Theophobia?
I watched a rather interesting, if somewhat abbreviated and terse, argument on CNN's "Paula Zahn Now" program last night. The three contestants were conservative commentator Dennis Prager, atheist author Christopher Hitchens, and Ibrahim Hooper, the national director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The debate was based upon the recent case of a Stanislav Shmulevich, a Pace University student who has been charged with a hate crime for putting two copies of the Koran in toilets; anyone unfamiliar with the case so far can read more about it here, and plenty of other places as well. I link to this one because the report seems relatively even-handed and at least recounts what's happened to date.
Having watched the argument, I find that all three participants said things with which I agree and things with which I don't. As far as demeanor goes, I thought Hitchens and Prager came across well; Hooper seemed to be rather caught up in an emotional argument, interrupted frequently and threw out a lot of red herrings. As far as Hooper goes, I only find myself in agreement with him insofar that Muslims are indeed being unfairly singled out in the US these days. There is quite a lot of hateful speech about them and a lot of nutcases calling for them to be rounded up and shot, deported, etc., based exclusively on their ethnicity and/or religious ideology. I also thought Prager's definition of Islamaphobia was well-conceived if not entirely useful; I think there are far more people who advocate violence against Muslims who don't separate the religious belief from the basic humanity of the people who hold to it than he's letting on. I do agree with him insofar as his point that criticizing the ideology isn't necessarily the same as being phobic about the people who hold to it; I'll get back to that. Hitchens, for his part, made excellent points about the case against Shmulevich itself and the fact that religious books are given a different treatment than other books based on the unsupported notion that they are somehow of a different essential value than any other book. He's right in saying that there's no difference between, say, burning a copy of the Koran and burning a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Personally, I don't see myself doing either one. The whole notion that a book can be desecrated rests on the idea that there is something sacred about it in the first place, though, and that concept itself relies upon the presumed existence of some property called "sacred-ness." Has anyone hooked up a sacramentometer yet? In just what units is sacredness measured — kiloblessings/meter/gram, maybe?
As far as the case against Shmulevich goes, invoking the charge of a hate crime against him is unwarranted. Certainly I could see charging him with destruction of public property for intentionally block up toilets, and perhaps even harassment for attempting to intimidate some specific people with whom he'd had an argument. However, what he did doesn't meet the legal definition of a hate crime, and by his own statements it doesn't appear that Shmulevich even intended his act to be noticed by Muslims in general, but by a specific group of people who happened to be Muslim. Even if this isn't the case, though, it would be difficult to prove that Shmulevich's attempting to flush a couple of Korans could be counted as a threat of violence against Muslims or an attempt to incite others to commit such acts. Shmulevich is certainly guilty of having lousy judgment and being a vindictive little prick, but I doubt he'll wind up being convicted of the same motivations that come into play when gay people are randomly chosen for beatings or Klansmen call for lynchings.
I don't think that Islam is deserving of any greater protection from criticism than any other religion. I tend to write more about extremist Christianity because I've had far more personal experience with it, and in fact that flavor of fundamentalism is far more influential in the country whose laws affect my existence than is radical Islam. That isn't to say that the same criticisms can't be applied to other sorts of fundamentalism, and indeed I think they can. All flavors of fundamentalism are essentially the same; names and specifics change, but the basic idea that some group of people believe that they have been charged with enforcing divine law at any cost, the same life-negating ideologies, and the same rejection of reason are present across religious specifics. This applies to fundamentalist Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Scientology, Wicca, etc., equally well.
Nor do I find in myself some greater fear of retribution from the followers of Islam than I do from the followers of any other religion. The reason I don't use my real name in this blog or give out personal information about myself online generally is precisely for the fact that I fear militants of all faiths equally. I am more likely to come to physical harm at the hands of an Eric Rudolph (or, more recently, a Menachem "Michael" Korn) as I am to find some stereotypically ululating jihadi waiting for my head outside my front door... because I live in a country where there are more Christian extremists than Muslim ones. None of them are any better than any of the others. If anything, I've received more death threats and been stalked by occultists more often than by any other group of people.
None of this is going to stop me from criticizing any of them, of course. I would honestly have to question whether a life spent without the opportunity to advance reason would be a life worth living at all. In the world in which we live, the advancement of reason necessitates some degree of conflict with religious fundamentalism. Simply advocating for scientific inquiry is enough to trigger a sizable number of the crazies, and it only takes one letter bomb with your name on it to fully ruin a perfectly good afternoon.
On the other hand, my own concern about myself and the people for whom I care is not about to make me advocate a comfortable extremism of my own. I will never support any ideology that insists that all Christians, Muslims, what have you, should be rounded up and deprived of their right to be complete cavemen in their thinking if that's what they want out of life. I will agree with arresting people like Rudolph and Korn, and I do agree that the world would be a better place if someone would put bullets into the brains of individuals like Bin Laden. Terrorists are terrorists; I don't agree with any terrorist ideology. The innocent should never be made to suffer for the visions of self-styled enforcers of the word of Gawd.
Now, if taking a crowbar upside the head of a fundie would instead of resulting in severe injury impart real knowledge and activate the reasoning centers of the brain, I'd be among the first to have a whack at it. Nonetheless, people even have every right to be fundamentalists themselves... so long as they don't insist that me, you, and everyone we know comply with their visions of heaven-on-earth. The visions all look a lot like hell to me, and what their advocates insist upon has been tried before. It doesn't work; that's why we don't still live in the Dark Ages today, as much as some people would like to turn the clock back to that era which, they will insist, was some sort of Golden Age. It's the insistence of someone who wasn't there, of course, and who knows very little about what life was like. It's ignorance that's our main enemy today, not any particular militancy based upon it.
I think this fellow has it about right. I saw this video this morning at Pharyngula, some hours after seeing the Hitchens/Prager/Hooper argument. It's too bad this Brigstocke fellow couldn't have also been called in to have a say!
