God is a Tool and a Weapon
From Fred Zackel, 3 Quarks Daily A pride of lions in the night is Chaos. Out of Chaos comes Order. So … In God We Trust. That makes a nice bumper sticker. There is more, of course, that cascades from that turning point in our evolution. For example, what we triggered by imagining the Divine might be our way of saying we imagine that we’re getting noticed by the Cosmos. American naturalist writer Stephen Crane (1871-1900) wrote the following doggerel: A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.” That being the case, we humans invented God. Or the gods. Or the Goddess. As a night light. I imagined you, God. You are a palimpsest of all the imagery my ancestors and family and culture could have imagined before me that they all slathered onto me like butter on bread. The Divine is evolutionary technology. A weapon. Or a tool. Being Human, we “imagineered” our Divines, all of them, to be extensions of us. To be solutions to our desperate straits. To Read More… | | The Paradoxes of the Re-Islamization of Muslim Societies
From Olivier Roy, The Immanent Flame This essay is one of nearly three dozen original contributions included in 10 Years After September 11, a digital collection launched today by the Social Science Research Council. In the days immediately following 9/11/01, the SSRC invited a wide range of leading social scientists to write short essays for an online forum. Ten years later, these same contributors have been asked to reflect on what has changed and what remains the same. The result is an extraordinary collection of new essays, with contributions from Rajeev Bhargava, Mary Kaldor, Barbara D. Metcalf, Saskia Sassen, Veena Das, Richard Falk, and many others.—ed. The 9/11 debate was centered on a single issue: Islam. Osama Bin Laden was taken at his own words by the West: Al-Qaeda, even if its methods were supposedly not approved by most Muslims, was seen as the vanguard or at least a symptom of “Muslim wrath” against the West, fueled by the fate of the Palestinians and by Western encroachments in the Middle East; and if this wrath, which has pervaded the contemporary history of the Middle East, has been cast in Islamic terms, it is because Islam is allegedly the main, if not the only, reference that has shaped Muslim minds and societies since the Prophet. This vertical genealogy obscured all the transversal connections (the fact, for instance, that Al-Qaeda systematized a concept of terrorism that was first developed by the Western European ultra-left of the seventies or the fact that most Al-Qaeda terrorists do not come from traditional Muslim societies but are recruited from among global, uprooted youth, with a huge proportion of converts). The consequence was that the struggle against terrorism was systematically associated with a religious perspective based on the theory of a clash of civilizations: Islam was at the core of Middle East politics, culture, and identity. This led to two possibilities: either acknowledge the “clash of civilizations” and head toward a global confrontation between the West and Islam or try to mend fences through a “dialogue of civilizations,” enhancing multiculturalism and religious pluralism. Both attitudes shared the same premises: Islam is both a religion and a culture and is at the core of the Arab identity. They differed on one essential point: for the “clashists,” there is no “moderate” Islam; for the “dialogists,” one should favor and support “moderate” Islam, with the recurring question, what is a good Muslim? To Read More… | | Pushing the Right Beliefs, for the Wrong Reasons
From Julia Galef, 3 Quarks Daily For a crash course in the tactics of persuasion, you can’t do much better than religion. Religious rhetoric is thick with arguments that win people over despite being logically flawed. Just a few of the most common:
Appeals to authority: “Believe in God, because your parents and teachers tell you to.” Appeals to consequences: “You should believe in God because without Him, people would be wicked.” Anecdotal evidence: “I prayed for my mom who had cancer, and she recovered.” Ad hominem: “People who don’t believe in God are wicked.” Appeals to fear: “Believe in God, or you will suffer for eternity.” Atheists, skeptics, and rationalists complain about arguments like these, and rightfully so. None of the above constitutes good evidence for the existence of a God. But there’s a reason religions use those appeals to authority, consequences, and fear — they work. The unfortunate truth is that people seem to be more susceptible to certain irrational arguments than they are to rational ones, which raises a troubling question for those of us who would like to combat false beliefs in society: Should we make the argument that constitutes the best evidence for the true claim, or the argument that’s most likely to persuade the person we’re talking to? To be clear, I’m not talking about lying. I’m talking about making an argument which is true but which isn’t good evidence for the claim you’re trying to advance. So for example, let’s say I wanted to convince a Catholic of the truth of the theory of evolution. My first instinct might be to lay out the evidence for the theory, showing them examples of natural selection at work, pointing to examples of transitional fossils, and so on. If my goal is to change their belief, however, I’d probably be better off explaining that the Vatican’s position is that evolution is consistent with Catholic dogma. That appeal to authority is going to be more persuasive, for someone who already trusts the authority in question, than an appeal to the relevant evidence. To Read More… | | Is There a Crisis of Secularism in Western Europe?
From Tariq Modood, The Immanent Flame Even quite sober academics speak of “a contemporary crisis of secularism,” claiming that “today, political secularisms are in crisis in almost every corner of the globe.” Olivier Roy, in an analysis focused on France, writes of “The Crisis of the Secular State,” and Rajeev Bhargava of the “crisis of secular states in Europe.” Yet this is quite a misleading view of what is happening in Western Europe. Each country in Western Europe is a secular state and while each has its own distinctive take on what this means, there are, nevertheless, two main historical strands of secularism, a main and a lesser strand. The latter is principally manifested in French laïcité, which seeks to create a public space in which religion is virtually banished in the name of reason and emancipation, and religious organizations are monitored by the state through consultative national mechanisms. The main Western European approach, which I call moderate secularism, however, sees organized religion as a potential public good or national resource (not just a private benefit), which the state can in some circumstances advance—even through an “established” church. Its public benefits can be direct, such as a contribution to education and social care through autonomous church-based organizations funded by the taxpayer; or indirect, such as the production of attitudes that create economic hope or family stability, or that contribute to conceptions of national identity, cultural heritage, ethical voice, and national ceremonies. To Read More… | |
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