blog | Crommunist

7 That being said…

October 12, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · cultural tolerance · good news · religion

Religious people are still capable of committing acts of great kindness:

Rabbis from Jewish settlements have given a box of Korans to a West Bank mosque as a gesture of solidarity after an arson attack blamed on settlers. Palestinians cheered as the rabbis and other settlers arrived at the village of Beit Fajjar in bulletproof cars accompanied by Israeli soldiers. They were welcomed by the local imam.

It will be my ongoing struggle as I continue to write this blog (hopefully sticking with it for a while – we’re at 8 months now) to ensure that I maintain a sense of perspective and balance. While my rampant liberal bias is evident from even a casual glance, I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that evidence which may not support my argument entirely. This particular story is a case of true religious tolerance and attempts to reconcile.

“This act does nothing for the settlements; it is morally and religiously wrong and is offensive to its core,” he added. “This is not how we educated our children; Islam is not a hostile religion even if we have a dispute with some of its followers.”

The governor of Bethlehem, Abdel Fatah Hamayel, said: “We welcome the Jews to Beit Fajjar so they can see with their own eyes the crime that was committed in this mosque, which was against humanity and against religion.”

When secularists and anti-theists like myself talk about the evils of religion, we are explicitly not talking about people like this. What we are talking about is the kind of hatred and illogic that spawns the attack in the first place. We are talking about the idea that there can be a ‘crime against religion’, as though religion has rights that go beyond the rights of the human beings that make up their congregations. Ideas don’t have rights. Beliefs don’t have rights. Philosophies don’t have rights. People do.

However, it’s often tempting to gloss over the good things that are done in the name of religion in my zeal to tear down the idea of religion as meriting some kind of special treatment or special rights. It’s especially difficult to bring up the positive things done in the name of religion when there are so many unbelievably evil things done with the same justification. Hopefully my willingness to highlight these kinds of things will lend my words a bit more credibility when I jump up and down on the head of the followers of YahwAlladdha – I’m not just saying this stuff because it’s fun; I’m saying it because it’s real.

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32 Why not offending the religious is bullshit

October 12, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · crapitalism · religion · secularism

As I mentioned a couple weeks back, there is a debate within the atheist/secular community about the best approach to spreading the message that we exist and care about things. Briefly, the two camps boil down into accommodationists – those who think we should be working with religious groups and believers to find common ground, and confrontationalists – those who think that the preferable approach is to be assertive and not worry about making people feel good. Daniel Schaeller prefers the terms ‘diplomats’ and ‘firebrands’, which I think is an apt (and less unwieldy) characterization.

If it’s not clear from the way I write here (and the title on the top of this post), I ally myself more closely with the firebrands. While I recognize the simultaneous facts that a) both approaches are crucial to advance the secular position, and b) that the diplomats will get all the credit when the dust clears, I have never been one to shy away from controversy in the name of sparing people’s feelings. But there’s another issue in the mix that seemingly goes without comment.

Most of you have probably heard of Richard Dawkins, the British biologist and professor who is the author of books like The God Delusion, The Ancestor’s Tale, Climbing Mount Improbable, and most recently The Greatest Show on Earth. Undoubtedly if you’re not familiar with his work, you’ve simply heard that he’s a militant asshole. In fact, the term ‘militant atheist’ gets thrown around so much that I find myself being accused of being just as bad as those who murder in the name of their religion, as though clearly expressing my thoughts on a blog is the same as killing someone.

Here’s the problem. Richard Dawkins is not a militant asshole. He’s a nerd from England who likes poetry and evolutionary biology – that’s it. What is his major crime that has earned him the appellation of ‘militant’? He wrote some books and has given some speeches. He also refuses to pretend as though the weaksauce apologies for religion are worth more than the air it takes to utter them. But because he’s talking about religion, he’s somehow violent and hateful. Well I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit, and here are some reasons why.

1. Coptic Pope Apologizes for Insulting Islam

Earlier, Bishop Bishoy had said that – contrary to Muslim belief – some verses of the Koran may have been inserted after the death of Prophet Muhammad. Egypt’s al-Azhar Islamic authority said the comments threatened national unity… “Debating religious beliefs are a red line, a deep red line,” Pope Shenouda said in the television interview on Sunday. “The simple fact of bringing up the subject was inappropriate, and escalating the matter is inappropriate,” he added.

This is the religious mindset, when allowed to take root in the public conscience. Not only does a comment made by a member of one religious organization – made about a different organization – threaten national unity, but even talking about beliefs is somehow inappropriate. Can you imagine if someone from the Canadian government made an announcement that debating economic policy or health care or military involvement was “a deep red line” that couldn’t even be discussed? They’d be laughed out of the room, or perhaps chased out with pitchforks. And yet, when a religious person says something so breathtakingly stupid, we’re just supposed to follow along. If we don’t, then we’re somehow militant.

You want militant? I’ve got your militant right here:

2. Austrian temple shooting yields convictions

An Austrian court has convicted six Indian men in connection with a gun attack in a temple in Vienna in which a visiting preacher was killed. Indian preacher Sant Ramanand, 57, was shot dead and more than a dozen others wounded, including another preacher… Prosecutors say the men had planned the attack on the visiting preacher because of a religious dispute. The men went on the rampage wielding a gun and knives during a temple service attended by about 150 people.

That is what a militant position looks like. Ideas that do not conform to your own are not met with skepticism or even outright dismissal, but violence. The lives of those who disagree with your position are forfeit. People who think differently from you deserve to die. Assuming the men in the court case were literate they could have written a book. Even if they weren’t literate they probably could have started a blog (the internet has pretty low standards). They could have protested. They could have said “I am secure enough in my beliefs that I will completely ignore your obvious stupidity.” But that’s not what a militant does. What a militant does is get 5 friends, board a plane to another country, and then try to shoot and stab 150 people. And yet, when firebrand atheists point this out, the immediate response is that we are “no better” than these terrorist fuckbags for being vocally opposed to religion in public life.

The religious shouldn’t be worried about atheists, they should be worrying about each other:

3. Palestinian mosque set on fire

Israel is investigating Palestinian reports that a mosque in the West Bank has been set alight by Jewish settlers. Palestinian officials say settlers set fire to the mosque in Beit Fajjar, near the town of Bethlehem. They blame residents of a nearby settlement because the arsonists reportedly scrawled Hebrew graffiti on one of the mosque’s walls.

I recognize that the conflict between Israel and Palestine is beyond my full understanding. It is a complex issue involving history, geography, foreign political influence, and xenophobia. However, when it asserts itself in the form of the destruction of religious buildings, it’s difficult for anyone to try and say that religion doesn’t play a central role in the problem.

So I challenge those who would use the phrase ‘militant atheist’ to do the following: find me one example of threats of the destruction of national unity, or mass murder, or the destruction of religious buildings, committed by atheists in the name of atheism, and I will make you a batch of delicious cookies.

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3 It don’t matter if you’re not black or white

October 11, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · crommunism · race

Because we live in Canada, and because so much of the way we see ourselves is inextricably tied up with the United States, we tend to see racism issues as black and white. I don’t mean this in a philosophical dichotomy way, I mean that we tend to focus on race and racism as a black people issue and a white people issue. At the presentation I gave on October 1st, I realized after the fact that the majority of my examples of race and racism are about black people in opposition to white people. Many of my examples from the blog are about black issues in the context of the white majority.

The reality, however, is that race issues go way beyond black and white. We live in a country (and, particularly, I live in a city) that is made up of a number of different groups with distinct cultural histories that are interacting in a unique way. Each group has its own issues to resolve with every other, and the majority of these have nothing to do with white people. Kids whose parents are from India or Pakistan (or those who are born there and immigrate) have to resolve old-world issues completely out of context of shared geography. Korean kids and Chinese kids are superficially grouped into “Asian” here in North America, but there is significant conflict between the countries of China and South Korea, conflict which is compounded by the fact that most others don’t know enough to differentiate between these two groups. Native Canadians find themselves in much the same condition (at least as far as perception goes) as black people, and yet there is very little camaraderie between the two groups.

The fact is that the racial conversation is very real for groups that don’t fall into a black/white or the _______/white dichotomy. James Sweet, a blogger from Rochester, NY, recently posted a piece asking why we use the phrase “person of colour”. After all, everyone is a colour – white people aren’t actually ‘white’. Why do we cling to this ridiculous nomenclature that seems to divide the world into white and non-white?

I responded in the comments to suggest that the reason for the term is because there are issues that are relevant to non-white people as a classification, but that referring to them as “non-white” reinforces the subtle idea that white people are the “default”, whereas everyone else is a deviation from that standard. To forestall the predictable objection that ‘nobody really thinks like that’ – yes, they do. A lot. I recently had a meeting with someone who I hadn’t met before (well I had, but she didn’t remember me). When I arrived, she walked right past me. I introduced myself, and she was shocked. “I was expecting you to be short and Irish,” she said. Now far be it from me to suggest that this says anything negative about this person, she’s really very nice and quite professional. It is simply that her assumption, based partially on my name and partially on the job title I have, was that I would be a white guy. So much so that it didn’t even occur to her that the black guy waiting outside her office was her 11 o’clock.

So we use “person of colour” as a way of describing a sociocultural phenomenon of existing in contrast with a dominant political majority group, without implicitly elevating that group. It’s a subtle rebranding that helps to erode one of the subtle nuances of endemic racial bias, rather than simply being an arch-PC term to avoid hurting feelings.

However, and this is really the subject that this post is about, there are far more numerous racial dichotomies that we as PoC deal with every day that have nothing to do with white people. In this particular case, treating PoC as a homogeneous group does us a significant disservice, because it accomplishes a counterproductive elevation of non-PoC, while necessarily neglecting the fact that the group is not a group.

So why don’t I spend more time talking about these other conflicts along racial lines? If I recognize that the black/white dichotomy is an oversimplification of race and race issues, why not do my part as an anti-racist commenter (if I may be so bold as to describe myself that way) and focus on these other issues? Part of my reluctance to wade into those other conflicts is that I don’t have any connection to them. I grew up observing the black/white dialogue, since it was relevant to my life personally. Simply being a PoC doesn’t grant me some kind of magical insight into cultures that are not my own, except insofar as I recognize those elements that are common to my own history.

I regret that I wasn’t able to make this issue more explicit during my talk, because I may have seemed to grant license to treat the black/white issue as either emblematic of the totality of the race discussion; or worse – I may have suggested that only black/white racism is worth discussing. I certainly did not intend to convey that, and I’m hopeful that anyone who was at the presentation or who watched it online didn’t carry that impression away.

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3 Movie Friday: Boys beware

October 8, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · funny · movie · sex

Not much to do with this one but laugh

I love how menacing “the homosexual” is, with his pencil-thin moustache. Who looks like that?

Never mind…

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1 Pope demonstrates why the cake is a lie

October 7, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · Catholic church · crapitalism · politics · religion

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

– George Orwell, 1984

There’s a concept in the sciences called “regression to the mean”. In statistics, regression to the mean is a phenomenon whereby as you add more observations to a sample, the values will tend to fall around the average (mean) value. In science, this effect is seen in the form of extreme observations moving toward the average the more frequently or longer they are observed. In medicine, we see this phenomenon in sick people who spontaneously improve in a non-intervention (or a placebo) control group.

This somewhat overlaps with the “relative frame of reference” idea from physics – that is, that a stationary object appears to be moving towards you at the same rate you move towards it. As such, spontaneous regression to the mean, seen from an outside perspective, appears to be a move either up or down toward the average. However, if your frame of reference is one that views things from the perspective of an observation that lies far above the mean, regression toward the mean appears to be a move downward.

I’ve also spoken before about the completely false picture of Christianity that some Christians like to paint – that of poor beleaguered misfits just trying to practice their own beliefs in peace. It’s a complete lie, and thanks to the Pope, I have evidence:

The Pope said: “I cannot but voice my concern at the increasing marginalisation of religion, particularly of Christianity, that is taking place in some quarters, even in nations which place a great emphasis on tolerance. There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere. There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none.”

Yes, Mr. Ratzinger (which sounds, incidentally, like a really unpalatable flavour of tea), from your privileged perspective high atop the social ladder, it would appear that Christianity is being “marginalized”. However, you betray your own ridiculous level of special pleading in your own words. The advocacy of moving religion out of the public square into the private sphere is not marginalization. Nobody is forcing Christians to stop believing what they like – they’re just not allowed to make decisions on behalf of other people. And yes, the people who argue against Christmas have a point – namely, that a specific religious belief system is not representative of the population at large.

The reason for the Orwell quote at the top is that the Pope spends the first 7 minutes of his address talking about the need for freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. He then pivots (on the head of Sir Thomas Moore) to talk about how religion should be more involved in political life. It’s not hypocrisy to him, it’s doublethink. He holds the ideas of freedom of religion simultaneously with the idea of greater church control of public life.

He also pulls the ‘lack of moral fundamentals’ card, a personal favourite of mine (so brazen is its hypocrisy). He talks a good game about the need to use reason, but in true Catholic style, he makes the Augustinian provision that reason should be subject to religion. He actually encourages more religiosity in the body politic, as though places like Iran, Somalia, the USA and Malawi aren’t warning signs that religion is a lousy way to run a country.

It appears to be Ratzinger’s intent to smear secularism, asserting repeatedly that it is somehow comparable to fundamentalism. Please show me one fundamentalist secularist. I’d really be curious to see one.

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4 Free speech vs… yo mamma!

October 7, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · funny · movie

Because Vancouver Moose asked for it:

36 Free speech vs… the Internet

October 7, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · free speech

I’ve periodically waxed poetic about my love affair with the internet. I view it as a new version of the printing press, giving unprecedented access to both information and speech to millions of people who would otherwise never even glimpse the leaps and bounds made in the last 100 years. This level of access will ultimately have a stabilizing effect on the world, as ideas will spread, and issues will no longer be bound by physical or political borders.

However, this level of access has negative repercussions as well:

The sharp growth in extremist websites is making recruitment much easier for al-Qaeda, according to Interpol head Ronald Noble. “The threat is global, it is virtual and it is on our doorsteps,” he said. Mr Noble told a conference of police chiefs in Paris there were 12 sites in 1998 and 4,500 by 2006.

This is the ugly side of free speech. Allowing all people access to a tool like the internet means that everyone will, eventually, use it. Sadly, the reality is that ‘everyone’ includes a bunch of assholes who think that violence is a reasonable and justifiable way of spreading ideas.

So what are lawful societies supposed to do? Block the information? They may pursue that, but thanks to teh G00gle, they may not be able to do it with impunity any longer:

Earlier this year, Google released details about how often countries around the world ask it to hand over user data or to censor information. The new map and tools follows on from that and allows users to click an individual country to see how many removal requests were fully or partially complied with, as well as which Google services were affected.

Of course, this is only one server (albeit a major one), but it may point in the direction of what will happen to freedom of information in the future. There will be a struggle between civilian governments and large corporations over who has access to and control over the series of tubes that make up the internet. The tool is really not altogether that useful yet. I was able to learn that Canada has fewer than 10 requests to remove Google-based data (YouTube, Blogger, etc.) Somewhat encouraging, I suppose.

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3 Free speech vs… the state

October 6, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · free speech · politics · secularism

I’ve talked about how religion steps on free speech to serve its own ends in society, but that’s not an entirely fair charge. It is not only religion that does this. As I mentioned a couple weeks back, sometimes a non-religious agency will do the same thing. It seems to be the nature of those in power to try and shut out any dissenting voices. The societies that are the most stable are those where honest disagreement is allowed, and that the excesses of the governing party can be exposed to the public. This serves the dual simultaneous purpose of forcing the leaders to be less corrupt, and of informing the populace so that corrupt leaders can be democratically removed.

Any time free speech is abrogated, you can pretty much guarantee that there’s some shady shit going down behind the scenes. It is for this reason that I am afraid of China:

A Surrey-based reporter says China’s Ministry of State Security is threatening his family, life and livelihood for his critical coverage of the Chinese government… some of [Tao Wang’s] reports have been critical of the Chinese government and its practices. NTDTV is one of the few networks with dissenting views that broadcasts in the Communist nation. He said the threatening phone calls began a month ago and have become increasingly harsh, escalating to the point of death threats.

Mr. Tao reports for the Falun Gong station NTDTV. For those of you who don’t know, Falun Gong is a pseudo-religious group in China that has been the subject of a targeted government crackdown. The Chinese government has identified practitioners as cult members whose activities undermine the social and economic progress of China. The idea of punishing someone for their beliefs should be immediately chilling to those of us in the secular movement, as it is precisely the same activity taken by theocratic fascist regimes against those who do not believe. Religious heterodoxy is a crime in China, which completely invalidates any claims it might make to being a progressive secular state.

So while I am not a fan of religion, I stand by my commitments that any country that wishes to model long-term secular values has to guarantee freedom of thought and expression to all people. We can neither favour nor be prejudiced against people based on their belief.

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1 Free speech vs… Islam

October 6, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · civil rights · free speech · politics · religion · secularism

There’s much hooting and hollering happening in the United States right now about whether or not it should be considered a “Christian country.” The facts are, of course, arrayed in multitude that it is absolutely not founded on Christianity. Facts are, however, of limited use when you’re talking to the religious. There may be some confusion among the less faith-headed over why there is such opposition to the idea of a Christian country. After all, Christianity is a religion of peace, right? Religious values built this country, didn’t it? Why would anyone resist the idea of a religion-based country?

Somali militants who have seized a radio and TV station say it will now broadcast only Islamic messages. Hassan Dahir Aweys, who leads the Hizbul Islam group, said he wanted the broadcasts to serve Islam.

Muslim scholars and moderates maintain vehemently that Islam is a religion of peace too. Those who use violence in the name of Islam are said to be “not really following” the religion. The whole thing about religious belief is that there is no “true version” of it. History has shown us that fractions inevitably occur within a group that is, at least titularly, following the same doctrine. Within Christianity there’s a wide swath from Unitarian or Anglican churches, wherein most of the specific religious rules are ignored in favour of a fuzzy kind of belief, to the Westboro Baptist Church, which is ultra-conservative and strict. Neither one of these is the “right” version of Christianity – members of both churches consider themselves True Christians.

This is the same phenomenon happening in Somalia. Fuzzy moderate Muslims in Canada probably don’t recognize their beliefs reflected in the actions of these paramilitary thugs who would torture and beat journalists in the name of Islam. However, the thugs themselves probably don’t recognize any True Muslims who would tolerate blasphemy against Allah or Muhammad, or go to schools with people of other faiths. Both groups can mine the Qu’ran to find justification for their respective beliefs. It is clearly not to the benefit of the people in these societies:

Radio stations provide a vital source of information for residents of Mogadishu who, because of the ongoing violence, need to be constantly updated on which areas are unsafe. But in the face of ongoing attacks, it is virtually impossible for them to carry out their work.

It is for this reason that secular humanists like myself are immediately wary of anyone who wants special recognition for religion – any religion – enshrined by law. History has shown again and again that when religion gains worldly power, it takes away civil freedoms by degrees, all in the name of the betterment of society (by which it means the church). This ‘better society’, instead of being based on observable, agreed-upon, verifiable evidence (such as vaccination campaigns, public health care, welfare programs, pension programs, etc.) is based on fundamentally unprovable promises of effects that can only be seen after death. I might not like paying taxes, but I can see the benefits of social programs now, requiring no faith on my part.

Luckily, there appears to be some pushback against these actions:

Somali journalists have walked out of a radio station recently seized by Islamists in the capital, Mogadishu. The staff at GBC said they refused to take orders from Hizbul Islam militants… The journalists from GBC, which was popular for its broadcasts of international football matches, said they had been ordered to refer to the government as “apostate”. “We defied because we do not want to lose our impartiality,” one of the reporters said, asking not to be named for security reasons.

But I don’t expect these gunmen to be particularly happy about it, or to say “well that’s your right to do it.”

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0 Online anonymity battle continues

October 5, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · free speech

This is another one of those issues I haven’t made up my mind about. Last week I mentioned an effort to create an IP-masking technology for use in Iran (and presumably other countries that don’t allow their citizens free speech). In a country where blasphemy is a crime and people are imprisoned for political opposition, there is a need to protect people who have unpopular ideas from state punishment. However, on the other side of the argument, I’m a firm believer in people standing behind their ideas rather than making anonymous assaults on others and then retreating into cyberspace. Imagine how quickly hate speech would disappear if people knew who was making it.

That appears to be the same problem that Blizzard is grappling with:

But despite the large population, MMORPG players, more so than members of almost any online community, expect their identities to remain hidden, largely due to the social stigma attached to playing such games — but also for fear of real-world retribution for World of Warcraft -realm actions.

The actions the article refers to concern the fate of one Micah Whipple, a moderator on an online forum who, in support of company policy, dropped his anonymity online. Immediately personal details about him, including his home address and phone number, were mined from social networking sites and other open-source documents and posted online. This is illustrative of the vehemence with which the online community wishes to preserve its members’ individual freedoms.

While I can appreciate the intent of the company to reduce forum trolling:

I think my inclination tends to fall on the side of anonymity. While we do have free speech protections in this part of the world, that protects us from legal action and reprisal only. What it doesn’t protect is the identity of a teen who is reaching out to the LGBT community for guidance on how to come out to his parents. It doesn’t protect an atheist living in a Christian-dominated city, for whom an admission of non-belief would affect her job and community standing. It certainly doesn’t protect someone whose political opinions run contrary to those of their neighbours.

It may still be necessary to protect online anonymity, at least for now. Some technoprophets are predicting that anonymity will become a quaint affectation of yesteryear, like a woman identifying herself as Mrs. (Husband’s full name). What the Blizzard experiment has revealed is that while that time may in fact come, it’s not here yet.

Shitcock.

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