Category Archives: Fundamentalism

Why wait for marriage?

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The same-sex marriage debate is, in part, about the separation of church and state. Should the government discriminate against some citizens simply because it offends others’ religious sensibilities? Or, formulated another way, how much should private morality be entwined with public policy?

This is well illustrated, of course, by folks like the town clerk in New York who resigned rather than perform gay marriages, which offend her religious convictions. (Whatever happened to “render unto Caesar…?”)

However, there’s another aspect to the private morality/public policy question that puzzles me. The media talks about the legalization of same-sex marriage as heralding a surge in gay weddings. Marriage licenses and civil marriages, I understand. But weddings? Are people really not getting married if the state doesn’t sanction it? Are we really acquiescing to second-class status? Has the wedding industry really been ignoring this market segment?

I’m not arguing civil marriage does not matter; of course it does. It matters a lot. That’s precisely why celebrating your union before your family and community, in defiance of a government that tries to render it invisible, is a radical, transformative, and liberating act.

Hijacked

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali asks in The New York Times where Islam’s moderates are. A better question, I think, is “what are progressives and moderates doing to prevent extremists of all stripes from hijacking social discourse?”

Right-wing Christians in the US bemoan a supposed assault on Christianity, since anything less than a state religion will not do. A presidential candidate needs to placate the religious right, reciting revised history in the process. Another candidate attributes his success to god alone. In American society at large, it matters much more that one invoke the name of the proper deity in the proper way than that one have sensible, concrete ideas to put ethical principles into action.

Do these folks not realize that conspicuous piety in fact speaks very poorly of their character, ethics, and value system?

Theotropism

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Mark Lilla, writing the cover story for this week’s New York Times Magazine, uses the word theotropism. While a Google search reveals that this is not a neologism, I am delighted to run across such a succint term that captures the all-too-common drive to construe the world in divine, supernatural ways. My own speculation is that this is a mechanism for making sense of the environment that was useful in our infancy, as individuals and as a species—but which now all too easily leads us astray as sects feel called upon to enforce divine will on the unbelievers and apostates.

Atheism seeks not its own reward

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Here’s a good defense of atheism:

Fundamentalists do what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill God’s will and to earn salvation; atheists do them simply because it is the right thing to do. Is this also not our most elementary experience of morality? When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward gaining God’s favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look at myself in the mirror. A moral deed is by definition its own reward. David Hume, a believer, made this point in a very poignant way, when he wrote that the only way to show true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence.

In a world where humanity is so content to hurt and marginalize others in God’s name, theists would do well to take note.

Offense, tolerance, and a cartoon

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I am all for religious tolerance, and I happen to believe that the way Muslims often are marginalized in the Western World is wrong. However, the whole hubbub about the Danish cartoons is ridiculous and dangerous.

Yes, I understand that depictions of the Prophet are offensive to many Muslims. But guess what? These Muslims can choose not to depict the Prophet themselves, and not to read (or even to boycott) publications that do.

However, to be offended by a drawing, ink on paper or pixels on a computer screen, to the point of riots, arson, or worse, is to sacrifice the message for the symbol. Moreover, not all the world is Muslim, and it is ludicrous to hold others to one group’s standards, much less to impose these standards on the planet at large.

The people who are so outraged to the point of violence are no better than the fanatics of other stripes who would criminalize and persecute those who do not bow down before their idol, their dogma, their flag, or their party line. Instead of celebrating the strength and richness of Islam, they choose to put forward a face of an irrational mob that cannot be reasoned with.

There is a desire in the mainstream of Western societies, perhaps borne out of post(?)-imperialist guilt, to be sensitive to other cultures. That’s a worthy goal, but we must be careful, too, not to become so “sensitive” that we tear down the very framework of human values so laboriously constructed since the Enlightenment. Specifically, our governments and our press should defend the Danish newspaper’s freedom to publish such a provocative cartoon, even if they choose to voice their disagreements over the content or the decision to do so.

Slate‘s Christopher Hitchens has a more detailed analysis, including the State Department’s and CNN’s tepid responses.