Spitting on Children

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Andrew Stuttaford

More grotesque religious fanaticism in the Middle East.

AP reports:

(AP) BEIT SHEMESH, Israel – A shy 8-year-old schoolgirl has unwittingly found herself on the front line of Israel’s latest religious war.

Naama Margolese is a ponytailed, bespectacled second-grader who is afraid of walking to her religious Jewish girls school for fear of ultra-Orthodox extremists who have spat on her and called her a whore for dressing “immodestly.”

Her plight has drawn new attention to the simmering issue of religious coercion in Israel, and the increasing brazenness of extremists in the insular ultra-Orthodox Jewish community….The girls school that Naama attends in the city of Beit Shemesh, to the west of Jerusalem, is on the border between an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood and a community of modern Orthodox Jewish residents, many of them American immigrants.

The ultra-Orthodox consider the school, which moved to its present site at the beginning of the school year, an encroachment on their territory. Dozens of black-hatted men jeer and physically accost the girls almost daily, claiming their very presence is a provocation.

Beit Shemesh has long experienced friction between the ultra-Orthodox, who make up about half the city’s population, and other residents. And residents say the attacks at the girls’ school, attended by about 400 students, have been going on for months. Last week, after a local TV channel reported about the school and interviewed Naama’s family, a national uproar ensued.

Well, at least this sort of behavior can still cause a “national uproar”, but for how long?

The abuse and segregation of women in Israel in ultra-Orthodox areas is nothing new, and critics accuse the government of turning a blind eye.

The ultra-Orthodox are perennial king-makers in Israeli coalition politics — two such parties serve as key members of the ruling coalition. They receive generous government subsidies, and police have traditionally been reluctant to enter their communities.

The ultra-Orthodox Jews make up 10 percent of Israel’s population. In the past, they have generally confined their strict lifestyle to their own neighborhoods. But they have become increasingly aggressive in trying to impose their ways on others, as their population has grown and spread to new areas.

“It is clear that Israeli society is faced with a challenge that I am not sure it can handle,” said Menachem Friedman, a professor emeritus of Bar Ilan University and expert on the ultra-Orthodox, “a challenge that is no less and no more than an existential challenge.”

If Prime Minister Netanyahu truly wants to do something about this sort of behavior he needs to go further than the denunciations he has already made. To start with, he needs to review his choice of coalition partners. This may not be in his interests politically, but it would, I suspect, be the patriotic thing to do.

For Professor Friedman is right: The growing clout of the ultra-Orthodox is indeed an existential threat to Israel, not only because of the danger this rapidly growing element may come to pose to that state’s internal cohesion, but because of what it could eventually mean for what’s left of Israel’s external support. Much of that support rests on the fact that Israel (for all its flaws) is the best the region has to offer in terms of western values, but it’s hard to see how this backing will survive if Israel’s political establishment continues to appease (and fund) the rise of an increasingly assertive theocratic cohort.

There needs to be a change of course. Soon. How about it, Mr. Netanyahu?

Posted in culture, politics | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Happy New Year!

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Andrew Stuttaford

2012…

And that’s 2012 AD. The substitution of BC and AD with BCE and CE has to be one of the more pointless examples of the language laundering that scars our, uh, era.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 8 Comments

The symbolism of the nonexistent

Posted on December 27, 2011 by David Hume

A few years ago I listened to Brad Stine, who happens to be a conservative Christian, make a joke to a sympathetic audience about how funny it was that some non-Christians were offended and objected to the image of a cross in a classroom. Stine’s assertion was to the effect that “It’s only a cross people! What’s so scary about that!” But my first thought was this: would Stine’s audience be laughing so hard if their children had to sit in a classroom with a Satanic pentagram? I doubt it.

Symbols are only innocuous when you find them innocuous. As a matter of fact atheists are not the only ones to object to crosses. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc., object to crosses in public places, or in locations which connote state sponsorship, because the symbol represents Christianity. For Christians the Satanic pentagram is a marker of the antithesis of their religion. Some Christians may even believe that the pentagram has a malevolent power! For Christians who hold to the position that Hinduism is a demonic cult standard statuary common to that religion has malevolent implications. Jews in particular have negative responses to the crucifix for reasons having to do with that religion’s history and relationship with Christianity.

I point this out because it is often amusing to laugh at the offense others take at what you find innocent or benevolent. But when the shoe is on the other foot you stop laughing. But I do have to admit that those of us who hold that all supernatural systems of belief are fictitious are in a peculiar position: we are taking offense at a symbol which is rooted in something which we think has no coherent basis in reality. This may not matter in a purely cognitive sense. To give an extreme example an atheist who was sexually abused by their priest may have a concrete viscerally negative reaction to symbolism associated with the Roman Catholic church without agreeing to the proposition that those symbols have any supernatural properties, or correspond to something with a supernatural basis.

But atheists are in a different position from those who adhere to religions which are not Christianity. For those people the supernatural domain may be real. And just as Christians may believe that non-Christian religions are fundamentally false, and non-Christians may be in thrall to false idols, so these individuals may have the inverse reaction to Christians and Christian symbols. A Jewish aversion to the cross may not be due to the fact that the cross is a symbol of a false religion, so much as that it is the symbol of a heresy debased with a idolatrous pagan ethos.

This somewhat pedantic exposition is to highlight that these issues aren’t so simple upon further reflection. One person’s offense is another person’s sacred. For atheists our very existence is objectionable, as can be made clear by some of the comments below. Therefore, how we position ourselves in the public debate does matter.

Posted in Religion | Tagged | 9 Comments

Atheists behaving churlishly

Posted on December 25, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

Of the various Christmas sightseeing destinations offered a child in 1960s Los Angeles, the Santa Monica crèches—a series of small stage sets erected on the bluffs above the Pacific Coast Highway–were particularly alluring.   The life-sized mannequins that populated the chicken-wire enclosures had an obvious ancient provenance in the nearby J.C. Penney’s, with their heavy mascara, California tans, and stiff smiles under their Bedouin robes, yet the magic of mimesis—of reproducing human life in artificial form—worked its usual magnetic appeal. 

This year, only three of the series’ fourteen Christmas scenes have appeared in Palisades Park after a local atheist complained about the monopoly on this prime piece of real estate enjoyed by religion.  Complainant Damon Vix and some fellow non-believers applied for space in the park to broadcast their own message; Santa Monica decided to allocate the territory by lottery and the non-believers won the vast majority of spaces.  Vix says that he never intended to dominate the area, but rather simply to receive an equal opportunity to make a pitch for reason.  Many of the atheists’ spaces have deliberately remained blank, so as not to antagonize viewers, Vix told the New York Times; a photo in the Times shows a now pathetically empty chicken wire cage hung with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “Religions are all alike—founded upon fables and mythologies.” 

My first reaction to this controversy is: What a ridiculous battle to pick.  My second is: Does every public dissent from faith, my own included, inevitably come off as equally unpleasant?  (Quick answer to the latter question: No, see Christopher Hitchens.)  Vix has merely reinforced the view of millions of believers that non-believers are—for starters–killjoy blights on the polity who are only out to destroy joy and good cheer, and who would leave a vacuum in the human spirit as ugly as the atheists’ empty cages.  Equally distressing is the tone-deafness of another skeptic, the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, who tells the Times that the Santa Monica situation was “one of the cutest success stories of the season.”  The Wisconsin-based group erected its own manger this year in the Wisconsin State Capitol, featuring Einstein, Darwin, and—I cringe to write it–Emma Goldman.  Way to further associate religious skepticism with Godless communism, guys!  (And skeptics should avoid Seventh Day Adventist-type mimicry: If you’re going to be a vegetarian, don’t ape the meat eaters with mock salmon loaf.) 

I am not even sure that non-believers should be picking battles at all, as opposed to simply asking the questions that logically follow from religious belief—such as why anyone thinks that God cares about his prayers for relief from mortgage debt or arteriosclerosis when God tolerates the daily slaughter of innocents by natural disaster and every kind of disease under the sun. 

For me, the crèche episode raises troubling questions about how skepticism can best challenge or talk back to the ever-weakening domain of faith, without coming off as crude, thin-skinned, or anti-social.  I confess that most contemporary atheist crusades—such as Rationalist slogans on buses–strike me as lame at best.  (Is Secular Right any different?  I hope so, but I cannot be sure.)  And yet though I would not draw the line at the Santa Monica crèches, there are other public and government sponsored displays of religion that I, too, find deeply annoying and, if I controlled things, unacceptable, such as the prayer from Congress’s resident chaplain that opens every day’s legislative session, prayer in schools, Presidential prayer breakfasts, and Texas’s official gubernatorial prayers for rain (still inexplicably unanswered).  (Vix would undoubtedly say, with likely justice, that he is not proceeding out of any personal annoyance but rather to uphold a fundamental Constitutional principle.)  Every separation of Church and state that today we take for granted, such as the disestablishment of the official state churches in the early days of the Republic, undoubtedly struck many believers at the time as equally gratuitous and juvenile–not to mention deeply dangerous. 

The issue here is not just how to dissent from religion; any challenge to a widely-accepted practice will be perceived by the majority as the action of cranks who should just keep their mouths shut.  And while Christianity in the West today can play the victim of an intolerant elite culture, it was of course unapologetic about suppressing heterodoxy before the Enlightenment and the market began chipping away at its hegemony over the public sphere. 

 
I have no hard and fast rule for arriving at a socially acceptable etiquette for expressing disbelief.   Challenging Christian traditions, especially ones as innocuous and child-friendly as Christmas displays, is particularly fraught since Christianity has become so tame and is so thoroughly integrated into our culture.  (My heavily Jewish, Hollywood-dominated grammar school in West Los Angeles held an annual Christmas carol ceremony without anyone objecting.)   Perhaps the most that one can say is that anti-majoritarian principles should be applied with discretion—knowing that everyone will interpret that mandate differently.  Here, though, I would leave the crèches alone.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 42 Comments

Merry Christmas One and All…

Posted on December 25, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

…on the occasion of this thoroughly enjoyable, marvelously syncretic celebration.

“For the people who were shovelling away on the house-tops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snow-ball – better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest – laughing heartily if it went right, and not less heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers’ shops were still half open, and the fruiterers were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied, baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers’ benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle-deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little world in slow and passionless excitement.” Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 3 Comments

Glimpses of Future Disaster

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Demographic projections always have to be treated with a great deal of care, but this (from a piece in the National Interest) still makes disturbing reading:

A recent report compiled by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics makes some projections looking out nearly fifty years, to 2059. The report separates out for the first time in any such official public reckoning the growth of the ultra-Orthodox population, which has a significantly higher birth rate than other Israeli Jews. The ultra-Orthodox currently make up about ten percent of Israeli society but by 2059 are projected to constitute over thirty percent.

The disproportionate growth of the Haredim, as the ultra-Orthodox are also called, has severe implications for Israeli society and the Israeli economy. About 60 percent of ultra-Orthodox men do not work for a living. They spend their time in religious study at yeshivas while they and their fast-growing families subsist on government stipends. This already constitutes a major burden on the remainder of Israelis and is a contributor to the economic discomfort that stimulated widespread demonstrations earlier this year. If the projected increase in the ultra-Orthodox proportion of the population involves a proportionate increase in those not contributing to the economy, it is hard to see how the even larger burden on everyone else could be sustained. The ultra-Orthodox also are not subject to the same military service requirements as other Israeli Jews, constituting another area where the burden is all the greater on the others. Then there is the effect on social mores and freedoms. The growing influence of the ultra-Orthodox has already raised issues regarding the status and liberties of Israeli women. A further expansion of that influence will make Israel an ever more illiberal place.

Clearly these trends present Israel with a very serious challenge to its vitality and even to its survival as a society recognizable and acceptable to most of its current citizens. A major question is whether the privileges and influence of the Haredim can be curbed before they become so large a proportion of the population that curbing is no longer politically thinkable. There has been some official recognition of the danger, as reflected in efforts to get more of the ultra-Orthodox into the work force, including the performance by some of auxiliary duties in support of the military. But privileges that go so far and are so firmly entrenched will naturally be stoutly defended. When an ultra-Orthodox rabbi suggested last year that full-time, government-financed religious study should be reserved only for exceptionally promising scholars who are groomed to be rabbis or religious judges and that other ultra-Orthodox men should “go out and earn a living,” he was so vehemently denounced by his own political party, the ultra-Orthodox Shas, that he had to be assigned a bodyguard.

H/t: Andrew Sullivan

Posted in politics | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Another God, Dead

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via the Daily Telegraph:

When the Sun of Mankind was born, in a humble log cabin on his nation’s holiest mountain, a new bright star shone in the heavens, and a double rainbow appeared. The birds sang songs of praise in human voice. The Sun of Mankind’s father, though his mortal body is dead, rules in eternity, and his spirit is reincarnated in the Sun of Mankind. The Sun of Mankind is also known as the Great Man Who Descended From Heaven.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to atheist North Korea.

The Sun of Mankind, in case you’re wondering, was the late Kim Jong-il, who died over the weekend following a heart attack. His father, the eternal leader who was reincarnated in his son, was Kim il Sung, who died in 1994 at the age of 82 but is still the official president. Christopher Hitchens, who sadly did not live to see Kim’s death, thus described North Korea as the only “necrocracy” in the world.

Posted in culture | Tagged | 4 Comments

Tanya Rosenblit

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via the New Zealand Herald:

She had no intention of emulating Rosa Parks when she set out to find a bus to Jerusalem on Friday but by yesterday Tanya Rosenblit had become a defiant symbol around whom a majority of Israel’s population was rallying, including Cabinet ministers. Rosenblit, who lives in the port city of Ashdod, boarded a bus that serves mainly the black-clad haredi, or ultra-orthodox, Jewish community, which constitutes about 8 per cent of Israel’s population.

The haredim had attempted to impose gender separation on buses connecting their communities in different cities. The Supreme Court termed this illegal but the authorities agreed to let the practice continue as long as it was on a voluntary basis and was confined to selected routes serving an almost exclusively haredi population. The bus driver Rosenblit hailed explained that secular women don’t usually travel on this line. The 28-year-old journalist nevertheless mounted the bus and sat behind the driver.
Haredi men looked at her askance but made no protest. On the second stop a haredi man boarding stopped inside the door and asked if she would move to the back. “No, I won’t,” she said.

After a brief exchange, she put on earphones and listened to music. At one point, when the man shouted at her, she took off the earphones and stated her case.

“There’s no cause for behaving this way to anyone, certainly not women. I made no provocation. I bought a ticket like you did. You won’t tell me where to sit only because I’m a woman. I’ll sit where I please.”

She held her ground despite an angry crowd of haredi men that had formed outside. The man continued to block the door and said he would do so until the woman moved. After half an hour, the driver called the police. The policeman attempted first to persuade the man to desist, then asked Rosenblit if she would mind, out of respect for their ways, moving to the back. She refused.

Good for her.

Posted in Religion | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Tanya Rosenblit

Why Ron Paul will not run as a third party candidate in 2012

Posted on December 20, 2011 by David Hume

Will Ron Paul kill the caucuses?:

The most troubling eventuality that Iowa Republicans are bracing for is that Paul wins the caucuses only to lose the nomination and run as a third-party candidate in November — all but ensuring President Obama is re-elected.

The Paul family doth protest their Christianity, so they must know that their deity states that “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me….” If Ron Paul “pulls a Nader” then Rand Paul’s political career is poisoned. Would a father do such a thing to a son? Perhaps. But I’d bet against it. There most certainly is a family “brand,” and I am curious as to why the elder Paul would expend his son’s capital in such a quixotic quest. True, it can be argued that Ron Paul’s run for president in the Republican primaries is quixotic, but he most certainly has affected the tenor of the debate and changed the terms of discussion on many issues. Running as a third party would do no such thing, in fact alienate hard won efforts at outreach to the broader American Right.

Posted in politics | Tagged | 2 Comments

Newt Gingrich & David Barton

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

OK, the source is Right Wing Watch, but here is Gingrich speaking with Rick Green, one of David Barton’s colleagues at Wallbuilders, but, clearly, ‘at’ Barton.

Gingrich: All I can tell you is that sometime in February or March, Calista and I and our family will be making this decision. As you know, I’m a great admirer of your work and of all you’ve done to teach Americans about their history and the roots of American freedom. And I can assure you that if we do decide to run next year, we’re promptly going to call you and say “we need your help, and we need your advice, and we need your counsel.” It’s more than a voting matter. If we decide to run, David, we’re going to need you.

Update

Now with added links…

Posted in politics | Tagged , , | 2 Comments