Month: January 2007

Well, you’ve asked me directly for my view, so here it is. At the risk of spoiling the illusion, the God Hates Fags video is, when you examine the site more closely, and watch the video more attentively, a brilliant piece of performance art. So brilliant it illuminates what it satirizes more deeply than any argument could.

Give me today to address his many good (and bad) points. But something strikes me reading the many emails you have sent. They fall into two categories: one batch lamenting his contradictions, intolerance and dogmatism; the other insisting that he has cleaned my clock in the argument. There are few emails taking a middle position, which suggests we are talking past each other. I’m going to try and amend that in my next post. It may be, however, that the very nature of the subject renders consensus or even clarity impossible. Those with faith and those without it actually read the dialogue differently. I think we can do better than that – and I hope to clarify more in my next installment.

He’s naming names.

The vice-president really does believe that he can somehow champion a party that declares that his daughter must be barred from any legal protections for her child and marriage and never be confronted with the contradiction. Sorry, Mr vice-president, but one day you will have to address how you can front a party dedicated to smearing, marginalizing and disenfranchising a member of your own family. Wolf Blitzer’s question is not out of line. Your hypocrisy is.

Dinesh is concerned that American popular culture is responsible for turning the Muslim world against the West. This may be what he’s thinking of: Dethklown from Metalocalypse. The song gets going at the 2:57 mark.

Worth reading:

Today in Iraq, American soldiers are risking their lives to save our lives at home. But our way of life puts peace, security, and survival ahead of conflict and danger. Thus it seems that the nobility of our soldiers is compromised because it is put in the service of mundane living for the folks back home – which is just what our soldiers gave up. Yet if we try to escape this incoherence by reminding ourselves that our way of life includes sacrifice for our way of life, then it seems we are sacrificing for the sake of sacrifice, endlessly.

This is but a sample of Rabieh’s reasoning. Her book is not a line-by-line commentary on Plato’s texts, but it does follow all the ins and outs of his arguments. If you want to learn about courage, or if you merely want to be impressed with what it takes to learn about courage, or to read Plato, this is the place to go. The toughness of courage is treated: The toughness to reject false hopes and to accept that certain evils are unavoidable. And also the magnificence of courage: the beauty of self-fulfillment that is greater than the nobility of self-denial or self-sacrifice. For self-sacrifice is in your interest if it makes you better. The paradox of sacrifice – for its own sake yet somehow for your own sake – is the theme of this excellent study.

One important distinction Mansfield also makes:

[C]ourage needs guidance from prudence to know when it is reasonable to make this sacrifice. It is noble to face risk, but must the risk not be worthwhile, requiring an exercise of prudence to see when to attack, when to retreat?

That is the question we are now debating. Without prudence, courage can easily become bravado or recklessness.

An interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Marie Claire magazine: What do you say to Muslim women who fight for the right to wear the head scarf?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I say that’s fine – unless you impose your personal choice on others. If you wear the veil, the message you convey is that you’re superior to women who do not, because you’re saying they are whores. You’re also saying men are incapable of sexual self-restraint, and that if they see women who are partly covered or not veiled, they will react like my grandmother’s he-goat.

Republicans against the surge. Repeat: Republicans against the surge. Doesn’t compute. Doesn’t compute. Over-heating. Over-heating …

"Yet another cry for attention by the Paris Hilton of television news, Anderson Cooper," – Irena Briganti, Fox News Spokeswoman on Anderson’s Cooper’s criticism of Fox News’ hyping an Insight magazine story with no substantiation.

Classy, isn’t she? A reader adds:

Funny that a Fox spokesperson wound insult Paris Hilton, whose stardom is due in large part to "The Simple Life" program that aired on Fox. Nothing like slamming family.

Sam Harris’s latest epistle can be read in full here. The temperature has gone up a notch. I’ll respond later today or tomorrow at the latest. Here’s a flavor of the latest from Sam:

Your brandishing of Vatican II is just silly, and only bolsters my argument. Are you saying that for about 1960 years Christians (including all the popes) were mistaken about the true doctrine of Christianity? Would you have our readers believe that Vatican II represents some kind of epistemological breakthrough? In reality, Vatican II was just damage control. The Catholic Church has been struggling to make the best of a bad situation ever since Galileo-who, as you know, was forced to his knees under threat of torture and obliged to recant his understanding of the earth’s motion and then placed under house arrest until the end of his life. He wasn’t absolved of heresy until 1992 (a few decades after Vatican II), at which point the Church ascribed his genius to God, "who, stirring in the depths of his spirit, stimulated him, anticipating and assisting his intuitions." (This might be an appropriate place to vomit.) In any case, I didn’t have to quote Leo XIII for lack of modern material. I could have quoted John Paul II, post-Vatican II. Here he is all his sagacity:

This Revelation is definitive; one can only accept it or reject it. One can accept it, professing belief in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, the Son, of the same substance as the Father and the Holy Spirit, who is Lord and the Giver of life. Or one can reject all of this …

You seem to have taken particular offense at my imputing self-deception and/or dishonesty to the faithful. I make no apologies for this. One of the greatest problems with religion is that it is built, to a remarkable degree, upon lies. Mommy claims to know that Granny went straight to heaven after she died. But Mommy doesn’t actually know this. The truth is that, while Mommy may be rigorously honest on any other subject, in this instance she doesn’t want to distinguish between what she really knows (i.e. what she has good reasons to believe) and 1) what she wants to be true, or 2) what will keep her children from grieving too much in Granny’s absence. She is lying–either to herself or to her children–but we’ve all agreed not talk about it. Rather than teach our children to grieve, we teach them to lie to themselves.

You can call me "intolerant" all you want, but that won’t make unreasonable claims to knowledge sound any more reasonable; it won’t differentiate your claims to religious knowledge from the claims of others which you consider illegitimate; and it won’t constitute an adequate response to anything I have written or am likely to write.

The full text is here, along with the blogalogue so far. Stay tuned.