Keep Your Eye on Darfur

Sudan is bringing an obviously frivolous case against a school teacher for naming a Teddy Bear Muhammad.  As local activists would say, keep your eyes on the real issue:  Darfur:

Some analysts saw ulterior motives. There are tensions between Britain and Sudan over the conflict in Darfur. In a Guardian interview this month, President Omar al-Bashir expressed anger at the threat of UK sanctions against Sudan if peace talks failed.

Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a prominent peace activist in Khartoum, said: “This was an opportunity for the government to distract people from the main issues in Sudan: the problems between the authorities in the north and south of the country, the conflict in Darfur and the question of letting in United Nations peacekeepers.”

When the smoke clears, Darfur will still be an issue.  The UK and the world are not likely to lose sight of that over a teddy bear.

The Media, Opus, Islam, and Censorship

Some media outlets have censored comics from Berkeley Breathed, and the right wing pajamo-sphere has the typical overreaction:

Update (Bryan): In the story of the two spiked Opus comic strips, we see the creep of dhimmitude over the US media.

Yeah, that probably sounded overly dramatic. Sorry, this stuff makes me a little gloomy — we need Ernie Pyle but we keep getting Robert Fisk.

This is framed as a question of cowardice in the face of over sensitive Muslim sensibilities:

Which gets us back to the big fact of the day: Terrorism works.

It takes a real coward to spike something as innocuous as this.

No.  Capitalism works.  This isn’t a case of kowtowing to radical Islam.  Its an organization that exists for profit putting perceived risk above freedom of speech.  The editors weren’t thinking “Oh God!  9/11, 9/11!  We’ve got to censor this penguin!”.  It was probably more like “Will this get us sued?”.   Fear yes, but of a different sort.

Still something to be opposed.  We just don’t need hysterical claptrap like this:

At least a subsection of the press in the US is self-censoring (again) out of fear of offending Muslims, hoping to prevent another cartoon jihad or at least keep themselves out of the way when another one erupts.

What we should do is try and get some clarification from the Press.  Why are you censoring Opus?

And as Mark Levin might say, and another thing: Doonesbury has been running a series of strips about a terrorist following a US soldier home from Iraq “if we cut and ran” for the past several days. As one character even says, the terrorist is a “profiler’s dream,” which evidently means he looks Arab and says he’s a terrorist and says “death to you” if you annoy him. Start reading the series here and work your way forward.

Differences: Doonesbury is making an obviously anti-war point, and hasn’t caused a stir at all, while Opus isn’t making any particular point (beyond the flippancy of some granola-brained hippies I suppose) but is being spiked in some newspapers. Both have about an equal chance of offending Muslims, I’d say, or even that Doonesbury has a slight edge there.

AllahPundit misses the point.  Opus directly confronts aspects of Islam (and our own societal flaws).  Doonesbury directly confronts the logical inconsistencies inherent in the war supporter’s arguments.  Not quite the same.  At all, really.

Just another excuse to lambast the so called liberal media for its cowardice, when in fact we should all be confronting the corporate media for their censorship.

Of Christians, Matyrs, and Proof

There is a thought provoking post up over at Johnathan Groover’s place. I ran into it via Finding Truth. A comment over there immediately piqued my interest (emphasis mine):

yep, i think this is one that most skeptics cant really answer. there are many things that people die for. there are people who will even knowingly die for a lie (cultures where “saving face” is important will do so). but they wont go from being cowards one moment to stalwart defenders of the faith the next….UNLESS there was something that changed.

Joy oh joy, a challenge! So I bounded over to have a look (emphasis mine):

Now, I made it clear that Christians are not the only people to be persecuted and die for their faith. Many Muslims have gladly given their lives in the name of “Holy War.” Many Jews were slaugtered simply because of who they were. But I must say, just as Jesus Christ stands in a league of His own in the religious figures throughout world religions, so too the disciples and early Christians who were martyred for sharing the message of Christ stand worlds apart from those who have died for “religious causes.”

Really? There are numerous cases, across a range of faiths, were people were killed for sticking to and preaching their beliefs. Look at the Sufi masters who were killed for proclaiming they were God, or Jews asked to convert to Christianity, who preferred to be brutally murdered instead. Christians are not at all unique in being killed for standing up for their religious beliefs.

Here’s the next interesting piece:

History has shown that eleven of the twelve disciples of Jesus were martyred for their witness of Christ. Let me give a few examples. Matthew the tax collector was beheaded by the sword. Mark was tied up behind horses and literally had his body dragged to pieces for his faith.

…

Now here’s the big problem. These men made a bold claim. They (along with 120, and a larger 500) claimed to see Jesus die and then rise from the dead. On top of that, these men all abandoned Christ in His greatest time of need. They were complete cowards (as I would have been) and feared retaliation. Yet, all of sudden, these men are proclaiming at the cost of their lives, a message of the resurrection of Jesus Christ who is also the Messiah (or savior) of the world. They went from being coward to becoming some of the boldest men in the entire world.

Ok. What’s your source? The primary source is the Bible. In other words, the central claim of this “unanswerable question” for skeptics relies on circular reasoning to make its point. Of course this is a compelling claim to make, that “12 cowardly men” died bravely for something they “saw”. But how do we skeptics know that this is the actual history?

Men will die for a belief. These men died beacuse they saw something…

Those men supposedly died because they believed in what they saw. In other words, they still died for a belief. It may be a justified true belief, but it was a belief nonetheless. And of course this assumes they saw what they claim they did.

And that’s part of the problem. Too much is taken for granted here. Like this:

But I must say, just as Jesus Christ stands in a league of His own in the religious figures throughout world religions

How is he unique? Being killed for his beliefs? Liberating beings from hell? Being the son of God? Suffering for the benefit of mankind? You can find examples of each in the surrounding Pagan religions of the time, in Judaism and Islam, and in Buddhism. That’s just off the top of my head.

The question of why people would die for a belief is a very important one to be asking. As would be looking into the similarities throughout history within the context of religious persecution. But any critical look at history must employ logic. If you start your investigation with your conclusions all neatly in place, you’ll only end up where you began.

Muslim’s Veils Tests NYTimes Grasp of 9/11 and Iraq

In a breathless article on conflicts arising from adherence to a particular dress code, the New York Times drops a real gem (emphasis mine):

Some who wear the niqab, particularly younger women who have taken it up recently, concede that it is a frontal expression of Islamic identity, which they have embraced since Sept. 11, 2001, as a form of rebellion against the policies of the Blair government in Iraq, and at home.

This is a poorly constructed sentence.   It doesn’t make sense.  Even if there were some link between 9/11 and Iraq (which has been thoroughly discredited), the two events were pretty far apart in time.  In fact, the predominant attitude immediately after 9/11 was one of profound sympathy.  We may have forgotten this given how quickly we squandered that goodwill (Iraq having played no small part in that), but given that response, 9/11 does not make sense as a starting point for said rebellion.

“For me it is not just a piece of clothing, it’s an act of faith, it’s solidarity,” said a 24-year-old program scheduler at a broadcasting company in London, who would allow only her last name, al-Shaikh, to be printed, saying she wanted to protect her privacy. “9/11 was a wake-up call for young Muslims,” she said.

The response to 9/11 by Britain and the US, that I can see as a wake up call.  But 9/11 itself?  It is only a wake up call insofar as it points out the horrible suffering that comes from extremism and violence.  Certainly a wake up call, yes, but not the kind I think al-Shaikh and the NYTimes are referring to.

Knowledge and Fundamentalism

When you hear talk about adding creationism to the curriculum, and removing real sex education in favor of the farce that is abstinence only, you are witnessing a naked play for ignorance.  In a real catch, Amanda at Pandagon delves into Mary’s (of Pacific Views) post on fundamentalism and its inherent weaknesses.  So one might expect that science and knowledge crop up as issues, and they do.  Oddly, one weakness appears to be the bible itself:

What I found most interesting was Altemeyer’s conclusion that actually reading the Bible can drive people away from fundamentalism. As Mary says:

For the first problem: when the Bible is actually read, the actual text causes problems for the discerning reader. “The Bible was, they said, too often inconsistent, petty, boring, appalling, self-serving, or unbelievable.” Altemeyer found that although many fundamentalist Christians profess allegiance to an inerrant Bible, very few have actually read it

Suddenly a post over at Jesus’ General clicked for me.  He linked to the lego version of the bible (ironically, possibly not safe for work).  Specifically the story of Phineas.  Essentially God starts killing Israelites because he is none to pleased with their worship habits (other gods, idols, that sort of thing).  Until a priest named Phineas kills an Israelite man and the Midianite woman he brings home with him “into his family”.

So essentially God displays the holy trait of jealousy, commits murder, and is only satisfied when a priest murders the Romeo and Juliet of the ancient desert.

I think this hits upon Altemeyer’s observations rather keenly:  inconsistent, appalling, unbelievable.

It is appalling to think that God would kill over something like this, that the violence of a priest would be favored over love.

It is unbelievable since nothing like this happens now.  Diseases do not stop when people change their worship habits.  People intermarry amongst various faiths without calamity.  In short, for whatever reason, God seems to have stopped killing people outright (or at least, if God is still killing people, God isn’t spilling the beans to anyone).

It is inconsistent because we are taught to think of God as being all loving, and all powerful.  Really, a perfect being.  How is jealousy or murder in any way consistent with this conception of God?

Personally, I do believe in God.  I just can’t square the actions sometimes ascribed to God as being, well, God-like.

How is the belief that killing people for God is morally justified (over whom they worship) any better than the notions of sacrifice we routinely criticize “barbaric” religions for having?  Why isn’t criticism of this part of the Bible a part of our national discourse on religion?  This is from Numbers.  That’s Torah, or Old Testament.  Judaism and Christianity.  Why don’t you hear about this when people complain that Islam is a violent religion?

If reading these sorts of things can turn people off of fundamentalism, that is very encouraging.  But what does it say about those who read about such violence in the name of God, and remain biblical literalists?  What impact does that kind of ethics and logic have when they take part in politics?