Making fun of atheists

The New Humanist has a bunch of recent posts featuring the cartoons of Martin Rowson. Rowson, whose cartoons I’d never seen until now (well, maybe I had but I just don’t know), takes religion – and atheism – for his subject matter. Here is an apparently controversial cartoon depicting a ginger, prancing Dawkins and a grim, rotund Hitchens at a “coming out” parade. The point, as I take it, is that even atheists can be touchy about how their mascots are treated. Richard Dawkins-as-Muhammad. Though I doubt many death threats or protests will erupt over this one. Because that’s just not what we’re about. But if you happen upon any reports that the New Humanist offices have been bombed by Hitchens’ acolytes, or that the Hitch himself has called for this image’s removal in the name of decency and respect, please forward me the link. In all seriousness.

The Examined Life

Last night I sat down to watch a film on contemporary philiosophers called The Examined Life. I got about halfway through before my mother called and I spent the next hour or so hearing about her recent bout of hives (from Chinese food, no less) and how you can eat sour cream up to six months after the expiration date without any risk. She doesn’t believe in expiration dates, you see.

So I never got past Judith Butler, who was kind of boring me with talk of “the role of the body” and all kinds of deconstructionist gibberish. But she was actually fairly coherent after ten minutes of Zizek carrying on about garbage being the real soul of ecology. “To be an ecologist” – I’m quoting from memory – “means you must learn to love trash.” Zizek is hilarious but I cannot bring myself to take anything he says seriously. He’s like the Charles Bukowski of contemporary philosophers.

Here is a clip of Avital Ronell yakking on about “the other.” It’s kind of a minor masterpiece of nonsense. “The minute you think you know the other, you’re ready to kill them.” Oh, shit, really?

I could’ve used another ten minutes of Cornel West, all things considered.

This just isn’t fair

These people aren’t going to take environmental disasters lying down. They’re going to stand up and pray to God to remove the oil, save the fish and the beaches, and return their gulf to them as it once was. They feel impotent. They can’t do anything except watch from their perch on the beach. They are frustrated. I understand them, and I think we all know the frustration of not being able to lift a finger to save the world. But why this leads some people to invoke magic and invisible spirits is beyond me. Do they really think Jesus is going to swoop down out of the sky like Superman and suck up all the contaminated water and take it to some celestial cleansing facility in the sky?

Susan Jacoby reviews “Agora”

And she likes it!

This idea of intellectual inquiry as a self-evident good died in the West for nearly 1200 years with the ascendancy of Christianity, and it is always–as we see in much of the Islamic world and in the precincts of far-right Christianity today–an object of hatred for those who would still criminalize heresy and blasphemy and, in the case of Islamists, murder those who defy their definitions.

Something decent in the Guardian

Every so often the Guardian publishes something I like:

I am an atheist. I imagine that the typical Cif belief reader may not think this is a particularly big deal, but it is for me, because I’m not just an atheist – I’m an apostate from Islam. Apparently there are people who would happily kill me for making such a statement. But I’m not expecting to be killed, or even threatened; despite what the BNP and certain elements of the press might want you to think, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not rabid fundamentalists who respond with violence to every perceived slight.

Comments are always revealing, and sometimes they are incomprehensible. Like this one:

As it says in the Qur’an, there is no compulsion in religion. Thanks and good luck.

Well, either the Qur’an I’ve been reading was translated by Sam Harris, or this commenter has an extremely flexible idea of what “compulsion in religion” is. There’s scarcely any content in the Qur’an which is not explicitly compulsive. If indeed it can be said that this book is “about” anything, that something is the compulsion to faith. Unbelievers are cordoned off to one side and proscribed from the believer’s worlview. They must be fought with zeal and gusto.

If you don’t believe me, read the book for yourself.

“Negative, negative”

The IDF gave them a fair chance. This makes me wonder if the actual scope of the flotilla was to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, or just to cause a media stir. And why were there so many weapons on board? And children?

Flotilla and “Women”

While the Flotilla Incident was happening I was busy reading the Qur’an. Since the waters are still murky around Gaza I’ll refrain from commenting. It’s going to be a long week.

I’m on the chapter called “Women”, ostensibly because there are passages of Leviticus-like lawgiving on the the treatment of women interspersed among further injunctions to “kill them wherever you find them.” Here is to be found a brilliant commandment to convert the unbelievers on penalty of death:

Do not take them for friends until they emigrate in the cause of God. If they refuse, sieze them and kill them wherever you find them, and do not take them as friend or ally, etc…

It’s not much worse than much of Deuteronomy, really, except that it was written a thousand or so years later. So Muhammad no longer has the excuse of antiquity for this kind of barbarism.

From “The Cow” to “The House of ‘Imran”

God has hardened my heart. I guess he wanted it that way, otherwise I would be a Muslim.

By now I’m far enough into the Qur’an that its repetitiveness is beginning to wear thin. “God is compassionate to each” is frequently followed up with the usual asides about the fires of hell being stoked for the unbelievers, blasphemers and the like. We are the scum of the Qur’anic earth.

Bible stories retold in digest version are recast as Islamic fables. Pious Jews and Christians are really Muslims, because Islam is the only true faith of the pious. The others are imposters, pious frauds, evildoers. It’s difficult to imagine a more polarizing conception of humanity.

Piety, faith, blah blah blah. There are some fair poetic passages reminiscent of the Psalms, but they are outweighed by the Qur’an’s obsession with the People of the Book. If you feel this book represents truth on any scale, and you wish to be among the pious, you might just devote yourself to its message. The alternatives presented here are dire.

Money quote: O believers, do not adopt as intimate friends those outside your circle. I guess that explains why I don’t have too many friend requests from Muslims on Facebook.

Another atheist reads the Qur’an

Alright, so I finally bought a copy of the Qur’an with the intention to read it. I was inspired by the fact that two new translations have recently been published by those erstwhile publishers of the world’s best books, Oxford and Penguin Classics. The Oxford edition is weighted down by lots of notes and footnotes, and the text is cluttered. That’s no way to approach a book like the Qur’an for the first time. After much reflection, I opted for the Penguin, which has the advantage of alternating between prose and verse. The pages are neat and there are spaces between the paragraphs. So Penguin won my hard-earned 10 euro.

For the record, I’m not out to diss the Qur’an. So no death threats, please.

Update: Halfway through the sura The Cow – which is the longest one – I’m getting a bit tired of being called names. Deaf. Dumb. Blind. I do not understand. I am as dumb as an ox. Why? Because I ask too many questions. The Qur’anic message thus far is, believe because I say so. Oh, yeah? Even the Bible tries to draw you in with finely woven tales of God’s miracles, good and evil behavior, natural wonders. It makes an attempt to convince. It goes out of its way to persuade. The Qur’an is the realm of absolute certainty, utter piety and eternal fire for the unbelievers.

Nonetheless, I’m enjoying it despite pronouncements like, “Your women are your sowing field; approach your field whenever you please.” That wouldn’t go down well in our home.