The Egyptian evolution

Posted on March 21, 2011 by David Hume

Egyptian Voters Approve Constitutional Changes:

Egyptian voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum on constitutional changes on Sunday that will usher in rapid elections, with the results underscoring the strength of established political organizations, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, and the weakness of emerging liberal groups.

More than 14.1 million voters, or 77.2 percent, approved the constitutional amendments; 4 million, or 22.8 percent, voted against them. The turnout of 41 percent among the 45 million eligible voters broke all records for recent elections, according to the Egyptian government.

…

The Muslim Brotherhood and remnant elements of the National Democratic Party, which dominated Egyptian politics for decades, were the main supporters of the referendum. They argued that the election timetable would ensure a swift return to civilian rule.

Members of the liberal wing of Egyptian politics mostly opposed the measure, saying that they lacked time to form effective political organizations. They said early elections would benefit the Brotherhood and the old governing party, which they warned would seek to write a constitution that centralizes power, much like the old one.

…

He and many other opponents of the referendum said religious organizations had spread false rumors, suggesting that voting against the referendum would threaten Article 2 of the Constitution, which cites Islamic law as the main basis for Egyptian law.

“I saw one sign that said, ‘If you vote no you are a follower of America and Baradei, and if you vote yes you are a follower of God,’ ” he said. “The idea is that Muslims will vote yes and Copts and atheists will vote no.”

…

Most “no” votes emerged from Cairo and Alexandria, Mr. Shukrallah noted, whereas support flowed in heavily from the provinces.

“The revolution was a revolution of the big cities,” he said. “The provinces are just not there. The secular values that drove the revolution have not reached them.”

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The Archbishop and the Governor

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan is greatly relieved that the pesky matter of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s unCatholic (at least for now) lifestyle is finally behind us.  The divorced Catholic governor has been very publicly living with his girlfriend and taking her to official events.  An advisor to the Vatican’s highest court, Edward Peters, had called for the denial of communion to Cuomo on the ground of his “public concubinage”—a perfectly reasonable interpretation of Catholic doctrine.  

The New York hierarchy, however, immediately closed ranks around Cuomo and brushed off this pesky Vatican busy-body.  The leader of the Albany diocese, Bishop Howard Hubbard, assured Cuomo and the world that the Church fathers would not dream of judging Cuomo’s domestic arrangements:

“There are norms for all Catholics about receiving communion and we have to be sensitive pastorally to every person in their [sic] own particular situation,” Bishop Hubbard said. 

Bishop Hubbard’s logic here is puzzling.  The very existence of  universal “norms for all Catholics” means that they apply to “every person” regardless of his “own particular situation.”    Not any more, it seems:

“When it comes to judging worthiness for communion, . . . it’s not something we comment on,” said Hubbard. 

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan was even more dismissive of the silly idea of stigmatizing Cuomo for his out-of-wedlock relationship.  Cuomo had threatened to cancel a scheduled lunch with Dolan, possibly out of pique at the criticism of his “concubinage” emanating from distant Catholic redoubts. But then Cuomo magnanimously found time in his busy schedule for lunch with the assorted New York priests.  Dolan later reported that Cuomo’s living arrangements never came up, adding:

“Thank God it didn’t, because it was a bit of a tempest in a teapot . . . . We were just happy to be there, and he obviously was, too.”

Lots of jolliness all around, obviously.  Dolan joked that the best part of the fact that Cuomo rescheduled their meeting was that “We got lunch out of it.” 

(How the once fearsome power of the Church has shrunk!  King Phillip in Verdi’s Don Carlo complains that the “throne must always bow to the altar.”  Now the altar creeps up to the throne and is grateful for a few table scraps.) 

One of the core purposes of the “secular conservative” construct, in my view, is to show that traditional morality can be justified on secular grounds alone.   Divine revelation is not needed to argue for obedience to the law and respect for the rights of others.  Continue reading →

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History Lesson

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Brie foe, Chablis fighter and Creationist Tim Pawlenty tries his hand at history:

We need to remember as others try to push out or marginalise people of faith—we need to remember this and always remember it—the constitution was designed to protect people of faith from government, not to protect government from people of faith.

The Economist puts the governor straight:

Madison’s goal was twofold; to protect religion from government influence was, indeed, one of them. But the other was, in fact, to protect the government from undue religious influence. Of official churches and their clergy, he wrote

In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of Civil authority; in many instances they have seen the upholding of the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberty of the people.
The founders established a pattern that helped make America one of the most religious countries in the world. The separation of church and state—yes, that is exactly what Jefferson and Madison wanted—was to protect both from each other. Modern secularists like to play up deists like Jefferson and quotations like Madison’s above to downplay the religiosity of the early republic; they go too far when they make simple statements like “the founders were deists.” Many were not.

The modern religious activists like Mr Pawlenty, though, commit the worse intellectual crime of effacing the secularism, deism and disestablishmentarianism of so many of the founders, baldly claiming they meant to put (Christianity’s) God at the centre of American public life. On the whole, they most certainly did not. Mr Pawlenty notes that the Declaration of Independence mentions the “Creator”. He probably knows, but does not mention, that the writer was the most deist of all the founders, Jefferson. Mr Pawlenty also says that 49 of 50 state constitutions mention God. He forgot one thing: the federal constitution does not. This was not because it slipped the founders’ minds.

Posted in history, politics | Tagged , | 3 Comments

The Rush for Judgment

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

The tragedy in Japan has produced a grimly familiar response.

Here’s Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara:

The identity of the Japanese people is greed. This tsunami represents a good opportunity to cleanse this greed, and one we must avail ourselves of. Indeed, I think this is divine punishment.

And here’s Glenn Beck:

I’m not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes, I’m not not saying that either.

What God does is God’s business. But I’ll tell you this, whether you call it Gaia or whether you call it Jesus, there’s a message being sent; ‘Hey, you know that stuff we’re doing. It’s not really working out. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.’ I’m just saying.

I’m at a loss to know what leads people to say this sort of stuff. Maybe they believe it, maybe it’s simple opportunism or maybe it’s an attempt to find some sort of meaning out of a hideous, random event.

It’s certainly very sad.

Omikuji, Tokyo (June 2005) (AS)

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Giving More Power To The IRS

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

This story comes from Mother Jones, and it comes with plenty of ‘coulds’, so some caution is called for. Nevertheless it doesn’t make pretty reading. Here’s a key extract:

Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt?

In testimony to a House taxation subcommittee on Wednesday, Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee, confirmed that one consequence of the Republicans’ “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” would be to turn IRS agents into abortion cops—that is, during an audit, they’d have to determine, from evidence provided by the taxpayer, whether any tax benefit had been inappropriately used to pay for an abortion

The proposed law, also known as H.R. 3, extends the reach of the Hyde Amendment—which bans federal funding for abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is at stake—into many parts of the federal tax code. In some cases, the law would forbid using tax benefits—like credits or deductions—to pay for abortions or health insurance that covers abortion. If an American who used such a benefit were to be audited, Barthold said, the burden of proof would lie with the taxpayer to provide documentation, for example, that her abortion fell under the rape/incest/life-of-the-mother exception, or that the health insurance she had purchased did not cover abortions.

“Were this to become law, people could end up in an audit, the subject of which could be abortion, rape, and incest,” says Christopher Bergin, the head of Tax Analysts, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit tax policy group. “If you pass the law like this, the IRS would be required to enforce it.”

Ugh.

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Religion Reading List

Posted on March 18, 2011 by David Hume

As someone with minimal religious intuitions and nominal indoctrination it’s been a long hard slog for me to understand religion as a human phenomenon. Books have been important. Not newspapers. And not just the words of believers. I’ve expressed irritation and exasperation at some readers who talk about things which they clearly have only a superficial grasp of. This is becoming a bit more common, so I’m going to have to take two steps. First, I’m going to actually start paying closer attention to comments on my threads. Second, below is a reading list which explains where I’m coming from. You don’t have to read any of these books, or try to understand where I’m coming from. Life is short. But in that case, don’t comment. I don’t know much about cars, so I don’t talk about cars. I am a fan of the Boston Celtics, but don’t follow the game closely enough to comment intelligently, so I don’t comment. I try to shy away from superficial conversation about serious topics in my day to day life (though I’m game to talk about Jersey Shore in a flip fashion), so I understand that this is a blog, but it seems we’d all benefit more from depth than not (this is not aimed at the transient visitors who arrive via periodic spikes from other websites, and will come & go at will). I’m not interested in winning arguments, I’m interesting in learning more through discussion. I don’t feel that I’m learning a lot in the repetitions of superficial conventional wisdom. This includes both the Islamoskeptic commenters (I count myself as a very strongly Islamoskeptic) and the partisans of pluralism. I accede to substantive disagreement more easily than I do to unintelligent or uninformed concurrence.

The list below is Abrahamically oriented, mostly because readers of this weblog have a stronger interest in these faiths as expressed by the comments they leave. Though I can recommend books on Chinese religious philosophy, and to a lesser extent Indian religious philosophy, if you are curious. Quite often the generalizations people make about human societies are uninformed by any deep knowledge of the broader swath of societies, so a cursory familiarity with all cultures is probably best unless you want to make yourself a fool by ignorance.

Continue reading →

Posted in Religion | Tagged | 28 Comments

Magical Thinking Watch: Free Government Jobs

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

The New York Times rues Ohio’s pending legislative effort to cut back on public-sector union clout when government jobs are the only decent ones left in an area of southern Ohio:

Decades of industrial decline have eroded private-sector jobs here, leaving a thin crust of low-paying service work that makes public-sector jobs look great in comparison.

(Actually, government jobs not the only decent ones: if you have saleable skills, there are “good jobs” in a local hospital and two power plants, reports the Times.)

 Apparently the Times thinks that there is no possible connection between a shrinking private sector and a well-padded public one.  The funding for outsized government health benefits and pensions just magically appears, rather than being stripped from private investment.   So why not then put everyone on a government job and solve all our economic woes?

Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments

Liberal de facto apologia for Islam

Posted on March 16, 2011 by David Hume

In the comments to my post “The double standard” many liberals objected to my assertion that much of the Left engages in a situational criticism of religion, whereby conservative Christians bear the full front of the secular critique, where Muslims do not. My own personal experience with this is that almost everyone I have close personal contact with is a liberal, because of the scientific-technologist Left Coast circles in which I move. They’ve often absorbed a set of mantras about “moderate Muslims” which indicates little deep understanding, comprehension, or concern. In other words, they are the unreflective inverse of the right-wing Islamophobes whom they detest!

My issue is not that American liberals strenuously defend the civil liberties of Muslim Americans. My issue is that they often expand their defense to an inaccurate characterization of the religion. See this exchange by Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches and Michael Brendan Dougherty:

 

Continue reading →

Posted in Religion | Tagged , | 13 Comments

Old-Time Irreligion

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Bradlaugh

The British philosopher Colin McGinn gives us that old-time irreligion in this essay “Why I Am an Atheist“.

I normally can’t take very much of this well-worn atheism-vs.-agnosticism stuff, but McGinn pulls it off very well & I found myself reading to the end, in spite of those too-long paragraphs.

He actually admits he can’t take much of it either:

I have also reached the point (I reached it long ago) that the issue of God’s existence no longer strikes me as an interesting issue. I mean, when it comes up I tend to glaze over, because all the moves are so familiar and the debate seems so antiquated. I find it hard to get fired up about it. It just seems dull. No intellectual sparks fly off it. The question has important political and cultural significance, to be sure, but as an intellectual issue in its own right it lacks vitality.

Now I’m even more puzzled that I read the whole thing …

I am not competent to judge McGinn’s status as a philosopher. He writes well, and I always enjoy his articles. (I have never read any of his books.) He is a handy prop when discussing education, though. Thus:

Like me, McGinn grew up in England under the “eleven plus” regime of school assignment. The way it worked was, everyone who passed through the state-school system (private schools were hors de combat) did six years in elementary school, then at the age of, of course, eleven plus took an IQ test. That’s what it was: a frank, straightforward IQ test.

Based on your test score you were then assigned to one of the three categories of school:

  • “Grammar school”:  Very academic, lots of homework. Latin, Greek, modern languages, higher math, economics, … the works.
  • “Technical school”:  Less academic, more vocational, but the cognitively demanding kind of vocational — aiming to produce electronics engineers, not plumbers.
  • “Secondary modern”:  Prole school. You’re going to be a factory hand, but you’re too young to start yet. Hey, let’s have a game of football!

I forget the proportions, but they seem to have been very roughly 20-40-40. It wasn’t a bad system, though it might not work in a post-industrial economy.

Anyway, one of the objections raised to the system (which was swept away in 1970s reforms) was that once assigned to a technical or secondary modern school a child would accept his place in society and give up on anything cognitively demanding. The notion that anyone should accept his placein society was loathsome to the egalitarian New Class that was taking over the 1960s-70s British establishment. Hence those reforms.

(Most of the New Class reformers were graduates of the Grammar Schools, by the way. The rest had been privately educated. And this line of thought was, as you may recognize, ancestral to the “stereotype threat” flim-flam currently popular with U.S. educationalists.)

In fact the system was more flexible than that. Mis-assignments and late bloomers could transfer up to better schools. I was at university with a girl who’d been assigned to a secondary modern school.

Well, McGinn is the star exhibit here, having been assigned to a secondary modern school in gritty,greasy Blackpool circa 1962.

Posted in culture, philosophy, Religion | 5 Comments

Gov. vs. God

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Apparently Wisconsin’s governor Walker is taking on the Almighty Himself. Who knew? “Pastor Dan”, that’s who:

Below the fold is the text of a joint press release from Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice and Madison Urban Ministry, two Wisconsin religious groups who have been active in leading protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s agenda. I am mostly passing this on to note that there are religious voices involved in this fight. I have yet to see any faith groups take up Walker’s side, but perhaps I’ve just missed them…

…while I think what we have here is bang-up, I do believe that it could be even stronger by reframing it as an issue of justice, rather than morality. The latter is a very weak frame that creates a “dog bites man” storyline. The former, especially if it’s pitched in terms of God coming down on the side of the working people (see: Exodus), is much stronger and creates the opposite storyline. When was the last time any religious leaders on the left had the chutzpah to tell a sitting governor he was going up against God herself?

The ‘God herself’ is a classic—both in terms of gender and lower case h—of the genre.

Thank you, Pastor Dan!

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