Virtual Museum of Offensive Art

In these times, when blasphemy is all the rage, the Virtual Museum of Offensive Art is a welcome resource website. You'll find a lot of controversial works of art here, that prudes of all types have wanted to ban. Plenty of blasphemy, but also plenty of sex and a little politics.

(Found at the NewHumanist blog.)

Why religion is the cause of religious terrorism

"[According to former CIA officer Marc Sageman. ] the first wave of Al-Qaeda leaders, who joined Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, is now down to a few dozen people on the run in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. The second wave of terrorists, who trained in Al-Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has also been devastated, with about 100 hiding out on the Pakistani frontier. These people are genuinely dangerous, says Sageman, and they must be captured or killed. But they do not pose an existential threat to America, much less have the power to provoke a "clash of civilizations."

It's the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman's account, it's a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls "terrorist wannabes." Unlike the first two waves, who were well-educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for action.

"It's more about hero worship than about religion," Sageman said in a presentation of his research last week at the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank in Washington. Many of this third wave don't speak Arabic or read the Koran. Very few (13 percent of Sageman's samples) have attended radical religious schools. Nearly all join the movement because they know or are related to someone who's already in it. Those detained on terrorism charges are getting younger: In Sageman's 2003 sample, the average age was 26; among those arrested after 2006, it was down to about 20. They are disaffected, homicidal kids - closer to urban gang members than to motivated Muslim fanatics."

David Ignatius, Daily Star (Lebanon), February 28, 2008

Ever since 9. September 2001, there has been people from all sorts of backgrounds who have tried to state again and again and again that religion has nothing to do with terror. For a large part, this is pure revisionism based upon unwillingness to face the truth that religions carry a lot of unhealthy ideas.

With the same logic, WW2 didn't happen because of Nazi ideology, but because of the Versailles treaty. No-one would doubt that the Versailles treaty had an effect, but you would have to be retarded to say that National-Socialism had nothing to do with it. But let's move from WW2 to present day neo-nazism. It is of course a bleak shadow of the heyday of NS-DAP. Hitler is their hero, and that's about it. A lot of the racist attacks on immigrants etc. happen because the racist is an uneducated, unemployed drunkard. But he is also a fan of Hitler, and Nazi ideology offer the framework where attacking immigrants on the street is OK. The SA would have done it like they do, and the SS would have been more thorough.

That's what the afore mentioned revisionists don't see, that while the jihadi theology may be a poor excuse, it is still a theology. They have simply distilled certain values from traditional Islam. (And if Islam was a really peaceful religion, as is often claimed, then this would be impossible.) The fact that the majority of Muslims may have a different view doesn't matter, because the majority of Christians had a different view than Martin Luther when he begun his work too. All religious reformers start off at the fringes.

I think Marc Sageman is onto something when using three categories of terrorists, like above. The London bombings was a copycat crime by fans. No doubt about that. And they're probably not very well edumecated in Islam either. But their faith provided a framework for the act, and Islam provided a framework for jihadi interpretation.

New atheists or new anti-dogmatists?

"What is strange is that, when one actually reads them, one gets the feeling that the real target of the "new atheists" isn't religion at all.
Indeed, they all explicitly say they have little or no problem with deism, or Spinozian pantheism or what Dawkins calls "Einstein-ian religion". Harris, Dennett and Hitchens (and possibly Dawkins) have indicated that they wouldn't necessarily want to see the synagogues, churches and mosques emptied, though they would want to see them abandon their “metaphysical bullshit” (see this video towards the end).
It seems that the new atheists’ real problem is with dogma, and specifically with the dogma of religious faith - with the belief that it is acceptable, even admirable, to believe propositions without logically sound reasons based on good evidence. They aren't really the “new atheists” at all, but the “new anti-dogmatists”."

Benjamin O'Donnell, Onlineopinion.com.au, 25 January 2008

I think this is a good observation. But it still needs some comments. Why is deism less of a problem than Christianity? Simply, because you can't buy yourself favours from God. There's no reason to act in irrational ways to achieve a special place in Heaven or to avoid Hell. And when you can't explain something, it's kind of pointless to say that a non-interfering god had been interfering. So Deism in itself is not much of a problem.
My only gripe with it is that when you actually accept that some god exists, then the next person can say: "Well, then what's stopping God from interfering in our lives?" And then Deism has fueled religion again, because no Deist would be able to prove to other believers that God never interfers. The best thing is therefore if we somehow can rid the world of this superstition.

"Thankfully, Fascist, Nazi and Communist dogmas have been so discredited that almost no one believes them any more. This is a development to be celebrated."

This is true, but he unfortunately he didn't explain why they are discredited. Now they had their obvious flaws, but so do religions and they're still alive. But imagine for a second that Marx didn't simply write books. Imagine that the idea about a Communist paradise was apparently given to him by prophecy. (An angel came down to Marx and gave him the Heimlich Maneuver while telling him weird stories.) This would have made Marxism and Communism religions, and therefore not testable. As it were, communism collapsed due to being a crap system, which it was not supposed to be and the superior nazis lost the war. So they failed the tests. Islam and Christianity are also crap, but they're not testable on earth. You have to die to know if they're wrong or not.

So, if Communism and Nazism were religions that people believed in, and which were "outside" the reach of science, then they most likely wouldn't be gone. All sorts of morons would say: "Oh, we have to respect Nazism. It's their faith that they are superior. Hitler gave them faith.". And so on. (Which reminds my of the brilliant parody on Terry Eagleton: The Fascism Delusion.)

So they were indeed testable and lost the fight with democracy. Thanks to not being religions.

Faith vs. the Faithless

"When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.
The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious. I’m assuming that Romney left that out in order to generate howls of outrage in the liberal press.
The second casualty of the faith war is theology itself. In rallying the armies of faith against their supposed enemies, Romney waved away any theological distinctions among them with the brush of his hand. In this calculus, the faithful become a tribe, marked by ethnic pride, a shared sense of victimization and all the other markers of identity politics."

David Brooks, NY Times, December 7, 2007

This is actually quite scary. It has an uncanny resemblance to how Hitler made the Jews an internal enemy. However, for Romney it's more of an attempt to say: "Look, they're more deviant than me!".

Atheists dominate in the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation

"The wooden doors of Castle Church were long ago replaced by ones made of bronze, but what comes as a far greater disappointment to Protestant pilgrims, especially those from America, is that only about 15 percent of Wittenberg's inhabitants identify themselves as Christian.
Most of the others proudly celebrate their atheism.
"We knew that Christianity had taken a hit during communist times, but to come here, to the land of Luther, and to find so many people outside the church, yes, it was a surprise," admitted Stephen Godsall-Myers, a Lutheran pastor from Pennsylvania.
The situation is even starker when the pilgrims make their way to the town of Eisleben, Luther's birthplace. There only 8 percent of the population calls itself Christian."

Chicago Tribune, 12/01/2007,

It's not all good news, because obviously Wittenberg attracts lots of pilgrims, but I've read about this earlier in a Norwegian article and what I find interesting is that East Germany never went back to Christianity like the other former communist countries. And one of the reasons is quite clear: the secularisation of Germany had already started before Hitler managed to screw up Germany. Quite unlike the situation in Poland and Russia. So while the communists elsewhere tried to put a lid on strong religious convictions with force, the German communists had a much easier job. At the same time, in West Germany, they used religion as a way to make up for the war.
There could be other reasons too, like the continued German efficiency, but I think the moral is that you can't force people with strong religious convictions to convert either way. After a couple of generations, OK, but 50 years won't do it. Also, have a look at a former post of mine about the current stats in Russia.

Unfortunately, the otherwise thorough Norwegian article (which most of you won't be able to read anyway) made the error that Communism and Nazism/Fascism actually agreed on religion: "they agree on the goal of a secular, atheist society". This is not true.
Nazism was certainly a threat to traditional religion, and they were for secularism, in the sense that religion should be a private matter insofar as the religion could not be changed to be more nazi-friendly. But they were not for Atheism. Spiritualism itself was more than welcome as long as it did not collide with nazi ideals and was useful to their ideology. Instead they scared people with Communist Atheism:

"Communism with the Mask Off
In Germany we have religious controversies which arise from profound questions of conscience but have nothing whatsoever to do with a denial of religion. These controversies are exploited sometimes by harmless and sometimes malicious critics and a parallel is drawn between them and the absolutely dogmatic atheism of the Bolshevic International."

Goebbels, speech 13 September 1935.

This is not to agree on religion. And for the inevitable religous comments about the connection between Atheism and Communism there's only one thing to say:

It's the economy, stupid!

Terror: Can We Blame Religion?

"In the wake of recent terror attacks, Western society has jumped to an easy and, it might seem, obvious conclusion. [blabla] [Sam Harris] contends that religion propagates myths that are dangerous, and that the world would be far better off without them. [blabla] What both Harris and Dawkins seem to overlook, however, is that religion has never been the unique instigator of violence. [blabla] The Soviet Union was a professedly secular society. [blabla] And there are more recent examples. Saddam Hussein led an Iraqi nation that “was thoroughly secular, [ruled] by a western-style legal code,” according to Gray."

Donald Winchester, Vision, Summer 2007 issue

Heard it all before right? Neither Harris nor Dawkins ever "overlooked" this straw man. It has been repeatedly rebutted, and just as often repeated again by believers. Here, Mr Donald Winchester, take a look at the famous "Problem with Atheism"-speech of Sam Harris.

"So too with the “greatest crimes of the 20th century” argument. How many times are we going to have to counter the charge that Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot represent the endgame of atheism? I’ve got news for you, this meme is not going away. I argued against it in The End of Faith, and it was immediately thrown back at me in reviews of the book as though I had never mentioned it. So I tackled it again in the afterword to the paperback edition of The End of Faith; but this had no effect whatsoever; so at the risk of boring everyone, I brought it up again in Letter to a Christian Nation; and Richard did the same in The God Delusion; and Christopher took a mighty swing at it in God is Not Great.

Did they overlook it? No, Donald Winchester overlooked it.
In a surprisingly (for him) nuanced comment he writes this:

"Does this mean that atheism or secularism is to blame for such slaughter? It would be hard to argue this. It simply shows that in these cases religion is not the cause of violence and terror. The absence of religion did not equal the absence of violence; the Jacobin Terror and Stalin’s purges demonstrate as much. On the other hand, the Spanish Inquisition and Islamic terrorism show that atheism is not the sole cause either. Indeed, many religionists are largely peaceful, as are many secularists. To ascribe the urge to violence to either is plainly unreasonable. Instead, we must search deeper."

That absence of religion does not mean absence of violence is pretty clear. We do not promise a world without violence. But what makes religions particularly dangerous when it comes to violence is that they are not falsifiable. Communism, as horrible as it was, is de facto falsified. We have all seen that it didn't work. While Christianity and Islam both promise an afterlife, Marx promised a paradise on here on Earth. And while there are lots of comparisons between religion and Marxism, the fact is that all communist regimes quickly turned sour. The experiment didn't work, and we have seen it with our own eyes. No such experiment will satisfy religious people, because their evidence will only come after death. The fact that living in the Middle East is probably worse than living in the USSR does not mean anything to them, because they expect a better life when they're dead.
So while Atheists can and will start wars in the future, they can not rest upon strange beliefs that can't be rationally discussed. Silly ideas won't last 2000 years.
Further, the argument about Stalin has magnitude as one aspect. But I think Winchester knows all too well that if the Spanish Inquisition had all the fancy new weapons of Stalin, they'd kill a lot more people. The crusades would have been much more effective too. I'm not sure, but I think that 911 probably set some world record as well. Not anywhere near the damage of the nuclear bombs dropped by the (so I hear) Christian country of USA, but you get the point. So as time passes, terrorists or religious fanatics in power are armed with better weapons and can inflict much more damage than the Spanish Inquisition could ever dream of(and I'm sure they did). I don't know what kind of nukes Iran are working on, but I bet they'll be more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
But let's hear more from Winchester:

"Stalin and Hussein aimed for unbridled power; the Jacobins, like today’s al-Qaeda, hoped to convert the world to their own worldview. Even Dawkins’s and Harris’s recent tomes fall inside this tradition, belonging to a genre of books that is among the most ideologically violent in modern publishing."

Yeah, right. How many people have Dawkins and Harris killed? Ideologically violent... al-Qaeda blabla. This is simply nonsense, and it shows how dishonest the anti-Atheist bigotry is. (Sorry, if this blog post equals an attack by al-Qaeda)

In the end, I refer everyone to this brilliant story I posted earlier:

"Then there's the problem on the other side -- among the atheists such as Richard Dawkins who have been labelled "fanatics." Now, it is absolutely true that Dawkins' tone is often as charming as fingernails dragged slowly down a chalkboard. But just what is the core of Dawkins' radical message?

Well, it goes something like this: If you claim that something is true, I will examine the evidence which supports your claim; if you have no evidence, I will not accept that what you say is true and I will think you a foolish and gullible person for believing it so.

That's it. That's the whole, crazy, fanatical package."

Dan Gardiner, The Ottawa Citizen, May 05, 2007

The New Atheism (and the left)

"If someone tells you that Islamic extremists are part of a “liberating” multitude because they are against imperialism, remind them that some folks in an earlier generation of leftists were quite able to be anti-imperialist and also to be against the Stalin-Hitler pact. They didn’t need hundreds of pages of theoretical delirium to figure it out. And remember that there were leftists whose theoretical hallucinations led them to imagine that the Second World War was little more than a reprise of conflicts among imperialists.[...]

Nonetheless, I am struck at how parts of the extreme left apologize for Islamic extremism in ways reminiscent of how an earlier generation found ways to apologize for Stalinism. The objects excused are different but the patterns of apologetics are sadly similar. It shows that there really is something I once called ‘the left that doesn’t learn.’"

Mitchell Cohen (professor of political science), Dissent Magazine, Fall 2007

An interesting article that has insights both on religion in USA as well as the Left.
It is no doubt a problem today that parts of the left do not follow up on their ideals when it comes to Islam. That is sad, because some good old idealism and activism for human rights is a lot better now than a relativistic fight for "the right to conform to your culture". I'm not sure it's the stalinist types that are currently defending Islam though. It seems to me it's the all too liberal left that does so. I hope the left can get more active, because a lot of the debate is hampered by the fact that Christians are more eager to fight for universal feminism and whatnot than the left itself.
It's going to be another black spot on leftist history unless they pull themselves together.

Genocide and Atheism

Two blog posts that go through some of the points related to this common and completely ridiculous idea:

"Atheism is responsible for the deaths of 100 million people in the 20th Century. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot killed millions of people in the name of atheism. Atheism is the cause of the most repressive, murderous regimes in history."

[...]

"Atheism is not a movement. No government or country effectuates policy in the name of atheism. Atheism is not even a a proper "ism". It has no guidelines, rules, tenets, or practices. It has no rituals, dogma, holy books or scripture. It cannot replace religion, because it is merely the vacuum created when religion disappears from one's personal beliefs.

[...]

Atheism in Stalin's Russia, then, was a mere tool used by Stalin, for the greater good of the state, imposed on the structure of society. It's effect was to strip away the power of the church to oppose his power. It was not a mere lack of belief in gods. Stalin could care less about the individual beliefs of the peasant, his focus was on destroying organized religion".

[...]

I challenge anyone to go through [the communists' (etc)] writings, or the writings of their biographers, and find any references to genocide on the grounds of a belief in god.

[...]

However, [the theist accusers] would still reason that while the killings perpetrated by these leaders were not done specifically in the furtherance of atheism, it is still because of their atheism that their moral depravity reached the depths witnessed by the entire world. But this still leads to logical fallacy. The world has never experienced a government conceived entirely on the notions of Hume, Spinoza, Paine, Jefferson, Einstein and other free thinkers. [...] But such an experiment has never been done, so it's impossible for the theist to argue that the result would be a negative one."

Regarding biographies and writings, I may add that if it's something the Soviet Union was not renowned for, it was interesting books on Atheism. (Ever heard of one?) I suppose it's because communism had too many similarities to religion, so lengthy criticism of religion would be counterproductive, while simply suppressing religious enemies would business as usual.

And as for the experiment with Hume and Spinoza etc. it is quite clear that the North European secular countries are in relevant fields far better places to live than deeply religious countries. So we don't need an experiment to see what is best from a religious nation and a non-religious nation.

See also this post:

Religions more safe in 'secular' nations, U.S. nun says

Goebbels on Atheism

"The European Crisis
[...]
Behind the Soviet leadership's pious phrases, we detect the grotesque face of Bolshevist atheism. It has not been liquidated, but rather it is only waiting to begin again its own work of liquidation, completing its work of extermination in the European states that it began with hundreds of thousands of priests in the Soviet Union. Only then, perhaps, will the Christian churches learn what combative enmity to religion really means.

Goebbels, Das Reich, 28 February 1943


"Make Way for Young Germany
[...]
No, the Marxist traitors were the ones who betrayed socialism, and the church was betrayed by those who claimed to defend Christianity but in reality made coalitions with God-denying atheists, thus destroying the foundations of national and Christian morality.
We have two Marxist parties for the workers. Are things going well for workers?
We have two Catholic parties. Has Catholicism been saved? No, the opposite is true. Ever since the Marxist parties in Germany began their fevered games, the workers have lost their jobs and their prosperity, and since the Christian-Catholic parties have joined with Marxism, God-denying atheism has gone about its work unhindered. These parties are the cause of the misery of the German people; the best thing for Germany is to kick this dead system's fat hacks in the rear."

Goebbels, speech 31 July 1932

"Communism with the Mask Off
In Germany we have religious controversies which arise from profound questions of conscience but have nothing whatsoever to do with a denial of religion. These controversies are exploited sometimes by harmless and sometimes malicious critics and a parallel is drawn between them and the absolutely dogmatic atheism of the Bolshevic International."

Goebbels, speech 13 September 1935.

Am I the only one who thinks the rhetoric of Goebbels sounds uncannily familiar to the run of the mill American evangelical?

[History] Hitler's Christianity

"To deny the influence of Christianity on Hitler and its role in World War II, means that you must ignore history and forever bar yourself from understanding the source of German anti-Semitism and how the WWII atrocities occurred.

By using historical evidence of Hitler's and his henchmen's own words, this section aims to show how mixing religion with politics can cause conflicts, not only against religion but against government and its people. This site, in no way, condones Nazism, Neo-Nazism, fascist governments, or anti-Semitism, but instead, warns against them."

Nobeliefs.com

A very good collection. Especially, take a look at the photos.

[Islam] "Misguided women"

"The ninjas. The burqa brigade. The women in black. For some years now I've been hearing such terms thrown around with disdain by "burqa-unfriendly" sections of Pakistani society to describe the women who swathe themselves entirely in black.

[...]

Then, in March, dozens of girls from Jamia Hafsa kidnapped three women and a baby from a house they claimed was a brothel. Next they kidnapped two policemen. Newspaper front pages were splashed with pictures of the ninjas chasing away plain-clothes policemen while wielding long sticks. They have also taken to patrolling the bazaars, threatening the owners of DVD and CD stores, which they claim spread pornography and vice."

New Statesman 30 April 2007

In short: Islamic Hitler Jugend for girls

[History] The myth of an atheist Hitler

"One of the main arguments that religious people throw up is that the great genocides of recent times were committed by atheists. They tend to focus on both Hitler and Stalin, ignoring the fact that both were brought up in religious circumstances and held religious beliefs. Hitler especially saw the Christian faith (well his ideo of the faith) as essential to an aryan Europe. Here are some quotes

[...]

"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people." [Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933, from a speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933]"

Profnewport.blogspot.com, 25 April 2007

A good list of quotes! Well worth checking out!

Vatican boycotts Holocaust remembrance

"· Shock as envoy rejects invite to Jerusalem service
· Row grows over reference to pope's wartime role

The Vatican ambassador to Israel has sparked a row after refusing to attend tomorrow's annual Holocaust memorial service in Jerusalem in protest at a description of the wartime role of Pope Pius XII.

[...]

The text notes that Pius XII's reaction to the Holocaust is controversial and states: "When he was elected pope in 1939, he shelved a letter against racism and anti-semitism that his predecessor had prepared. Even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican the Pope did not protest either verbally or in writing." The description also says Pius XII chose not to sign a December 1942 Allied declaration condemning the extermination of Jews and did not intervene when Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz."

The Guardian, Saturday April 14, 2007

[History] The Nazis didn't like blasphemy

"According to the principles governing the compilation of this list, the following publications must be removed from public and commercial lending libraries:
[...]
c) All writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy to the healthy sentiments of the Volk."