I was being granted the gift of faith.

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

First Amendment Watch

Cross-posted in the Corner:

Writing in USA Today, Anthea Butler, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, reveals that she hasn’t quite got to grips with this whole First Amendment thing:

[W] hy did I tweet that Bacile should be in jail? The “free speech” in Bacile’s film is not about expressing a personal opinion about Islam. It denigrates the religion by depicting the faith’s founder in several ludicrous and historically inaccurate scenes to incite and inflame viewers.

Completely wrong. The film is ludicrous, quite remarkably so, but if it does one thing it makes Bacile’s personal opinion of Islam all too obvious.

And then there’s this:

While the First Amendment right to free expression is important, it is also important to remember that other countries and cultures do not have to understand or respect our right.

The heckler’s veto. Endorsed.

Good to know that ideas of American freedom are alive and well at the University of Pennsylvania.

Posted in Religion | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Re: ‘Free Speech is Free Speech is Free Speech’

Cross-posted on the Corner:

Reason’s Jesse Walker adds a quick footnote to Matt Welch’s earlier comments:

A quick footnote to Matt’s excellent post about the Cairo embassy’s comments on “religious incitement”: In addition to being wrongheaded, these little announcements are self-defeating. When you issue such statements, you encourage the view that the government is somehow responsible for the speech you’re condemning. Even if you succeed in calming the crowds — and to judge from what happened yesterday, you shouldn’t expect to achieve even that much — any fringe film that you haven’t anathematized can become the next cause célèbre. And if you think you can keep pumping out statements attacking every one of them, ponder what will happen if a mob decides to riot over the comments of a congressman, or someone else that a diplomat wouldn’t want to officially denounce. Better to embrace free speech from the beginning than to lend support to the idea that your job requires you to sort acceptable expression from bad.

Quite.

As Mark notes:

The mob of “Islamic rage boys” gets mad about all kinds of stuff — cartoons, dogs, teddy bears. You can never make a long enough list to satisfy them. So you might as well tell them you’re not going to start.

On the other hand, here’s Karzai:

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday condemned an American-made film that mocks Islam, galvanizing fears among Westerners that the Afghan leader’s denunciation could be read as a go-ahead to stage violent protests. The presidential palace said in a statement that Karzai “strongly and resolutely denounces this desecrating act” and expressed “abhorrence in the face of such an insult.”

… A condemnation from Karzai was thought to have inflamed passions in the spring of 2010, after Jones and his followers staged a Koran-burning. Nearly two weeks elapsed without any reaction in Afghanistan, until Karzai issued a call for Jones’ arrest and prosecution. The next day, April 1, a furious mob descended on the U.N. mission in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, killing seven foreign U.N. workers.

Karzai’s public stance toward the NATO force and his U.S. patrons has been somewhat hostile of late. He issued a strident statement accusing the United States of disregarding Afghan sovereignty after American authorities retained some Taliban and other insurgent suspects when handing the country’s main military detention facility over to Afghan control. And the Afghan leader commemorated Tuesday’s anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by criticizing the West’s conduct of the war in Afghanistan.

And in so doing Karzai insults those who serve and have served in (and, in no small way, for) his country, and desecrates the memory of those who have been killed while doing so.

Posted in Religion | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

‘Free Speech Is Free Speech Is Free Speech’

Cross-posted on the Corner:

Back at the time of the Mohammed cartoon troubles, an article published in the embattled Jyllands-Posten included this phrase: “Ytringsfrihed er ytringsfrihed er ytringsfrihed. Der er intet men.” The translation? “Free speech is free speech is free speech. There is no but.”

The appalling attacks in Benghazi and Cairo only underline the importance of repeating that point again and again and again.

Over at Reason, Matt Welch explains:

My government has no business giving a whirl about “hurt[ing] the religious beliefs of others” (a standard both elastic and asymmetrical, virtually begging for a heckler’s veto) . . . The fact is that the First Amendment, no matter how embattled, protects a range of expression unthinkable even in Western Europe. Because of that unique position, and because the U.S. seems doomed to play an outsized diplomatic and military role in the tumultuous Muslim world, it behooves the State Department to constantly explain the vast differences between state-sanctioned and legally protected speech in the so-called Land of the Free. If the U.S. government really was in the business of “firmly reject[ing]” private free-speech acts that “hurt the religious beliefs of others” there would be no time left over for doing anything else.

It’s really not that hard. The values in that film (or “film”) are not our values; our government respects religion, religious expression, and religious pluralism (including and especially that of Muslims, even in the wake of murderous Muslim-led attacks on American soil); and we are not in the business of approving or (for the most part) regulating the private speech of our citizens. To the extent that that message is not sufficient for rioters, the problem is theirs.

Some liberal Tweeters this morning are pointing out that, hey, the Bush administration condemned the Mohammed cartoons, too!, but this mostly goes to illustrate how bipartisan cravenness can be. We know that this issue will keep coming up; maybe it’s about time the American government, and the rest of us, develop a more American response.

Amen.

Posted in Religion | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on ‘Free Speech Is Free Speech Is Free Speech’

Relentless Ruffians, Fell Attorneys, And . . .

Reading Susan Jacoby’s long grumble about the dearth of women in the “secularist movement” (why does it have to be a movement?) my eye was caught by this:

Atheists to this day are constantly accused of being shrill, but in a sexist atmosphere shrill seems shriller when it’s a woman who is speaking.  As a Massachusetts newspaper wrote in the 1850s of Ernestine Rose, an immigrant from Poland who is another overlooked female figure in the history of American atheism, “We know of no object more deserving of contempt, loathing, and abhorrence than a female atheist. We hold the vilest strumpet from the stews to be by comparison respectable.”

Dr. Johnson got there first, in his description of 1730s London:

Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire,
And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,
And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;
Here falling houses thunder on your head,
And here a female atheist talks you dead.

Johnson’s imitations of Juvenal are well worth the trouble.  Here (and here, and here) is another one.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Barbarism

The New York Times reports:

DAKAR, Senegal — Radical Islamists who control northern Mali extended their campaign of enforcing harsh Shariah law on Monday, amputating the hands and feet of four young men they accused of robbery in the main square at Gao, a principal town in the region.

“We cut their right hand and their left foot, in the city of Gao, at the Place de l’Indépendance,” Aliou Mahamar Touré, a professed Islamic commissioner with Mujao, an offshoot of Al Qaeda that controls Gao, said in a telephone interview. “We cut all that today. It is not us who ordered this. It is God.”

…In Gao, the real jihadists took their four young victims to the town center at midday Monday, according to a municipal counselor who saw the amputations, Abderahmane Oumarou Maïga. They tied them to pillars, “feet at the top, heads at the bottom,” Mr. Maïga said, “solidly attached.”

For “each one, they cut off their hand and foot,” said Mr. Maïga, using what he called “giant scissors,” which had been specially fabricated, under duress, by a local blacksmith. “It was under threats that they did their dirty work,” Mr. Maïga said.

Revolting.

Posted in Religion | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Having Eyes, See Ye Not?

Cardinal Dolan, absurd:

“The threats to our “first and most cherished freedom” are abundant, but let me list just two. One comes from those called secularists, who will tolerate religion as long as it’s just considered some eccentric private hobby for superstitious, unenlightened folks, limited to an hour on the Sabbath, with no claim to any voice in the public square.”

Notwithstanding the efforts of fanatics like that sad bunch of atheists opposed to the 9/11 cross, this is nonsense. America’s “public square” is filled with religious voices. That’s fine. That’s good. And to claim that it is under threat is ludicrous.

The rest of Dolan’s speech is worth a serious look. This passage caught my attention:

“Government has no business interfering in the internal life of the soul, conscience, or church.”

Putting to one side the fact that the Roman Catholic Church has been active in trying to persuade government to adopt positions that give profound offense to the beliefs of quite a few (restrictions on assisted suicide might be one example, the church’s support for the ‘right’ to universal healthcare another), the idea that the church is somehow immune from laws that applies to everyone else can, if taken beyond a reasonable understanding of the First Amendment, be a proposition somewhat difficult to reconcile with e pluribus unum,

There is a fine line between defending religious freedom and supporting the creation of religious privilege. I wonder if Cardinal Dolan recognizes that it exists.

Posted in Church & State | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Having Eyes, See Ye Not?

Cretins

Via The Blaze:

Atheist activists have a knack for picking riveting, infuriating and seemingly never-ending battles. During the Christmas season, they aim for nativities on public property and at the end of every school year, their targets set on commencement prayers.

While these battles have become all-too-familiar, there’s one showdown brewing that distinguishes itself from the rest — atheists’ demands that a cross found in the rubble following the September 11, 2001 attacks not be included in a museum that is being planned to commemorate the lives lost during the tragedy.

American Atheists (AA), a group working to advance the secular cause, has been leading the charge against the Ground Zero cross since July 2011, when the organization first filed suit against it. TheBlaze’s Meredith Jessup has explored this issue, in detail, on TheBlaze Blog, where she explained AA’s main arguments against the cross’ inclusion.

“The atheists’ suit claims that by including the cross in a museum on public property, the government is unconstitutionally endorsing a religion,” Jessup writes. “It also asserts that the mere presence of the cross would result in emotional — and possibly even physical — injuries among atheists who will feel anxious and excluded.”

Get a life and all that.

Cretins.

Posted in Church & State | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Humiliated in Cairo

As, on 9/11, an Egyptian mob storm the US Embassy on 9/11 in Cairo “offended” by a film about Islam made in America, America’s diplomats cringe and kowtow, and jettison the principle of free speech in favor of religious privilege:

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.

Good Grief.

Back at the time of the Danish cartoon saga, an article published in the embattled Jyllands-Posten included this phrase : “Ytringsfrihed er ytringsfrihed er ytringsfrihed. Der er intet men.” The translation? “Free speech is free speech is free speech. There is no but.”

No there is not.

But don’t tell the US Embassy in Cairo.

What a disgrace,

Posted in Religion | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Untold Story

Cross-posted on the Corner:

Today of all days, it is disheartening to read this:

A screening of a controversial documentary on the history of Islam has been cancelled on security advice after its presenter was threatened. Historian Tom Holland’s Channel 4 film Islam: The Untold Story sparked more than 1,000 complaints when it was broadcast. Holland was threatened online with a torrent of abusive messages on Twitter. A Channel 4 spokeswoman said: “Having taken security advice, we have reluctantly cancelled a planned screening of the programme Islam: The Untold Story. We remain extremely proud of the film which is still available to view on 4oD.”

The private screening was due to take place at the broadcaster’s London headquarters on Thursday before an audience of historians and “opinion formers”.

The documentary is due to be repeated late on Thursday night and can be viewed online. It examined claims that rather than Islam’s doctrine emerging fully-formed in a single text, the religion instead developed gradually over many years with the expansion of Arabic empires.

Holland, the writer of best-sellers Rubicon and Persian Fire, said that Islam is “a legitimate subject of historical inquiry”.

The Islamic Education and Research Academy (IERA) accused him of making “baseless assumptions” and engaging in “selective scholarship”. Iranian state media suggested the broadcast was an “insult” to Islam.

One message sent to Holland read: “You might be a target in the streets. You may recruit some bodyguards, for your own safety.”

Posted in politics, Religion | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Untold Story