Dave’s Archives

There seems to be a growing school of thought in Western countries that the burqa (or other forms of Islamic headdress) should be banned, with several European countries (including Belgium, France and Spain) debating or already having passed laws against it. There are murmurings here too, by the Liberals' Cory Bernardi and the Christian Democrats' Fred Nile.

The most ludicrous claim is that such religious clothing is a security risk. If that were so, we ought to ban all manner of clothing, including just about anything you might want to wear if the temperature drops below about 20 degrees C (as it has been known to do, on occasion), or even if it doesn't. Bernardi and others claim that the veil obscures the wearer's identity. This may be so, but implication is that none of us are entitled to anonymity - we must be readily identifiable in any public place to which we might venture. Why? We are not (yet) a police state, and I rather like the idea of being anonymous when out in public. I suspect most other people would as well, if they thought about it. Identifying specific circumstances in which the veil may cause problems does not justify a blanket ban. The security argument is simply designed to press the buttons of islamophobes looking for the most flimsy of excuses.

A marginally less ridiculous argument concerns women's rights. It is argued that we ought to ban such clothing because it represents the submission of women to a male-controlled religious establishment. This is a little more plausible, but there are still two enormous holes in the argument:

1. What about Muslim women who want to wear religious clothing, due to a genuine, freely-held belief that it's the right thing to do? Any claim to be defending their rights through a ban on such clothing is completely nonsensical. If you're not actually being oppressed, then the fact that some people see your clothing as a symbol of oppression is utterly irrelevant.
2. Even in cases where religious clothing does indicate female subjugation and/or religious oppression, it's only a symptom of the problem. A likely outcome of any ban might be to effectively prevent women in such an unfortunate position from going out in public at all. After all, it's they who will be targeted under any ban, not their oppressors. They will face a three-way choice - violate the law, violate religious commandments, or stay at home. The law might be written to ban men from forcing women to wear religious clothing, but how do you enforce that? You can't legislate to force people behave as if they aren't at the wrong end of a power relationship, or as if their beliefs don't matter. It's the women in question who will miss out on attending university, getting a job, etc., and this lack of exposure to society would only entrench the problem. If there really is a problem, what on Earth could possess you to think that punishing the victims will solve it?

I worry that this argument has ensnared a number of feminists, which is disheartening because it's largely anti-feminist. It appeals to one's sense that one group ought not to impose standards on another, but the proposed solution is to hypocritically impose just such a standard while ignoring whatever religious/gender power relationship might be at the root of the problem - if indeed there is a problem. The argument probably arises out of the ancient reactionary instinct that "bad things" can simply be banned. It's not always that simple. Whatever you think of the idea of covering yourself up in public, or even of forcing others to do so, surely it's better that devout Muslim women feel they can at least be in public places.

The final fall-back argument is high-minded secularism. France, for instance, bans all "conspicuous" religious symbols from state schools. This thinking also annoys me. (The protagonists talk about values, which is never a good sign in political debates.)

I'm a great fan of secularism. I think it is, almost by definition, the only way that different religious groups can coexist peacefully. When I'm wearing my atheist hat, of course, I argue that religion and religious beliefs are unnecessary, that morality derives from human nature (far from being in conflict with it), the universe is inherently naturalistic, etc. I see those arguments as being largely of intellectual value, while the political arena presents an entirely different set of problems.

Secularism is essentially the separation of church and state. It is not anti-religious; it permits any type of belief system that does not infringe the rights of others. The state is supposed to be, as much as possible, agnostic.

So what, then, is the state doing making judgments of what constitutes religious clothing or symbolism? In theory, the state shouldn't even be aware of the concept of religious clothing or symbolism, because such awareness in itself breaches state-church separation. The state should merely ensure that the rights of its citizens are being upheld.

To impose a ban on religious clothing or symbolism (except perhaps for those people who symbolise the state itself - but that's a side issue) is not a secular idea, but an anti-religious one. I have no love of religion, but government intervention isn't how atheism wins. It is far more important that everyone in society be able to get along. Militant secularism is not secularism at all.

There's nothing like a righteous religious leader for a good dose of stagnant inanity. Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen doesn't let us down (SBS, ABC, News Ltd):

As we can see by the sheer passion and virulence of the atheist - they seem to hate the Christian God - we are not dealing here with cool philosophy up against faith without a brain.

One should immediately be suspicious of the phrase "the atheist". Those two words alone give Jensen away, if you think about it for a moment. At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, it brings to mind whinging complaints about "the Jew". The reason he does it, I imagine, is that it carries more weight than just "atheists". He's not referring to the group overall, but to each and every member of it. They're all the same, so nuanced reasoning is not required.

The "passion and virulence" of atheists was picked up on earlier by Monash University Professor Gary Bouma, who accuses atheists of stoking sectarian conflict. This is a convenient rhetorical device used to turn "arguing the point" into something negative. I haven't heard of any atheist mobs hurling bricks through church windows. It's really just hypocritical invective.

"Atheists hate God" has been a long-running mantra in certain religious circles, voiced frequently by those who apparently see no contradiction in the idea of hating an entity that one does not believe to exist. Christians do not generally "hate" the various supernatural entities of other religions (as far as I'm aware), so why would atheists "hate" the Christian God? I find it incredible that this misconception continues. Jensen clearly suffers from an acute lack of imagination.

Atheism is every bit of a religious commitment as Christianity itself.

This is a manifest falsehood, made all the more dishonest because Jensen uses such emphasis. Christianity posits an entire volume of miracles, historical events, prophecies, commandments, virtues, vices and assorted supernatural beings, not to mention the church's additional evolving beliefs, rituals and systems of authority over the last two millennia. What dogma does atheism have to compare to all this? Atheism merely states that there is no God, and even that is argued over within the atheist community. (Is it right to say that God doesn't exist, or merely that we cannot substantiate the concept of God?)

As a general remark, it's curious that religious leaders choose to describe atheism condescendingly as a religion. They have no problem describing as religions their own institutions, which purport to offer the most important truths that you can possibly know. Surely, if their world view has any merit, calling atheism a religion would be elevating, not denigrating it. This is a hint that our protagonists don't truly believe what they're saying. I suspect they know at some level, perhaps subconsciously, that religion cannot compete with science or higher philosophy; that in fact it does not offer the absolute truth of the universe. Instead, they merely resort to suggesting (without a hint of justification) that atheism also suffers from the same fundamental problems.

It represents the latest version of the human assault on God, born out of resentment that we do not in fact rule the world and that God calls on us to submit our lives to him.

It is a form of idolatry in which we worship ourselves.

The notion of a "human assault on God" is rather amusing. Is Jensen really saying that rebellious atheists are ganging up on the Supreme Being? The force that supposedly created time itself and brought into existence a trillion galaxies is under "assault" from the electrical impulses of a bunch of organic molecules on one tiny rock? Forgive me if I don't show overflowing concern for His well-being. Even if I believed in Him, I'd expect the Creator of the Universe to be a little more resilient than that.

As for resentment and idolatry, I suspect this is just part of how Jensen justifies his own faith. The notion that it might be possible to not worship anything at all seems alien to people who make these sorts of arguments. They don't truly believe that atheism is even possible, so they translate it into something else more amenable to their understanding.

Jensen might reflect on the company in which he finds himself. Among the other religious commentators of late is Catholic Bishop of Parramatta Anthony Fisher:

Last century we tried godlessness on a grand scale and the effects were devastating: Nazism, Stalinism, Pol Pot-ery, mass murder, abortion and broken relationships - all promoted by state-imposed atheism.

This is why I think I'm safe from Godwin's Law. It's pure self-parody. I'm happy to see that, in a list containing Nazism and Stalinism, Fisher found room to bemoan the tyranny of broken relationships.

I read that the National Biblical Literacy Survey 2009 in the UK has reported a poor showing for Bible knowledge. I can't say I'm either terribly surprised or troubled by this; there are any number of other literary works more deserving of public knowledge, and at some level this must be reflected in the public's attitude.

There is, of course, some lingering sense that we "should" understand the Bible; that it above all other books has some special status. Well, that particular miscellaneous collection of ambiguously-translated ramblings is supposed to be the Definitive Word of the Infallible Creator of the Universe, isn't it? Of course it is - it says so itself. Comments from those affiliated with the survey are not much more moderate:

Brown said the survey showed the need to push for greater religious education among young people as knowledge of the Bible among the under-45 age group was in decline.

"We have got to recognize that it (the Bible) is the foundation of our society, upon which our whole culture has been based," he told Reuters. "To understand it and to live in it you do need an understanding of the Bible."

Well, I'm not entirely convinced. If only someone had conducted a survey to determine the relevance of the Bible to our society. Oh look, they did! This piece of logic evidentially fails on some people. The fact that few of us know or care about the Bible these days is fairly good evidence that it isn't relevant to much of our society at all, let alone forms the foundation of it. I assume, of course, that British and Australian culture are not too far removed.

To understand and live in Iranian or Saudi Arabian society, by contrast, I imagine you would need a solid understanding of the Koran and other sources of Islamic doctrine, but then that's because those countries are theocracies. The West has spent a good few hundred years slowly disentangling society and governance from religion, and frankly we're all much better off as a result.

There are many things to be said about debating in online forums. One, that you learn early on, is that it doesn't take much effort to find the fruitcakes. It really doesn't. The people who firmly believe that the World Trade Centre was brought down by explosives, as evidenced by the "indisputable fact" that it "fell faster than gravity", because just look at that YouTube video. The people who believe you're going to hell not just because you don't believe in God, but because you haven't performed the 54-day version of the "Rosary Novena" (a type of prayer) and that TV shows made since the 1960s are so unforgivably immoral that they must be the work of Satan Himself. The people who equate taxation with slavery and socialism with atheism. The people who believe that oil is not derived from ancient organic matter but instead is simply "produced" by the Earth's core. The people who proudly challenge you to disprove their three-paragraph thesis on why the entirety of science on evolution and cosmology is flat-wrong and the literal Biblical account is the only possible alternative.

One person I encountered had a pet theory on the nature of photons (particles of light): that each in fact comprises an electron and a positron in orbit around each other. Facts, such as the one where photons have no mass, unlike electrons and positrons, do not pose a hindrance to such theories, I've discovered. The idea, more generally, that experts in the field have been looking into this sort of thing for quite some time, publishing multitudes of peer-reviewed journal articles along the way, is of little concern.

Not that I'd wish to put you off online debating, but as you're encountering these varied and interesting specimens, you're bound to pick up a few insults, depending on what fascinating theory you're being unreasonably sceptical of. As a change of pace from the usual names I get called - leftist, liberal, socialist, atheist (which at least is true), materialist or totalitarian - I've recently been called a "Bushbot". This is an interesting and somewhat disturbing thought, considering some of the stuff that's popped up in my George Bush "Out of Office Countdown" off-the-wall calendar.

Not even Bush though can match some of the wisdom of the Internet, which I've decided to share with you:

"In addition, the Earth is continually producing oil, because "Peak oil" was a carefully crafted myth. Oil does not come from dead dinosaurs as you skulls full of mush have been brainwashed to believe."

"Scientists are usually the last to know about anything"

"A price chart is how I make my living....It represents truth."

"A truth to point, all the Atheists I know have no children and it is always due to thier Atheistic mental state as compared to normal (spiritual) people. I know 7 Atheists; three couples. Sure many Atheists do produce children but certainly a large number possessing the Atheistic mind, refuse and will therefore generally NOT pass on either their genetic or social make up to the younger generations."

"The constant social and technological progress resulting from the constant advancement of the metaphysical mind set means that we now have societies full of people, some of whom now can survive to adulthood with all alorts of personal shortcomings. This obviously includes Atheists."

So now you know.