Cassilis

A little late on this but worth flagging all the same. Pickled Politics had an interesting discussion yesterday on the news that the Muslim Council of Britain has reversed it's long standing boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day. Opinion in the comment thread seems divided as to whether the MCB deserves credit for this or whether it's too little too late.

I'd always thought the boycott was indefensible anyway so I'm not minded to be too gushing in praise for the MCB just for finally doing the right thing. Having said that, any suggestions that the MCB shouldn't be made welcome now is unhelpful at best and, at worse, tantamount to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust being guilty of the very thing they've criticised the MCB for in the past - let's just get on with remembering what the 27th January is all about.

Despite disagreeing with them on their boycott as well as some other issues I do have some sympathy for the MCB. As the comment thread at PP illustrates they're held up as some sort of oracle of Muslim opinion and expected to be able to respond instantly and with perfect nuance to any story relating to Islam anywhere in the world. Any attempt to add context or qualify their comments tends to get labelled appeasement which, of course, it sometimes is but not always. It's worth noting the speed with which they condemned the treatment of Gillian Gibbons in the Sudan over the 'teddy bear' row and the pleasing lack of any such qualifications or excuses.

Labels: Religion

Worth having a look at the New Statesman's 'Faith' column this week by Jim Corrigall, a communications consultant for 'Unitarians in Britain' - I have to confess that until I read his introductory piece on Monday I'd never even heard of Unitarianism. He’s talking about ‘Unitarian Universalism’ rather than the branch of Christian theology that explicitly rejects the notion of the trinity.

Until lately, when pressed, I'd describe myself as an atheist but since the arrogant, reductive atheism beloved of Dawkins, Grayling et al. has given the tag a bad name I’ve been notionally casting around for a less contentious label - perhaps the Unitarian's would have me? Here's Corrigall on the Unitarian's attitude to creeds and dogmas:

Labels: Religion

Dr Rowan Williams is a difficult man to disagree with. His calm and measured contributions are nearly always a welcome addition to any debate and his evident profundity always gives me pause for thought. So finding myself at odds with him on a particular issue always tests the tenacity of my opinions and the current row over religious exemptions from the Sexual Orientation regulations is one such instance.
In the letter released yesterday written by Dr Williams and Archbishop of York John Sentamu, they take refuge in the idea of 'freedom of conscience':

In legislating to protect and promote the rights of particular groups the government is faced with the delicate but important challenge of not thereby creating the conditions within which others feel their rights to have been ignored or sacrificed, or in which the dictates of personal conscience are put at risk. The rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation, however well meaning.

The surprising thing however is that nowhere in the letter (full text here) or during his media appearances yesterday did Dr Williams explain how these regulations present any threat whatsoever to freedom of conscience. Worse still for a man usually known for his lucidity he appears to be misrepresenting both the notion of conscience and the requirements of the legislation. First the notion of 'freedom of conscience'.
As always the semantics are important - 'freedom of conscience' refers to an individual's right to hold and express particular beliefs, not necessarily to be given licence to act on them. Nothing in this legislation requires someone who disapproves of homosexuality to revise their opinion and so the notion that conscience is under threat is misleading. Conscience is not being "made subject to legislation", behaviour is. Getting this distinction right is important - if we 'blur' the boundary between belief and behaviour then most of the anti-discrimination legislation over the last 40 years would be subject to challenge on those grounds. I'm free under the law to believe in the superiority of one race over another, one gender over another etc. but I'm not entitled to act on those beliefs - conscience is completely free of censure, behaviour is subject to it. The one qualification to this idea is 'does the law actually compel anyone to act against their conscience' and this is where the second misrepresentation arises.

Labels: Politics, Religion

Frustrating though it is to stumble across a blogger taking a similar line as you but doing so via infinitely better writing, manners dictate that I nonetheless point it out. From CIF but via his excellent blog Temperama, journalist and novelist Dave Hill takes apart the secularist preening of the likes of Polly Toynbee and A.C. Grayling.

But when liberal-left resistance to religious conservatives becomes a generalized expression of contempt for all religious sentiment, it sounds as blinkered as the bigots it berates. This is a phenomenon I've long failed to understand. What is about "the religious" that reduces Polly's quality of argument to a level lower that of a sixth-form debate? What sort of advert is it for secular rationalism when the eminent philosopher A.C. Grayling comes to the podium as he did yesterday spitting bile like a man possessed by demons? What is the self-justification of people who rightly reject simplistic diagnoses of criminality or cause-and-effect claims for the virtue of marriage yet so glibly subscribe to the Dawkins delusion that religion is the root of all evil?

Read the rest here...

Labels: Politics, Religion

In the latest edition of the Hoover Institution's quarterly 'Policy Review', Mary Eberstadt looks at the growing readiness of both the left & right to identify scapegoats in the wake of 9/11 and direct all their ire in that direction, more often than not to the detriment of a genuine understanding of the issues. As she points out:

Labels: Media, Politics, Religion

It's always frustrating when, having posted on a particular topic and allowed yourself to be flushed with a little pride at your own erudition, some mainstream commentator goes and tackles the same topic and illustrates to all and sundry why they get handsomely paid for their efforts and you don't! Still, good grace demands that I bring it to your attention...

The ever-excellent Timothy Garton Ash tackles the subject of religious belief in today's Guardian, taking on both the fundamentalists of whatever denomination as well as that nauseatingly pompous high priest of atheism Richard Dawkins. A few select quotations to savour:

"Now one can argue about whether the world would be a better place if everyone became convinced of the atheistic truths of natural science, or at least took their religion as lightly as most part-time, demi-Christian Europeans do. But clearly this can't be the premise on which we build a multicultural society in a free country. That would be just as intolerant as the practice of those majority Muslim countries where no other faiths than Islam are allowed"

"On the contrary, in free countries every faith must be allowed - and every faith must be allowed to be questioned, fundamentally, outspokenly, even intemperately and offensively, without fear of reprisal. Richard Dawkins, the Oxford scientist, must be free to say that God is a delusion and Alistair McGrath, the Oxford theologian, must be free to retort that Dawkins is deluded; a conservative journalist must be free to write that the Prophet Muhammad was a paedophile and a Muslim scholar must be free to brand that journalist an ignorant Islamophobe. That's the deal in a free country: freedom of religion and freedom of expression as two sides of the same coin. We must live and let live - a demand that is not as minimal as it sounds, when one thinks of the death threats against Salman Rushdie and the Danish cartoonists. The fence that secures this space is the law of the land."

"My quarrel with the Dawkins school of atheists is not anything they say about the non-existence of God but what they say about Christians and the history of Christianity -much of which is true, but leaves out the other, positive half of the story. And, as the old Yiddish saying goes, a half-truth is a whole lie. In my judgment as a historian of modern Europe, the positive side is larger than the negative. It seems to me self-evident that we would not have the European civilisation we have today without the heritage of Christianity, Judaism and (in a smaller measure, mainly in the middle ages) Islam, which legacy also paved the way, albeit unwittingly and unwillingly, for the Enlightenment. Moreover, some of the most impressive human beings I have met in my own lifetime have been Christians"

Labels: Politics, Religion

"Interesting" conversation between Osama Saeed, a former SNP activist and blogger based in Glasgow, and Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish Nationalists. Osama posted this on his blog, Rolled-up Trousers, and if this doesn't make you despair at the prospect of a Nationalist administration in Holyrood next May nothing will.



I did intend to do a line-by-line fisk of this conversation but I can't summon the will - for anyone of moderate intelligence it speaks for itself. Were it simply an overhead conversation in the pub you could laugh it off for the ill-informed, misguided nonsense it is - the fact that one participant aspires to lead my country almost reduces me to tears.

If I get the time I'll do the fisking but if anyone else fancies taking up the mantle the comments sectionis, as ever, open...

Labels: Politics, Religion

Last night's critique of militant atheism by Rod Liddle on C4 needs little adding to. Although it tended to repeat itself a little over the hour his basic case, that atheism has shifted from a from a straightforward denial of the existence of God to an aggressive and hostile belief system with all the hallmarks of religion, was well made. If you want one quote that makes his case, one of his contributors actually said, without the slightest sense of irony:

"I don't mind differing opinions as long as they are right"

Still, there are a few aspects to the debate that Liddle didn't deal with in any depth and I promised to share my thoughts on the issue so here goes. First a few words about my background so you can put my outlook in context. I was raised a Roman Catholic (a challenging enough experience on the West Coast of Scotland during the eighties) and attended an RC secondary school. Despite the fact that my wife had a similar upbringing we've both since lapsed and we didn't marry in the Church and our first child, born during the summer, wasn't baptised. When asked I tend to describe myself as an agnostic although if pressed I'll acknowledge that I don't hold any belief in a deity, life after death etc.As it's commonly understood atheism refers to a lack of belief in supernatural beings or an intelligent creator behind the universe and, taken literally like this, I'd describe myself as an atheist. I no longer believe in the idea of an all-powerful creator or the religious interpretation of the biblical stories - in this respect there's probably little to separate me from someone like Richard Dawkins.

Where I do part company however is in their readiness to extend and subtly change the meaning of the word atheism itself. No longer content to simply deny the existence of God (a reasonable enough position given the lack of evidence) there seems to be an eagerness to launch a full-on assault on the whole psychology of religious belief and the often (though not always) positive outcomes it produces. Dawkins latest book (which to be fair I haven't read) is called 'The God Delusion' and by all accounts seeks to dismantle the very idea of religious devotion and cast those of a religious bent as deluded and mistaken. Although I'm not religious myself I have enough experience of people who are to realise that this amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding about what religious devotion means. Trying to deny or invalidate the very idea of religious belief is like trying to deny the existence of love or jealousy. Under the microscope both emotions could easily be dismissed (in most cases) as completely irrational, nothing more than a series of psychological reactions to certain stimuli - but to do so is to fundamentally misunderstand their importance. It's not the objective truth of those emotions that matter but their subjective impact and the behaviour they elicit. What's more, however ephemeral the emotions themselves their outcomes are often all to real and to ignore such outcomes because they were prompted by something that in and of itself can't be proven is daft. In essence this is the utilitarian argument and Liddle only touched on this last night. Dawkins tried to dismiss it by drawing parallels with belief in 'fairies and goblins' - if individuals choose to believe because it comforts them then that's OK but it doesn't prove an objective truth about those beliefs. In one sense he's right but the attempt to draw a parallel between several thousand years worth or religious devotion, the art & literature or moral framework inspired by it and a belief in 'fairies and goblins' is a startlingly naive position and one that doesn't become a man of Dawkins intelligence.

There's a tendency to characterise people who act according to a deeply held religious conviction as somehow inherently more dangerous or unstable than those who act according to a particular secular doctrine. This is clearly nonsense since it assumes that secular motives are, by default, scientific in nature and free from any element of faith or belief when clearly this isn't the case. A belief in the equality of the sexes for example or the efficacy of free markets is no more scientifically verifiable than a belief in Jesus Christ.Liddle also tackled that stalwart of teenage debates over religion - the discussion around the number of lives lost in religious disputes contrasted with the number lost under secular or atheistic regimes. The stock defence of atheists - that brutality under an atheist regime is coincidental and not directly prompted by the belief system - was shown to be rather flimsy. One contributor even tried to write off Stalin's crimes to Confucianism and Liddle rightly countered that this was absurd - the point isn't that religion itself prompts violence but that it's part of the human character and it will find an oultet regardless and the evidence for this is everywhere.

Labels: Media, Religion

The luxury of posting less regularly is that I can give more thought to the topics I post on. A complete coincidence but I've been writing a few words on atheism and religious belief and realised while flicking through this week's TV guide that there's a programme on the subject on C4 tonight, presented by former Today editor Rod Liddle.

Labels: Media, Religion

Thoughtful article in today's Guardian from Gary Younge on US Muslim's experience since 9/11 and how it contrasts with the experience of their co-religionists in the UK and Western Europe. It's certainly not easy being a Muslim in the US at the moment (where would it be easy?) but there are subtle yet important differences in their experience that UK politicians would be wise to note.

I've long puzzled over why the US, the country Gary points out "that has done more than any other to foment Islamic fundamentalism abroad", seems relatively immune from the phenomenon themselves despite having a significant Muslim population. To my knowledge there were no protests (certainly not on the UK scale) over the Danish cartoon row earlier this year or Pope Benedict's remarks in the autumn and, unlike our experience in July 2005 there have been no terrorist attacks propagated by US born Muslims. Perhaps because of it's history as a 'land of immigrants' the US has always been more comfortable with notions of multi-faceted identity - African-American, Irish-American, Italian-American etc. What's more, despite the implicit hierarchy in the semantics it's always seemed as though people who adopt these labels recognise themselves as Americans first - without in any sense diluting their affiliation with or passion for their core ethnic identity. As Gary puts it, in the US..

"there is greater scope for understanding the difference between autonomy - a distinct cultural space base from which people interact with the rest of society; and segregation - where people seek to separate themselves from the mainstream. To qualify your national allegiance through ethnicity, race or religion is not necessarily regarded as diluting it"

Labels: Religion

Good piece on CiF today from a group called the New Generation Network. It's a group of individuals calling for a new approach to tackle racism and discrimination and their manifesto, launched today, is calling for a mature and reasoned debate on the way we discuss race & religion. It takes a thoroughly deserved pop at the explosion in 'community leaders' and (even more deserved in my view) the media's over reliance on such people largely because of their 'shock value'. I'm not sure if the manifesto comes from a left-leaning angle or not but I welcome the wholehearted rejection of 'communal politics'. The tendency to treat people as part of some homogenous block and ignore the diversity and free-thinking elements within every community has done more to harm integration and cohesion over the last 20/30 years than the lunatic fringe on the far right ever could have hoped.

Labels: Religion

A simply superb speech in the Commons on Wednesday from Conservative MP for Wycombe Paul Goodman. Paul represents more Muslim voters than any other member of parliament and so his remarks on such subjects should carry some weight. Many thanks to the New Culture Forum for bringing it to my attention and, like them, I think it's worth quoting extensively.

"A central question about the Queen's Speech...is whether both it and Government policy more broadly will curtail terror, build security and help to deliver that moderate, prosperous and integrated British Muslim majority that we all want to see. Ministers must thus convince the House that the analysis that accompanies their actions is thoroughly thought through. I shall risk a medical analogy: relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain are clearly to some degree poisoned. Seeking to drain the poison and heal those relations is a bit like a doctor treating an illness. We have to diagnose the cause of the illness before seeking to cure it.

There is no shortage of diagnoses. Some claim that the main cause of Muslim alienation is racism and Islamophobia; others that it is poverty and lower life chances; and others still that the cause is intergenerational conflict between older people who, in some cases, still inhabit psychologically, if not physically, the hill villages of Pakistan and Azad Kashmir, and more rootless younger people who identify neither with traditional life in those villages nor with modern Britain. Other voices cite the failure of the multi-culturalist experiment in delivering social cohesion, and others point to foreign policy.

For myself, I believe that all those observations are part of any sensible diagnosis. As the first parliamentary Member of my party, as far as I know, to call publicly for an independent inquiry into the Iraq war on 2 June 2003, I am scarcely likely to argue otherwise. However, in my view these observations do not constitute the whole diagnosis. Clearly, there is something missing. Dhiren Barot, for example, cannot originally have been a victim of Islamophobia as he was raised as a Hindu. Jermaine Lindsay, the 7/7 bomber, cannot have been caught in an intergenerational struggle with Pakistani elders as he was black. Mohammed Sidique Khan, another 7/7 bomber, cannot have had his livelihood damaged by lower life chances as he was a graduate of Leeds Metropolitan university.

I suggest to the House that that missing something is the ideology of Islamism. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (David Maclean) said, Islamism is not Islam. Islam is a religion - a great religion at that and one, it seems to me, as various, as complex, as multi-faceted and as capable of supporting a great civilisation as Christianity. Islamism, however, is an ideology forged largely in the past 100 years, and that word "ideology" should help to convey to the House a flavour that is as much modern as mediaeval.

Like communism and like fascism, those other modern ideologies, Islamism divides not on the basis of class or of race, but on the basis of religion. To this politician, it has three significant features. First, it separates the inhabitants of the dar-al-Islam - the house of Islam - and the dar-al-Harb - the house of war - and, according to Islamist ideology, those two houses are necessarily in conflict. Secondly, it proclaims to Muslims that their political loyalty lies not with the country that they live in, but with the umma - that is, the worldwide community of Muslims. Thirdly, it aims to bring the dar-al-Islam under sharia law.

The leadership of the Muslim community that I know best, in High Wycombe, is moderate and sensible. The community makes a huge contribution to the town. It is well integrated into both the main political parties and it produced the first Conservative Asian mayor in the country - Mohammed Razzaq - in the 1980s. However, it is clear that nationally, and especially among the alienated young, the moderates are not making the running; the Islamists are making the running. The moderates are in a position strikingly similar to that of the Social Democratic and Labour party in Northern Ireland, which has, in the past 15 years, been outpaced, outwitted and outsmarted by Sinn Fein-IRA, with consequences that are still fully to be seen. Deferring the debate further will only allow this process to continue. When it finally takes place, which it will, it will probably be noisier and nastier than would otherwise have been the case. It is essential that the moderates grasp that the main threat of the Islamists is as much to them as to anyone else.

This Queen's Speech thus presents us with a choice - we can either take an approach that tends to lurch from pacification in the wake of future highly charged public rows, such as the veils controversy, to panic in the wake of future terrorist attacks, which we are, alas, told are only too likely to happen, or we can rise to the challenge in an informed, decent and consistent way. In facing the challenge, Opposition Members must acknowledge and be mindful of the fact that Ministers have a responsibility that none of the rest of us at present has to bear. George Orwell once wrote of the

"deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs."

On 7/7, we heard the roar of bombs in London. I sometimes worry that the deep, deep sleep that Orwell described in the 1930s is still here in relation to Islamism in sections of the Government, parts of the political and media establishment, the House and the country. This is one of the most urgent problems facing us, and if we are in that deep, deep sleep, it is time for all of us to wake up.

Labels: Religion

Plenty around over the weekend on the repercussions of Nick Griffin's acquittal on charges of inciting racial hatred. The debate seems to be revolving around whether or not we need new or amended legislation to cover the sort of bile Mr Griffin was heard spouting in the undercover BBC investigation. With unseemly (if all too characteristic) haste Gordon Brown rushed to uncap his legislative pen again promising to 'look again' at the law - John Reid was a bit more measured and at least had the courage to recognise that the likes of Griffin will need to be defeated by something more subtle than legislation.

Scouring the press for reaction to these events Janet Daley in today’s Telegraph best summed up my own thoughts:

"The question of the moment is not whether we have a right to feel certain unpleasant emotions, but whether we have the right to express them. Since the principle of freedom of expression is basic to our constitution, the only way that any form of speech may be criminalised is by its capacity to produce actual actions or events. So hatred cannot be a crime in itself, but incitement to hatred may be, because it could cause people to do things that are criminal"

"To say that Islam, as a faith, is wicked and vicious might be uninformed and gratuitous, but it is within the realm of debate about the nature of religion. Most disturbingly, it is a view that has resonance for a great many voters who are not being helped to overcome their prejudices by politicians of all parties (and the BBC) who pretend that they either do not exist in any significant numbers, or, to the extent that they do, are beneath contempt"

"Religion is profoundly different from race in this respect: belonging to a racial group does not involve subscribing to a set of doctrines that might be contentious, or even disruptive to the moral views of society at large."

"This is a profoundly irresponsible bit of cowardice on the part of Britain's political class. If it is left to the Nick Griffins among us to acknowledge what is clearly quite widespread concern about Islam, we will never be able to have the serious, substantial debate that we need about the role of Muslim practice in Britain. How is a liberal democracy to deal with an illiberal orthodoxy in its midst? How can a faith whose own laws often contravene those of its host society make its peace with the secular state?These are questions that need urgently to be addressed. They cannot be fudged by banning "religious hatred", or by insisting that anyone who alludes to them (or who resents the problems that they raise for our society) is a bigot fit only to be fodder for the neo-fascist fringe"

Labels: Religion

I promised more on the launch of the religious think tank Theos and I’ve just finished reading their inaugural report “’Doing God’: A Future for Faith in the Public Square” by Nick Spencer.

As I mentioned earlier I’m not a religious believer but I’ve never subscribed to the overtly hostile secularism prevalent in much of the media today. In the foreword of the report Rowan Williams and Cormac Murphy-O’Connor tackle this problem head on, pointing out that the insistence on an atheistic or exclusively secular approach in the public realm is itself an “intolerant faith position”. The report challenges the common assertion that we are becoming a more secular society and then addresses the usual arguments against religiously-motivated engagement in the public realm. It charts the history of religions contribution to welfarism and civic life prior to (and beyond) the 1945 settlement and looks at how religion and the politics of identity overlap through the prism of the recent rows like the Danish cartoons, Jerry Springer the Opera, Sikh demonstration against Behzti etc.

Overall it’s a very interesting read and augers well for future output from Theos. I see no reason why when we have a National Secular Society and a British Humanist association those of a religious outlook shouldn’t have a means to add their contribution too. The only observation I’d make is that it’s very Christian in it’s outlook – some of the issues it addresses around identity and fundamentalism would benefit from input from theologians outside the Christian tradition but I suppose they have time yet to remedy that…

Labels: Religion

Just found this very funny clip on YouTube from Mel Brooks 'History of the World' movie. Despite a good catholic upbringing it certainly made me laugh which got me to thinking - how would a similarly disrespectful parody of aspects of the Koran go down in our current climate?

Labels: Religion