The Religion Pander

This week's Religion Report featured an interview with Christian apologist Alister McGrath on Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. McGrath has debated Dawkins on several occasions, as well as Christopher Hitchens, and on such occasions has always had his arse handed to him. So it was with great disappointment that I listened to presenter Stephen Crittenden treat McGrath's arguments with kid gloves in this interview.

The format of the programme was ridiculously one-sided, for starters:

1. Crittenden plays a grab of Dawkins from an Oxford University debate (with McGrath),
2. Crittenden elicits from McGrath a long-winded criticism of Dawkins--invariably prefaced by his signature phrase "I think what I'd want to say . . ."--and then eagerly joins in,
3. Crittenden fails to submit McGrath's claims to the same level of scrutiny.

Crittenden was positively testy with Sam Harris when he appeared on TRR in December last year, and on an earlier show had opined that "people like Dawkins are just as fundamentalist as any southern Baptist, just as ignorant about religion as your southern Baptist is about science, and perhaps guilty of promoting, fuelling movements like Intelligent Design, because of their fundamentalism." But he could at least, in his capacity as a journalist, have tried to play the Devil's Advocate with McGrath.

Instead--having himself remarked that "Dawkins makes so little of Islam, even when he's writing about religious violence. He's really focusing much of this book on Christianity, isn't he?"--he allows McGrath to get away with pearlers like these:

Well he is, and I think that in many ways Dawkins finds that he can't criticise Islam directly because that would be politically really quite dangerous, and therefore he prefers to concentrate on soft targets, and there's no softer target than Christianity, so he and these other writers seem to be focusing on Christianity as being the easy target. It's really been very well received in certain parts of the public, because there is this very deep sense of alienation from what the Christian church has been saying.

Dawkins doesn't criticise Islam? Did McGrath really just say that? On pages 24-27 of The God Delusion Dawkins attacks the "incitement to mayhem" throughout the Muslim world (which he also describes as "hysterical") arising from the Danish cartoon controversy--he notes that "if you don't take [Islam] seriously and accord it proper respect you are physically threatened, on a scale that no other religion has aspired to since the Middle Ages." Elsewhere in the book he attacks blasphemy and apostasy laws in Muslim countries (he cites the case of Abdul Rahman, sentenced to death in Afghanistan in 2006 for converting to Christianity, and who is now in hiding in Italy), and the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. He suggests Ibn Warraq's Why I Am Not a Muslim could be retitled The Myth of Moderate Islam. Regarding the London bombings, he approvingly cites another author's suggestion "that the young men who committed suicide were neither on the fringes of Muslim society in Britain, nor following an eccentric and extremist interpretation of their faith, but rather that they came from the very core of the Muslim community and were motivated by a mainstream interpretation of Islam." Shall I go on? In 2001, four days after Sept. 11, he remarked: "testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next."

Why might Dawkins pay more attention to Christianity than to Islam in The God Delusion? "Unless otherwise stated, I shall have Christianity mostly in mind, but only because it is the version with which I happen to be most familiar. For my purposes the differences [between the Abrahamic religions] matter less than the similarities." Simple as that.

Next, Crittenden and McGrath tackle Dawkins' claim that there is a real conflict between science and religion:

Stephen Crittenden: Indeed, is that one of the biggest weaknesses in Dawkins' book, that he doesn't acknowledge the role of the churches and religious believers in the history of science: the Jesuits in astronomy and seismology, and medicine, for instance; or the fact that the Big Bang theory was first proposed by a Belgian priest. And of course the general public doesn't know all that much about this history either.

Alister E. McGrath: Well that's right. I mean Dawkins has this very simplistic idea that science and religion have always been at war with each other, and he says only one can win, and let's face it, it's going to be science. But the history just doesn't take into that place. The history suggests that at times there has been conflict, but at times there has been great synergy between science and religion and many would say that at this moment, there are some very exciting things happening in the dialogue between science and religion. What Dawkins is offering is a very simplistic, slick spin on a very complex phenomenon. It's one that clearly he expects to appeal to his readers, but the reality is simply not like that at all.

I'm not sure that there is too much to get excited about in the dialogue between science and religion. Endeavours to demonstrate the efficacy of prayer in the science lab have invariably led up blind alleys. On the other hand, the emerging science of neurotheology suggests that the capacity for religious belief may be hardwired into our brains.

While it is possible to oversimplify the historical relationship between religion and science, the role played by religion in suppressing science is undeniable. But McGrath misses Dawkins' point, as articulated in a 1997 article:

Science is based upon verifiable evidence. Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops. Why else would Christians wax critical of doubting Thomas? The other apostles are held up to us as exemplars of virtue because faith was enough for them. Doubting Thomas, on the other hand, required evidence. Perhaps he should be the patron saint of scientists.

That is the crux of the issue between science and religion.

Crittenden continues:

Stephen Crittenden: There's one particularly outrageous moment in his book where he talks about the great scientist Gregor Mendel, and suggests that he became an Augustinian monk in order to support his scientific research. I'm not sure how he could know that.

Alister E. McGrath: I think this is Dawkins' rewriting of history to suit his own agendas, to be frank.

Rewriting history--really? Dawkins actually says (on p.99): "Mendel, of course, was a religious man, an Augustinian monk; but that was in the nineteenth century, when becoming a monk was the easiest way for the young Mendel to pursue his science. For him, it was the equivalent of a research grant." Which is true: Mendel, the second son of peasant farmers, was a brilliant student in his youth, but his parents lacked the means to pay for his higher education. So he entered an Augustinian monastery. Dawkins isn't "rewriting" anything here.

Stephen Crittenden: It seems obvious, on the other hand, that religion - I mean this is almost too obvious to say - that religion has indeed been in retreat before science, as science has answered more and more questions about the physical world.

Alister E. McGrath: Well I would certainly agree with that. And I think one of the issues we have here is that in the past, religious people have very often overplayed their hand, and said in effect, 'Look, we can tell you everything'. And then science has begun to encroach on that, and they had to retreat. What I'd want to say is - and I think many would agree with this - that science is wonderful when it comes to explaining the relationships we observe in the material world. But there are bigger questions of meaning and value. In other words, why are we here? What's the purpose of life? And I'd want to say very clearly that science actually can't answer those questions, and in fact if science does answer those questions, it's gone way beyond its legitimate sphere of authority.

The implication here is that if such questions do not fall within the "legitimate sphere of authority" of science, then they must be assumed to fall within the "legitimate sphere of authority" of religion. I'll let Dawkins speak for himself on this one:

It is a tedious cliche (and, unlike many cliches, it isn't even true) that science concerns itself with how questions, but only theology is equipped to answer why questions. What on Earth is a why question? Not every English sentence beginning with the word 'why' is a legitimate question. Why are unicorns hollow? Some questions simply do not deserve an answer. What is the colour of abstraction? What is the smell of hope? The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn't make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention. Nor, even if the question is a real one, does the fact that science cannot answer it imply that religion can. (p.56)

But it is, as I said, rather disappointing that Crittenden didn't challenge McGrath on this point.

We then hear a grab of what is perhaps the most well-known argument advanced in The God Delusion: "There's a chapter on children, and what I regard as the abuse of children, which is the assumption, without the child's consent, that the child inherits the religion of its parents, and I've described that as a form of child abuse." Rather than address this argument directly, Crittenden suggests that Dawkins lacks "a theory of culture," and thus

Dawkins doesn't really understand the ethical and sociological dimension of religion. I'm talking about his idea that belief in God arises from a meme. That's a sort of anti-culture idea, a sort of biological theory of culture. I'm also thinking of his view that bringing up children in a religious tradition is a form of child abuse. That almost sounds like culture is something alien.

Alister E. McGrath: Well that's certainly a very fair point, and indeed one of the major criticisms I'd make of 'The God Delusion' is that he doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between belief in God, religion, world views and culture. These are very important distinctions to make, and certainly you mentioned this idea of the meme, which plays a very significant role in Dawkins' book The God Delusion, and really the key point here is that Dawkins seems to think that his idea of the meme explains away belief in God, that somehow you can give a biological explanation of why people believe in God and that shows it is wrong, it can be disposed of. And of course the point you've made is a good one. Actually there are very important cultural reasons why people believe in God, because there's a cultural mandate to think about these things, to begin to evaluate the evidence for belief in God and then if there is a God to begin to express that belief in certain cultural ways. For example, ways of behaviour, rituals, actions and so forth. And again, I don't see Dawkins really engaging with that, which gives I think his critique of religion a real vulnerability at that point

Of course there are sociological explanations, cultural explanations, for why people not only believe in God but choose to raise their children with such a belief. That doesn't go anywhere near addressing the idea that children ought not to be labelled and coerced in this way, and that they ought instead be allowed to develop their own ideas regarding religion--just as they are permitted to do when it comes to political ideologies or political parties. McGrath makes no attempt to justify, to say why it is right that children be referred to as "Catholic children" or "Protestant children;" he is either stupidly confusing an "is" with an "ought," or arrogantly doing so.

Stephen Crittenden: Now one of the most interesting areas in his book I think is the section in his book that deals with the links between religion and violence. Because after all, if you're right, and 9/11 was the trigger for the book in the first place, this really gets to the heart of the matter.

Alister E. McGrath: Yes, there's no doubt that the most persuasive part of the book is where Dawkins argues that religion seems to have this innate propensity to lead to violence. In other words, if you believe in God, you are much more likely to be a violent person than if you don't believe in God. And I think personally, that's one of the reasons why the book has had such an impact in Australia because you are nervous about violence, nervous about extremism, and Dawkins offers an extremely simplistic answer to those concerns: it's caused by religion, get rid of religion and these things go away.

Actually, Dawkins acknowledges (p. 259) that "Religion is a label of in-group/out-group enmity and vendetta, not necessarily worse than other labels such as skin colour, language or preferred football team, but often available when other labels are not." For Dawkins, though, religion is particularly problematic for three reasons:

1. Labelling of children. Children are described as 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' etc. from an early age, and certainly far too early for them to have made up their own minds on what they think about religion
2. Segregated schools. Children are educated, again often from a very early age, with members of a religious in-group and separately from children whose families adhere to other religions. It is not an exaggeration to say that the troubles in Northern Ireland would disappear in a generation if segregated schooling were abolished.
3. Taboos against 'marrying out'. This perpetuates hereditary feuds and vendettas by preventing the mingling of feuding groups. Intermarriage, if it were permitted, would naturally tend to mollify enmities.

Dawkins is only claiming that religious labelling exacerbates our propensity to violence; he is not claiming that if you get rid of religion, violence will disappear.

Stephen Crittenden: It's interesting that in Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene from the mid-1970s which is the book where he coins the term 'meme', we get Dawkins the social Darwinist, who suggests that selfishness and violence comes from our biology, and yet here he is in this book blaming it all on religion. It seems like an interesting contradiction.

Except he's not "blaming it all on religion." Shoddy journalism, Stephen. And here's where Alister McGrath makes one of his most outrageous statements:

Alister E. McGrath: Well it's an intriguing transition and certainly in the book The Selfish Gene he seems to say all these things are genetically programmed. But then right at the end of the book he says, 'Well somehow we can rise above this'. But I'd want to challenge him at this point I think and say Look, I have no doubt that some people who are religious, have done some very bad things, but I'd want to make a counterpoint very forcibly. And that is, this is not typical of religion. This is the fringes being presented as though they're the mainstream. And we saw that in his television program, The Root of All Evil, which many of your listeners may have seen, where he presented some extremists as if they were mainliners, and I think that's a very serious misrepresentation. I want to make it clear, I have no doubt there are some very weird religious people who might well be dangerous, but those of us who believe in God, know that, and we're doing all we can to try and minimise their influence. The centre needs to be reaffirmed, and Dawkins does not help us do that at all.

What an astonishing ignorance of history this man has, if he thinks the Crusades or the Inquisition were the work of "fringe" elements and not mainstream Christianity. What an astonishing ignorance of current events this man has, if in the wake of countless sexual abuse scandals in the Church--not least of which has been the Church's complicity in attempting to sweep it all under the carpet--he can talk about "fringes being presented as the mainstream" and keep a straight face. You can't get more mainstream than the Catholic Church, a denomination comprising one sixth of the world's population.

Stephen Crittenden: No. On the other hand, it's true isn't it, that there's a very strong powerful view in popular culture about the churches, and their history. It may be a caricatured view that starts with the Inquisition and includes the Crusades and so on, it's a very one-sided view of course, but it's very, very deep in the culture.

Alister E. McGrath: That's right. And Dawkins is able to point to this narrative of violence, the Crusades, the Inquisition.

Stephen Crittenden: What can the churches do about that?

Alister E. McGrath: Well I think there are two things they can do. One is they can make sure the other side of the story is told. They can talk about the narrative of violence in atheism in the 20th century, for example in the Soviet Union, where there were a whole series of absolutely abominable events, which again reflected the imposition of atheism on a fundamentally religious people, and that needs to be said.

Tu quoque. And wrong: Stalin's purges were not a logical consequence of the official atheist stance of the Soviet state. The prevailing dogma in the Soviet Union was not atheism--it was Stalinism. Christopher Hitchens has a great answer to the kind of canard being peddled by McGrath:

Wiener: The final killer argument of your critics is that Hitler and Stalin were not religious. The worst crimes of the 20th century did not have a religious basis. They came from political ideology.

Hitchens: That’s easy. Hitler never abandoned Christianity and recommends Catholicism quite highly in “Mein Kampf.” Fascism, as distinct from National Socialism, was in effect a Catholic movement.

Wiener: What about Stalin? He wasn’t religious.

Hitchens: Stalin—easier still. For hundreds of years, millions of Russians had been told the head of state should be a man close to God, the czar, who was head of the Russian Orthodox Church as well as absolute despot. If you’re Stalin, you shouldn’t be in the dictatorship business if you can’t exploit the pool of servility and docility that’s ready-made for you. The task of atheists is to raise people above that level of servility and credulity. No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine.

In short, for McGrath's Stalin analogy to work, he would need to show how the atheism mapped out in The God Delusion--an agnostic atheism grounded in the virtues of critical thinking, skepticism, and free inquiry--leads inexorably to the atrocities perpetrated under Mao and Stalin.

McGrath continues:

But against that, we need to make this point, that does not mean that all atheists are evil, it certainly doesn't. Just as the fact that some religious people do violent things, does not mean that all people who believe in God do these things.

Strawman: nobody is suggesting that all people believe in God do violent things.

We finally come to the end of the interview, where the following excerpt from Dawkins is played . . .

Given that right and wrong is a very difficult question anyway, once again what on earth makes you trust religion to tell you what's right and wrong? I mean if you do trust religion, where are you going to get it from? For goodness' sake don't get it from the Bible, at least not from the Old Testament, and certainly aspects of the New Testament have very agreeable vibes for us today, but how do we decide which of those are agreeable and which are not? It is the case that since we are all 21st century people, we all subscribe to a pretty widespread consensus of what's right and what's wrong. Nowadays we don't believe in slavery any more, we don't believe in child labour, we don't believe in physical violence in the home, there are all sorts of things that people used to believe in and no longer do, and that is a general consensus which we all share to a greater or lesser extent, whether or not we are religious.

Now if you look at the Bible, either the Old or New Testament, you can pick and choose verses of the Bible which chime in with that decent moral consensus that we all share, and you can say Oh well, this comes from the Bible; this comes from the Bible. But of course you'll find plenty of other bits in the Bible which are simply horrendous by today's standards. So something other than religion is giving us this general moral consensus, and I haven't time to go into what I think it is, but whatever else it is, it's not religion. And if you try to cherrypick your Bible or your Qu'ran, your Holy Book, whatever it is, you can find good bits and you can throw out bad bits, but the criterion by which you do that cherrypicking has nothing to do with religion.

. . . which is studiously ignored by Crittenden and McGrath. The obvious question to put to McGrath would be: do you think we get our morals from the Bible, and if so, why? Crittenden, however, prefers to ask:

Alister the church seems more on the back foot than ever on this point of where values comes from. It sometimes seems to me that part of what's going on is that this is a very vibrant time for biology in particular, and we're seeing the kind of youthful exuberance of a new biological paradigm, as the biotech revolution gets under way. And religion creates a lot of problems for science at this particular time. It seems to me that one of the things that perhaps we've allowed scientists to get away with is the idea that science creates value.

Alister E. McGrath: I think that's a very important point. And actually Dawkins and I, I think, agree at one point on this. Because Dawkins is very, very clear that rightly, science cannot tell us what is right or wrong. In other words, that those who science creates a system of values are misunderstanding what science is all about. And I think we do need to challenge science at this point and say Look, the fact that something can be done, doesn't make that good in itself, that by doing something new, we very often open the door to possibilities that cannot be changed, that might actually be destructive. There's a real concern there. And certainly I want to affirm that science offers us many very good things. For example, better medical procedures. But we all know the dark side, that science is able to make available new methods of mass destruction that really can be enormously dangerous for humanity. So I think we need to be deadly realistic about what we're talking about here.

That's nice, but Dawkins was making a specific point which you have failed to address: wherever we get our morals from, it can't be from the Bible. He's not saying we get them from science--you acknowledge this yourself. So why not address his actual point?

Stephen Crittenden: Are the churches also perhaps on the back foot here? We've been through a period where there's been so much debate particularly about sexual politics and sexual morality, people are less inclined than ever to take their values from what the churches say.

Alister E. McGrath: I think the real difficulty is that we need values at this time more than ever. And the churches perhaps are feeling discouraged about trying to get their values heard in this secular culture. And very often the problem for the churches is that their values are simply heard to be No, to this, No, to that. That we need to really present Christian values in a positive, engaging way and say Look, it's not about negation, don't do that, it's trying to say Look, here is an understanding of who we are as human beings, but what our role is here on earth and in the light of that there are certain things we should be doing, and certain other things we need to be much more critical of. And we need to sell this big picture, not just individual Nos to this, that and the other, but rather a powerful, persuasive, compelling view of human identity, which enables us to show that there are certain things we should be doing, and certain things also that we should not.

Based on what evidence? What evidence is there to support this "powerful, compelling view of human identity" that you refuse to sketch out? What is our "role" here on Earth, and how do you know that it is our role, or that we indeed have a "role?" At some point McGrath needs to peel himself out of his comfortable armchair, desist with the hand-waving, and actually explain why he thinks Christianity is a good source of morality, rather than assume that it is.

Well, it all goes pear-shaped from here, I'm afraid, because even after McGrath has acknowledged Dawkins affirmation that science cannot tell us what is right and what is wrong, Crittenden introduces the dread strawman TEH DARWINIAN WORLDVIEW, upon which McGrath seizes with gusto:

Look, Darwinism presents us with a narrative which is about the strongest winning out. Can we transfer that to society as a whole, and say Look, let's let the strong win. And you can see that Darwinism does pose a challenge, not simply to some Christian values, but to some values that are deeply embedded in civilisation as a whole. And the real question is this. Do we just say Well Darwinism may help us understand what's happening in nature, but that does not have an impact on the way we ought to behave, either as Christians or simply as good citizens. And that certainly to me is a very important point. Darwinism is articulating a value system which if it were to be applied rigorously, would I think lead to the weak being marginalised, set to one side, so that the strong can simply overwhelm everyone else.

Strawman. Strawman. Strawman. (Or perhaps Projection, projection, projection.) There really is no better way of putting it. Who's articulating this "Darwinist value system," and advocating that the weak be marginalised, and the strong overwhelm everyone else? Certainly not Dawkins. And it is not a belief--as you yourself acknowledge--that follows from the acceptance of Darwinian evolutionary biology. So why introduce this red herring into the discussion at all?

Stephen Crittenden: A last question, Professor McGrath, is there a sense perhaps in which you and Dawkins share the same premises? You both come out of an English empirical philosophical tradition. Perhaps you as an Evangelical are just as caught up with propositions and proof as he is?

Alister E. McGrath: Well Dawkins and I are both men of faith. We both believe certain things to be true, and we know we can't prove them. Dawkins I think has perhaps an exaggerated sense of what he can show, but certainly when you look at him rigorously, he is a man of faith who believes certain things, that cannot actually be demonstrably so. And he and I both believe that we are telling the truth, and we both believe also that if we are right, this has a major implication for the way people live their lives.

Except that Dawkins is able to offer evidence in support of what he believes is true, while you, McGrath, refuse to do so, and Crittenden refuses to challenge you on this. That's poor journalism on Crittenden's part, and poor apologetics* on yours.

(*This is especially so considering that McGrath is currently in Australia, so the Religion Report tells us, to help evangelicals counter Dawkins arguments. Given that McGrath's brand of apologetics consists largely of obfuscations, misrepresentations, and logical fallacies galore, my advice to Australian evangelicals is: ask someone else.

And would someone please pin McGrath down on why he became a Christian? McGrath tells us "First, Christianity made a lot of sense. It gave me a new way of seeing and understanding the world, above all, the natural sciences." You can get the same effect from any number of exotic substances, not all of them legal. So what? Why does McGrath think Christianity--not just theism, but Christianity--make more sense than atheism? "Second, I discovered Christianity actually worked: it brought purpose and dignity to life." There's a lump in my throat. Really. So Christianity makes you feel better about yourself: you once woz lost but now iz found. Are you suggesting that atheists in general lack purpose and dignity in their lives, just because you feel you did when you were an atheist. Hasty generalisation fallacy.

You're an evangelical, McGrath. Who could you possibly hope to convert with such feeble reasoning?)

UPDATE: When he has been pressed on his reasons for believing in God (as he is in the Oxford University debate referred to in The Religion Report, his answers are not surprising. Fallacious, certainly, but not surprising:

. . . the very strong sense that this world is ordered, and that this ordering is something both excellent and beautiful in itself, but also that it needs to be accounted for. [Argument from design.] And again it seemed to me that one of the strong points of the Christian faith was this postulation of an ordered universe created by God, which we could begin to investigate and uncover. [Begging the question.] Second, there is a whole range of things to do with human experience, experience with our own lives, of culture, which very often involves, for example, this very unusual sensation of a longing for transcendence [wishful thinking]: in other words, an idea you find in writers like Iris Murdoch, or even John Dewey [little Johnnyism], that there's something beyond us, which somehow brings legitimacy to some of our core notions both of morality and general philosophical ideas [argument from ignorance].

It's so tempting to transcribe the discussion as it proceeds from here. Dawkins presses McGrath on whether he--as a man of science--believes in miracles such as the Virgin Birth, and McGrath waffles on about ". . . different levels of explanation." It's beautiful.

Cross-posted at Five Public Opinions.

Antidote to the antidote

This morning my girlfriend, who teaches in an Anglican high school, received an email being passed around the offices of several religious schools in the Perth metro area entitled "Antidote to Root of All Evil."

The antidote in question is a critique of Richard Dawkins' Root of All Evil by Rachael Kohn in the SMH, which very quickly (and very disappointingly) descends into an anti-atheist, anti-science rant.

Kohn takes issue with the comparison Dawkins apparently draws between Ted Haggard's Pentecostal megachurch brand of worship and Nazi rallies.

To the scientist Dawkins, a room full of people waving their hands and singing "Praise Jesus" is evil because it is irrational. By definition, believers obedient to a God which cannot be proved to exist, and whose dictums are based on mythical stories that have no basis in fact, are as dangerous as the Brownshirts.

Dawkins is not accusing Haggard and his followers of being Brownshirts, of course. What he is doing is pointing out what megachurch Christianity and Nazi rallies have in common: unquestioning dogmatism--the sheer absence of critical and reflective thinking that is the hallmark of every kind of fundamentalism--be it religious or ideological.

So when Kohn argues that "what Dawkins failed to acknowledge in his encounter with Haggard is that the Nazi program of eugenics and extermination was not dictated by an unseen god," she is missing Dawkins' point entirely.

But there is more in this that should put the scientist masquerading as a moral philosopher on guard. Nazism's propaganda was written with the help of a legion of scholars from the hard and soft sciences, from anthropologists, philologists, psychologists and economists to biologists, zoologists and doctors.

So what? No-one is claiming that scientists are incapable of folly, ignorance or despicable behaviour; nor is anyone suggesting that the fruits of scientific research cannot be put to heinous uses. Certainly Dawkins is advancing neither proposition in Root of All Evil. The important distinction for him is not between scientists and believers (how could it be--many scientists are believers), but rather between science and faith. He is pitting the fallibilism and skepticism of science against the parochialism and dogmatism of faith, and what he's suggesting is that Nazism and megachurch fundamentalism both exhibit the latter characteristics. Hence, the comparison holds.

The Nazi example is not unique but was repeated elsewhere, such as in Stalinist Eastern Europe and Mao's China. It is no doubt occurring in Iran, where dissidence is virtually impossible. The point is not the political ideology, but the readiness of "rational" scientific types to help mad regimes to deliver untold suffering to millions.

Kohn is contradicting herself here. If dissidence is virtually impossible in these regimes--it will be as impossible for "rational scientific types" as for anyone else--whether we're talking about China, Eastern Europe or Iran. In any case, the point is the political ideology--and the fact that the Stalinism and Maoism that held sway in Eastern Europe and China respectively have far more in common with religious fundamentalism (of both the Islamic and the Christian kind) than they do with the tradition of freethinking and skepticism embraced by many atheists.

But no rant is complete without a strawman argument:

The trouble with the present flight from religion to the welcoming embrace of atheistic scientists and philosophers is that they offer precious little more than a new conviction that religion is the cause of evil in the world. In other words, these scientists deliver a message akin to that of the fire-and-brimstone preachers who bellowed about the dangers of sin, only they warn from their secular pulpits of the dangers of religion.

No, Rachael: if atheists and scientists (who may or may not be atheists, but don't let that stop Kohn throwing us all into the same box) have a message to deliver, it is that the benefits to humankind of reason and critical-reflective (as opposed to dogmatic and parochial) thinking are manifold and demonstrable. Every advance we have made towards liberty and democracy--be it racial equality, gay rights, women's rights, etc.--has been made in spite of the vehement opposition religious traditionalists. It is the latter, and not freethinkers, who have held us back every time--and Kohn may want to take a few minutes out from her thoughtless science-bashing to give that some thought.

Kohn closes with an attack on Michael Onfray's The Atheist Manifesto. I haven't read the book myself, but apparently it entails a Marxist critique of religion. Why this should in and of itself be a problem Kohn doesn't deign to inform us--I guess the sheer mention of Marx is supposed to set off a big red flashing light in our heads and send our critical faculties into meltdown as we search under our beds with a flashlight. (Lazy argument being another hallmark of the rant.) She complains that Onfray presents a "comic-book" view of religion--in a piece that itself presents a comic-book view of science and nonbelief. She complains that "Onfray does not accept the sociological truth that religion has not only accommodated the laws and ethos of a democratic state but in a pervasive way supports it." Supports it? In what sense? It is the religious who oppose the full enfranchisement of the gay and lesbian community. It is the religious who want to dictate to women what they should do with their own bodies. It is the religious who (as this article demonstrates) regularly attack science when its discoveries come into conflict with theological presuppositions. It is the religious who want tear down the wall of separation between church and state--even though, ironically, it is the existence of such a wall that guarantees religious freedom. How exactly does any of this support democracy?

Kohn's closing line is priceless:

If Germany in 1933 had been invaded by people in prayer singing "Praise Jesus" instead of Nazis in jackboots it would not have presided over the worst mass killing in history.

Bullshit. People in prayer singing "Praise Jesus" lynched African-Americans in their thousands in the Deep South. People in prayer singing "Praise Jesus" have blown up abortion clinics and murdered their staff. People in prayer singing "Praise Jesus" abused children under their power while other people in prayer singing "Praise Jesus" covered for them. And Rachael: people in prayer singing "Praise Jesus" were complicit in the Nazi extermination of millions of undesirables.

Cross-posted at Five Public Opinions

Virginia Tech: the blame game continues. Debbie Schlussel blamed Muslims foreigners. Dinesh D'Souza pointed the finger at atheism and secularism. Ken Ham blamed Charles Darwin.

Now Townhall's Mary Grabar, herself a Temporary Assistant Professor of English at Clayton State University, Georgia, is blaming English teachers and professors.

If you were a student at Virginia Tech last fall and had a propensity for the gruesome and violent you could have satisfied your thirst for the bloody and course requirements by enrolling in Professor Brent Stevens’s English 3984 class, “Special Studies: Contemporary Horror.” And, as a plus, you wouldn’t have to read many books because some of the “texts”--as they increasingly are in English classes today--would be movies. [gasp! schock!!]

Guess who took that class that watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and explored in papers and a “fear journal” how “horror has become a masochistic pleasure,” according to the course description? Guess who read a graphic novel (a book with pictures, i.e., a comic book) titled From Hell by Alan Moore [Smelling salts! Stat!!!], presented by Professor Stevens as “one of the most popular and accomplished writers in the medium,” as well as the work of scholarly “criticism,” Men, Women and Chainsaws? [Argument from scare quotes. If Grabar wants us to convince us that the work in question is indeed of questionable scholarly value, she needs to demonstrate how. Just placing "scare quotes" around the word "criticism" is no subtitute for an actual argument. One hopes she doesn't model such poor reasoning in her own classes.] Guess who was drawn to the course described by the professor with these words: “We are consuming horror on an unprecedented scale. But the rules have changed. Until recent years, lead characters could be counted on to survive the invasion of zombies/homicidal maniacs/vampires. But this margin of safety no longer exists; horror has become a masochistic pleasure”? Guess who said to himself, “Bingo! That’s the course I want!” to a course description that ended with the words, ‘WARNING: Not for the faint of heart.”

Cho Seung-Hui proved, indeed, that he was not “faint of heart.” His own massacre of 32 fellow students and professors on April 16 demonstrated that if he did have a heart it was filled with evil. Cho outdid Freddy Krueger.

Minor quibble: Didn't one of the victims in Texas Chainsaw Massacre escape the killers? Never mind. In effect, Grabar is laying the blame for the VT shootings on Brent Stevens and his "Contemporary Horror" course.

In a feature story on his class last year, Stevens commented that "The goal of the class was to get students to think analytically about the books and films they reviewed." This would be stating the bleeding obvious to anyone who has taken or taught an English or cultural studies unit at university, be it a general film studies unit or, say, a unit on Utopian Fiction or Postmodern Gothic (the latter of which might find one encountering Anne Rice novels or The Crow). In such courses students are encouraged to think critically about the texts they study: in terms of how they privilege or marginalise certain values or social groups, perhaps, or how they engage with prevailing or obscure ideas and philosophical currents--both contemporary as well as those which prevailed at the time the film or book in question was first produced. (I can already hear the STRAIGHT FROM CHAIRMAN MAO!!!!!!!!! tripwires being set off in certain brains.) The point is, thinking analytically about a book of film--regardless of whether a Leavisite or poststructuralist methodology is applied--requires on the part of the reader an ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

In my experience, many students hate this. I taught a cultural studies unit at a local university a few years ago, and I remember students complaining to me that they were no longer able to enjoy the latest megaplex blockbusters because they had become so accustomed to reading films through the lens of semiotic analysis. They still had to learn, I responded, the art of knowing when and when not to suspend disbelief. Being able to suspend disbelief willingly, of course, is itself dependent upon the capacity to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Given the aims of his class, it would not have been unreasonable for Stevens to expect that each of his students--being university students and not five-year-olds--possessed this capacity when they signed up for his class: indeed, it is difficult to see how one could have passed his course without the ability to suspend disbelief and attend to horror films and fiction critically and analytically.

All of which escapes Grabar, who is apoplectic at the very notion of [cue fainting spell] horror films being used as objects of study in university English courses:

The showing of the videos and writings left by Cho has stirred up much debate by commentators. But what about the videos and books that were considered “texts” in an English class in an institution of supposedly “higher learning”? Would NBC and other stations be criticized for airing footage from one of the required class texts, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, on prime time? But this is what Cho and his classmates were writing term papers on.

Of course, Grabar fails to offer any sound reasons why texts like Texas Chainsaw Massacre should be considered unsuitable for use in a university English course. She just asserts that it is, and proceeds to assert a post hoc ergo propter hoc link between Cho Seng-Hui's enrolment in Stevens's class, and his subsequent killing spree. Again I ask, would she accept this rubbish from her own students?

But it's not all Stevens's fault, Grabar is careful to point out. There is also the fact that public schools and universities are secular institutions, owing to some document called "the Constitution" and some quaint notion of "the separation of church and state."

In our schizophrenic universities students are taught that Christianity is evil and that heroism is a passé idea of old fools; at the same they are trained in pacifism and sensitivity. College classes extend from high school the training in respect and appreciation for the practices of every other culture, while disparaging our own. Students, steeped in relativism, scoff at the notion of original sin, insisting that it is our culture, especially its religion, that corrupts the heart and mind of the inherently innocent child.

When most college freshmen are presented with Alexis de Tocqueville’s notion that government should encourage religious belief and that atheists should be “marked as the natural foes of the whole people,” they gaze with horror. How dare he state that an atheist’s ideas are less valid than a Christian’s! How judgmental and intolerant! Why atheists, they insist (sometimes pointing to themselves), can be “good people.”

You see, events like VT happen not just because Gawud and Jeebus have been expunged from the classroom, but because the evil English professors teach kids to hate God! I mean, they actually teach kids that Christianity is evil!! And even worse than that, they even have the temerity to insist that atheists can be "good people" and should not be considered the natural enemies of the nation. (Even Daddy Bush insisted that atheists weren't really citizens.) And--and in the nation's kindergartens, they show kids videos of donkeys fellating elephants!!!

I mean, come on. It's one thing to make unsupported and fallacious assertions about the link between screening horror movies in English class and students shooting up the entire campus, but it's entirely another thing to just make shit up like the notion that students are taught that Christianity is evil. Please, Grabar, please provide the evidence that this endemic--if it occurs at all--across the "schizophrenic" (exactly what makes them schizophrenic Grabar doesn't say--I guess if Grabar says it, we're supposed to believe it) universities of America. While you're at it, you might like to demonstrate exactly why it is impossible for atheists to be good people. Don't worry about the donkeys fellating elephants thing--I made it up--but it's no less credible than anything Grabar is selling.

So how does this "godless-education-leads-straight-to-school-shooting-massacre" thesis work? I'm not really sure, but apparently after 13 years of secular indoctrination you get students who are:

only eighteen years old, but they are firmly set in their beliefs in gay marriage, unrestricted abortion, the prohibition of prayer in the public arena—and in cynicism about previously cherished values like heroism, nobility, and honor.

And as we all know, it's but a hop, skip and a jump from advocacy of gay marriage to mass murder.

To aid and abet this moral leveling we have a curriculum made up of titillating ephemera. Among the panoply of trivia are grievance tracts by “overlooked” writers, cave paintings, scalp dances, performance art, pornography—and horror flicks--that professors think will draw student-customers. It’s not that the great writers did not depict evil and horror; just read Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and Flannery O’Connor. Pious literature is no more great literature than slash-and-burn movies are great cinema. But great literature, while providing the cathartic experience of tragedy, engages us in moral questions.

Two points. First, on what grounds has it been decided that you can't use horror films to explore moral questions? Yet another unsubstantiated claim. And second--leaving aside the unsubstantiated claim that professors select course texts based on what they think will attract enrolments--what's a Republican doing bandying about a term like "student-customers" in such a derisive fashion? This is the party that embraces the very neoliberalist business models that universities have been forced to adopt in order to maintain their funding levels. Newsflash: the business model that Grabar, as a Republican, has such a hard-on for couldn't give a flying fuck about Shakespeare or morality.

Bottom line: Cho Seng-Hui did what he did because he was mentally ill--if this made him more susceptible to the so-called deleterious influences of exposure to violent images (as some suggest), it is because he suffered an inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

Interestingly, by advocating that English classrooms be transformed into sites of Christian indoctrination, Grabar is advocating that students be indoctinated into a mindset marked by a similar inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Rather than being sites where critical thinking is nurtured, Grabar wants to transform English classrooms into places where magical, dogmatic thinking is privileged. Therefore, I read Grabar's attempt to blame the Virginia Tech shootings on Stevens's horror film and fiction course as a classic case of projection. She subscribes to a religious ideology that values credulity, dogmatism and literalism over higher-order cognitive, critical and interpretive skills; hence she assumes that anyone who takes Stevens's class will be as credulous, dogmatic and literal-minded as she is.

Grabar seems to be the kind of Christian who would maintain that the only thing preventing her from perpetrating her own VT massacre is that God told her not to. This makes her far more dangerous than any evilatheistevilutionistabortionisthomosexualistleftwingprofessor with a scholarly interest in horror.

UPDATE: Crossposted at Five Public Opinions. More on Texas Chainsaw Massacre at But Don't Try To Touch Me.

Obama tells Howard to stuff it

Prime Minister John Howard got involved in the 2008 US Presidential elections when he made some comments about recently announced Democratic candidate Senator Barack Obama:

CANBERRA, Australia (CNN) -- Australia's conservative Prime Minister John Howard said Sunday that victory for Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and his party in next year's presidential election would be a boon for terrorists.

"If I were running al Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats," Howard said, speaking on "Sunday," a TV show on Australia's Nine Network.

Howard -- who faces reelection this year -- is a staunch supporter of President Bush and committed Australian troops to help the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Obama hits back after Australian PM slams his Iraq stance

Obama in response said:

Obama, campaigning in Iowa, told reporters Sunday he's flattered that one of Bush's allies "started attacking me the day after I announced (his presidential run) -- I take that as a compliment."

The Democratic presidential hopeful said if the Australian prime minister was "ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq," he needs to send another 20,000 Australians to the war.

"Otherwise, it's just a bunch of empty rhetoric," Obama said.

Australia has about 1,000 troops in Iraq and most in non-combat roles.