Haru-Cute’s first single is now in the works.  Here’s the tracklist

01. EVERYDAY, Zekkichou!

02. Shochuu Omimai Moushiagemasu

03. Member introductions

Name: Alison
Birthdate: 11/16/91
Birthplace: Ketchaken, Alska
Nickname: ALY :’D
Blood Type: A-
Height: 5′5″
Groups:

Haru-Cute (2009-present)

AlyMandAngeru (2009)

Hobby: alien hunting. oh, and I play the flute and sing too…
Special skill: making cinnamon sugar toast
Strong point: singing, I think
Weak point: lazy-ness…
Habit: I play with my hands when I get nervous
Favorite color: Pink!!!
Favorite flower: Chrysanthemums.
Disliked thing to do: Clean
Scared of: squirrels, belly-buttons, latex gloves… you name it I’m probably afraid of it…
Favorite movie: Salem’s Lot
Favorite book: Snow Falling on Cedars
Favorite word: Shabondama
Favorite season: Fall!
Favorite food: It’s between sushi and macaroni…
Least favorite food: bologna.
Favorite song: 100kai no kiss or goodbye natsuo by Aya Matsuura
Charm point: My eyes! not too blue, not too grey and they’re really glassy.

Ja kun sinä/oivoi, MINÄ ole/t/n riemuissa/si/ni uusimpien kirjoje/si/ni tilauksesta ja kerro/t/n hänelle… Niin hän sanoo, että vie vain… Vaikka oli/t/n hälle kertonut, että viedäänkö heti postiin. Oltaisiin yhdessä riemuittu. Hälle ei se niin riemu tai äly ollutkaan. Sama sille, jussi vai ville kirjoittaa? Vuodattaa sydäntuntojaan?

Siinä lie höttöalbumia kaikille rakastaville. Hän vain työntää isoon suuhunsa pottua ja toteaa: VIE VAIN!

Paksat, huomenna vien ja olen vähän aikaa hiljaa. Kiitos tilaajalle kuitenkin…

Lumiesteet vielä jostain puuttuvat…

Onkohan sitä rakkautta, sitä IHAN HELVETIN OIKEATA JOSSAIN NÄILLÄKIN PISTEILLÄ?

Sleepless and bored one night in late September I was channel surfing on my TV when, by chance, I tuned in the ABC just as it aired a promotion for one of its talk shows, Q&A, something about God, Sodomy and the Lash.  Before moving to another channel I heard that Christopher Hitchens would be a panellist on the show and there would be no politicians.

I made a mental note of the date and time.  Hitchens’ name alone made me decide to give the show a look-in.  It didn’t hurt that there would be no political doublespeak.

Who the hell is Christopher Hitchens?

Christopher Hitchins – a great thinker and philosopher of our times – should be included in all school curriculums.

– Delphic Oracle, blogger on ABC Fora, http://www.abc.net.au/tv/fora/stories/2009/10/06/2706358.htm, 8 October 2009.

Well religion is a sort of poison but then so is Depleted Uranium and Christopher Hitchens seems to have had no compunction in encouraging the poisoning of Iraq. This guy is a class B war criminal.

– Marina, blogger on ABC Fora, http://www.abc.net.au/tv/fora/stories/2009/10/06/2706358.htm, 8 October 2009.

There’s little question that Christopher Hitchens is controversial and polarises audiences.  He has been called an iconoclast, contrarian, polemicist and many other less flattering things.  He seems to generate only passionate assessments, with hardly a tepid word said about him.

My own acquaintance with Hitchens’ work dates back to the early 1990s, when I read Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports (published in 1988).  In that collection of writings he seemed to me as somewhat strident and, yes, doctrinaire, in voicing what would have been controversial opinions at that time.

Nevertheless, his irreverence was oddly compelling and since that time I have read with great interest whatever columns and essays of his I came across, gradually coming to realise that what he wrote about appealed to my own opinions and prejudices.

Hitchens at the mike.

Nevertheless, I never really investigated the man and I still find it difficult to characterise Hitchens beyond a few generalities.  A seemingly acid-tongued Britisher with an upper-class accent, insatiable thirst, and still-boyish looks in his later 50s who excoriates religion, the hypocrisies of the faithful and of autocrats of any flavour, all from his home-base in dreary, cold and rainy Washington DC.

Writing for the conservative American publication National Review, Tom Bethell gave a portrait of Hitchens as a drunken, rabble-rousing, atheistic socialist (7 April 1989).  A colourful and somewhat romantic description, I think.  More recently, ahead of Hitchens’ keynote address to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House on 3-4 October, Sydney Morning Herald journalist Matthew Buchanan quoted Hitchens thus –

”I’ve already read an attack saying it’s much too easy to do what Hitchens does, and what does he mean ‘dangerous’?” Hitchens said.

”It’s a perfectly good point – in a way.  What danger is there in my going to the Opera House?  None.

”But it’s not nothing to me that a murderous theocracy in Iran is about to get nuclear weapons by stealing and cheating – that is dangerous.  Or that there are settlers around the greater River Jordan and Jerusalem area who think that by stealing other people’s property they can bring on the Messiah and Armageddon – that is dangerous.

”And I can give you another dozen such examples.”

Just so.  A pox on both their houses!  The quote continues –

”I think human civilisation only begins when people separate religion from the state.  Policing that frontier, making sure of it, is a huge thing, culturally and politically. You realise that any attempt to cross it is poisonous – in the sense of lethal.”

(http://www.smh.com.au/national/heathens-above-gods-harshest-critic-smokes-in-the-shower-20091001-ger1.html, dated 2 October, accessed 3 October 2009.)

Clarifying the sources of Hitchens’ ire, Matthew Clayfield, writing for The Punch, had this to say –

Hitchens’ real targets … are hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, and the suppression of liberty by tyranny.  Pretty good targets, by any reasonable standard.

And now, Hitchens seems fairly certain, he has found a figure who embodies all three.  The figure in question?  That would be God.  And it will be God, too, that Hitchens goes after when he takes to the stage of the Sydney Opera House tonight, to argue, after the title of his most recent book, that God is not great and that religion poisons everything.

(http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/interview-christopher-hitchens/, dated 3 October, accessed 4 October.)

I guess that Hitchens might, therefore, be seen as a blasphemer by the faithful, as a gadfly or enfant terrible by establishment politicians of all stripes, particularly those who have been the subject of his critiques, and as an iconoclast, polemicist and all-round contrarian in literary circles.  In other words, a talk show producer’s dream, promising animated discussion and the kind of controversy that generates ratings bumps.  But maybe, just sometimes, he could also be the catalyst for changing people’s minds.

I cannot be certain how much influence Hitchens has had on my thinking, but I suppose the hundreds of pages of his work that I have read will have left some sort of impression, particularly in terms of my thinking about the human condition and being “flawed” rather than striving for godlike perfection.

Those who profess faith in some higher power may be uncomfortable with my thesis because they often seek to mitigate their flaws by positioning themselves as more nearly “pure” and “perfect” than others because of their faiths in some unknowable, unattainable, but absolute perfection – God, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha.  Call it what you will.  This becomes dangerous when those who seek this kind of perfection also seek to impose their ideas on those who don’t want to know.

I suppose this is what Hitchens means when he says that religion is poisonous.

Hitchens’ most frequent battlefield appears to be the hypocrisy commonly practiced by those professing to be dedicated to the quest of attaining the perfection “mandated” by some higher power.  This thought firmed in me while I watched Hitchens calmly and rationally put forward his views amid a barrage of critique, insults and misrepresentations.

The friction between my own early agnosticism, which developed into atheism in my teenage years, and the pressures on me to at least pay homage to religious observances has always made me acutely aware of the repressive characteristics evident in almost all dogma and all religious influences on supposedly secular, liberal democratic societies in Europe, the US and Australia.

I still remember being forced to attend church at Christmas by my foster parents despite my clear objections on the grounds of not being a Christian and not wanting to be made a hypocrite by attending Mass.  No luck.  Children don’t have rights!  There were later attempts at coercing me to bow my head during prayers and hymns at high school morning assemblies.  By this time I didn’t really care too much about rights and just disobeyed.  The way my teachers exploited their positions of authority to bully me only confirmed my suspicions about the authoritarian nature of organised Christian religion and spurred me on to greater defiance.

Perhaps the most formative incident occurred when an Irish Roman Catholic priest physically assaulted me in a “religious education” class when I was 14 for daring to suggest that the “virgin” Mary was probably an inventive young woman who came up with a fabulous fiction to mask her infidelity and otherwise inexplicable pregnancy.  The lesson I took away from the assault was that even modern Christianity engenders such fervor that all supposedly Christian morality gets pushed aside when it comes to dealing with “heretics”.

At roughly the same time I first became aware of the details of atrocities committed by the Nazis, the Soviet communists, the Imperial Japanese, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge and other unsavoury secular zealots.  I formed the view that there was little to distinguish enforced ideological from theological extremism.  In fact, it seemed to me that totalitarian ideology was no more than a form of secular religion.

Not that many years later I saw TV actuality of what happened in Iran on the return of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini.  I was appalled by the unbridled and unreasoning zealotry of a Tehran crowd that had worked itself into a hysterical frenzy, bristling with a fearsome primeval violence that I had never seen before (except at British soccer matches), but that seems all too common on the evening news now.  Like Hitchens, my views towards fundamentalist Islam hardened on the day that I learnt in 1989 that a fatwa ordering the murder of Salman Rushdie for passages in his novel, The Satanic Verses, had been issued by Khomeini.  Was the Islamic cleric insane?  Was he so arrogant as to believe Allah needed him to become an instrument of death?  Did no one in Iran recognise that this couldn’t possibly have been the path to enlightenment and the peace of Allah?  This, indeed, was a poisonous running sore on the body of Islam.

Since those days I have never missed an opportunity to represent my personal disgust at the excesses of any religion, secular or theological, but my soap box has always been limited to letters to the editor or to politicians.

The above should clearly identify my biases on the subject of religion, and my distaste for the imposition of any ideology, whether it be theology dressed up as identity politics, opportunistic or demagogic political doctrine, or paternalism and autocracy.

Nevertheless, I have always felt ineffective against the crushing weight of apathy, ignorance and collaboration of the vast majority of people whose passive, bourgeois prejudices were so stereotypically expressed by all but Hitchens on the Q&A panel.

These, then, were the views I took with me to the viewing of the ABC Q&A programme on 1 October 2009.

Hitchens’ fellow-panellists on the programme included Jesuit Catholic priest and public activist/commentator Frank Brennan; former editor of The Monthly, Sally Warhaft, who departed because she couldn’t stomach Robert Manne’s giant ego and meddling ways; politics lecturer, lawyer and former spokesman of the Islamic Council of Victoria, Waleed Aly; and the relentlessly narcissistic Anne Henderson, best known for being the wife of Gerard Henderson, and an apparatchik of his reactionary right-wing “think tank,” the Sydney Institute.

Details about the show can be found at http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/past-programs-by-date.htm (accessed 3 October 2009).  A full transcript can be found here http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s2695716.htm?show=transcript (accessed 3 October 2009).

Vengeance, miracles and God

The first question –

Ejder Memis asked: If thousands of people dying in earthquakes can’t be called ‘God’s punishment,’ then why the rescue of a person from the rubble days later is almost always called a ‘miracle?’  Why should God be credited for the good act of a human being saving the life of a fellow human being, while being spared the blame for an event that humans are not responsible for?

Surely Memis jests!  A rhetorical question designed to illustrate the manifestly nonsensical effort, particularly by fundamentalists of all creeds, to read some sort of Old Testament vengefulness into dreadful accidents?

Said Hitchens –

It’s probably the stupidest thing the human race does, is to look for patterns in this way and say when a baby falls out of a high rise building and bounces on the grass below, that must be God.  And when millions of children die every day from lack of pure drinking water and just die of diarrhoea in a banal manner, that’s because God moves in a mysterious way or isn’t involved at all.

Or is it that God is a sadist, a malicious tyrant, a petulant and unpredictable child?  I doubt that Christians, Jews or Muslims would contemplate such possibilities.

The bland-faced, silver-haired, and softly spoken Brennan gave a very cautious answer in the manner of a social worker talking to a troubled teenager –

Natural disasters happen and an omnipotent God lets them happen, for those of us who believe in God.  It’s not about God saying that we won’t let nature take its course.  Those of us who do have a religious faith, we equally, I think, are committed to science but, like Christopher says, we all look for patterns.

Anyone expecting a fiery confrontation between the controversial atheist and the Jesuit was to be immediately disappointed.  No fire and brimstone from this Jesuit.

Frank Brennan.

Was Brennan suggesting that God takes a laissez faire attitude to his creation?  And if so, doesn’t that mean that all people are free to do as they will, regardless of dogma?  Does that not make organised religion, like Brennan’s Roman Catholic Church, obsolete?  Not if organised religion were to be recognised as a political power structure as much as a spiritual one.

Waleed Aly is a slightly-built man who looks like someone needs to feed him.  He has a friendly, open face with the archetypal distracted appearance of an academic.  He took up the point of the dangers in human interpretations of the unknowable –

Well, I think, by definition, if you believe in God, you would have to say that at the very least God allows this thing to happen because to say otherwise would be to presuppose that God lacks the power to stop it, which – I don’t know of any religious traditions, certainly no monotheistic religious tradition that would say that.  I do want to say something that I definitely agree with in what Christopher said, and that is that this sort of very simple dichotomised thinking about natural disasters – that they are punishment or reward and this is the prism through which we view them – I mean, this has to be some of the most rudimentary, unsophisticated thinking that religious people and, frankly, irreligious people, who perpetuate it even via criticism, have ever produced.  I think it’s a ridiculous assertion and I’ve not really encountered a serious religious thinker, as opposed to one who is too busy playing forms of identity politics or some other kind of rabble rousing – persecuting some rabble-rousing religiosity, who would argue that.  The simple fact is that things happen in life that are, in our subjective experiences, grotesque and other things that are wonderful and our judgments, immediately, about whether they’re grotesque and wonderful are, in a sense, beside the point.

Interesting, but badly in need of clarification.  In referring to identity politics, is Aly implying that those who might ascribe disasters to God’s vengeance for sins committed by humans are in fact lying through their teeth in order to promote otherwise unjustifiable political ends?  Does that mean that those ascribing any natural event to an act of God are in fact not sincere about their professed faiths, instead using a religious platform to manipulate or brainwash targeted populations?  Aly doesn’t say so, but this is an almost irresistible conclusion.

I would argue that those who profess to know the mind of God, as alluded to by Aly, thus elevate themselves to the status of messiahs or prophets.  I would imagine this comes pretty close to what is known as heresy in the Christian tradition.  It would be more appropriate, I think, for the faithful to confess that they have no way of knowing why God might allow disasters and good fortune to occur.  I do not accept any nonsense about God speaking privately to anyone to reveal to them the purpose of any event.  Inadmissible as hearsay, I would think.

The pancake layers of make-up and immaculate coiffure sported by Anne Henderson reminded me of the matriarchs of wealthy families everywhere, but could not hide the lines of bitterness and spite around her eyes and mouth.  She didn’t really add anything of substance to the debate, but couldn’t help big-noting herself –

It’s a question of when people can’t understand something they give a force a place in their understanding which is usually something spiritual or beyond the material.  And to me what God is is not so important but what God – that idea of God leads people to do.  When the New Orleans tragedy happened, one of the most heroic acts was the way the Salvation Army was there on the spot the minute it happened.  I spent three and a half years going to Villawood Detention Centre and got very much involved, as Frank did, with the so-called illegal people that came to Australia without visas, and trying to get them visas.  When I went to the yard, which was a very unpleasant place to be in every week, it wasn’t the Fabian Society or the Pacifist Society that was there helping people but, invariably it was older nuns, people who had some connection with the Anglican Church.  We sat down, people who believed in Islam, people who believed in Christ, people who believed in anything you could think of, and we were all kind of in the same boat together.  But it was interesting how it was those that had some faith who had the time too, no doubt, who were there helping …

I’ll go along with the rationalisation of the inexplicable, but not with attributing “heroic” action to a rationalisation.  Whether the Salvation Army rendered valuable assistance or not is irrelevant to the question.  The help delivered would have been given regardless of any attribution of the disaster to an act of God.

Anne Henderson.

In terms of the Villawood issue, I find it difficult to conceive of a circumstance where Henderson would be in the same boat, literally or figuratively, with refugees.  A cruise liner is more her style than a leaking, sinking fishing trawler.  A North Shore mansion more likely than actual detention anywhere.  My point is there’s a bit of a credibility gap when she argues that she was “helping”.  More likely assuaging her own guilt about being a wealthy socialite.

Moreover, she seems to want us to assume that what she was doing was inherently “good” in some way, but she presented no evidence to that effect, such as identifying her motives or the outcomes of her actions.

Mention of the Fabians and pacifists was a straight-forward and uncalled-for insult to Hitchens.  Besides, just because she didn’t see them, how can she be certain they weren’t there?  How does one distinguish Fabians and pacifists from other people anyway?

Most importantly, she glossed over the fact that the Federal Government was engaged in a screening process to assess which of the illegal immigrants were to be granted residency, and which posed security risks because of terrorist or criminal affiliations.

No matter how flawed the Australian policy on boat people might be, or how oppressive the conditions in the Villawood facility, Henderson and her cronies are simply not equipped to make the sorts of judgements that are made by all countries in the world about illegal immigrants and security concerns, particularly in a post-9/11 world in which radical Islam has identified Australia as an enemy.

In that light, Henderson might be regarded as well-intentioned, but ultimately beholden to a fairly simple-minded view on the relevant issues and, perhaps, dedicated to ideologically-motivated opposition to immigration policy, but from the comfortably unassailable position of offering no workable alternatives.

Hitchens attempted to respond to Henderson, arguing that it shouldn’t be forgotten that it has been part of the liberal democratic project to provide the kind of assistance Henderson described without abandoning people to the tender mercies of charities, but he was interrupted too frequently by the loquacious narcissist to make a cohesive point.  That’s a pity.  I would have liked to have heard what he had to say.

Religion and doing “good”

Next question –

Joel Brown asked: My question is to Christopher Hitchens re religion “poisoning everything”.  How do you account for the aid work religious organisations, both Christian and otherwise, do in third world and developing countries as well as amongst our own community with the homeless and needy?

Although Henderson did everything she possibly could to prevent Hitchens from answering while basking in the sound of her own voice, Hitchens cut her down: “I’ll get to the end of this sentence if it kills you, let alone me,” and he did finally manage to make a compelling statement –

Now, to the point about religious activism.  Isn’t it true — haven’t you all heard that Hamas does so well because it supplies social services?  Are you going to say that the same is true for Hamas, an Islamic jihad?  Never mind that they’re religious.  They distribute services where otherwise there’d only be secularism and corruption.  Well, if you want to claim that, you can’t just claim the charitable part of it, it seems to me.  Mother Teresa was endlessly praised for work that most of the time she actually never did.  I went to watch her very closely in Calcutta.  You don’t mind that she thinks that what Bengal and Calcutta mainly needs is a campaign, a clerical campaign, against birth control and family planning.  Has anyone here ever been to Bengal and concluded that’s what it really needs?  That’s what she was really campaigning for, in case you are worried.  But never mind.  She gives a wonderful impression of being a charitable person.  So what Indians need is more missionaries to cure poverty, when everybody knows there’s only one cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women, which means giving them some control over their reproduction.  You name me — you name me a Catholic or Muslim charity that goes into the fields determined to secure the empowerment of women…

Indeed.  And it seemed the audience was convinced, too, because Hitchens was silenced by loud applause.  My own experiences convince me that “charity” always comes with a price tag, and sometimes that price might be more expensive than the supposed benefit offered.  Ulterior motives are what they are regardless of whether they are dressed up in the suffocating cloth of religion.  That does not mean that the recipients shouldn’t grab what’s on offer with both hands, only that we should recognise an offering for what it really is and not allow some asserted religiosity to cloud the motive and also the ultimate outcome, whatever it may be.

A case in point I happened to stumble across on a boring evening.  On 15 September the ABC aired a Foreign Correspondent story, Fly Away Children, about Ethiopian children being adopted by American families.  The introduction included a voice-over that asserted –

Some adopting parents suspect or discover the new child they’ve taken in is not an orphan as they’d been assured.  The child may also have a litany of health problems that has been covered up by corrupt officials.

Also, many ‘relinquishing’ Ethiopian parents or carers may have been duped into giving up their children through a heartless process called ‘harvesting’ and can’t hope to re-establish contact with them.

In the documentary, an organisation called Christian World Adoption harvested Ethiopian children for adoption by Americans, apparently promising the parents of the children that they would have a better future in the US, and that the agency would keep them informed about their children’s progress.  This latter promise was apparently broken.  See http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2009/s2686908.htm for a transcript of the programme.

My point here is just what sort of morality is involved in the practice of harvesting children?  Altruism in offering the scions of a third world country better opportunities in the US?  I’m not entirely convinced that this isn’t closer to the slave trade than altruism.  But it must be all right because it’s all done under the guise of a Christian agency.  Surely a Christian organisation wouldn’t mislead or lie to people, would it?  I have an inkling that Hitchens might have commented: “Of course they’d lie.  And let’s call what they do what it really is – trafficking in human beings.”

Waleed Aly made a valid, if slightly misleading point on the topic of motivations for charity –

Religions can be used as a cover and a pretext for violence and evil and all sorts of things.  It can be instrumentalised in that way.  It can also be instrumentalised in the opposite way.  And so I kind of echo what Father Frank Brennan has said here and that is that if you actually look to the substance of what people are doing, rather than asking the first question, is this a religious organisation or is this not, and then trying to make some judgment about their conduct and their motives on the basis of that, then I think you get further down the track of making some kind of assessment.

It is, of course, common sense to judge each person and each case on its own merits, regardless of secular or theological context.  That’s the way it should be.  And Aly’s point almost negates the original question.  It is not religious organisations and charities that do “good” work, it is the people working within those organisations that do the work and make it good, bad or indifferent.

Waleed Aly.

But Aly cannot deny that if you describe yourself as a Muslim and you do not speak out against Islamist excesses, you inevitably offer tacit support to these activities.  And just so, the uncritically faithful of all religions support the excesses of their professed flavours of faith.

It seems obvious that most people with religious convictions assume that their beliefs are innocuous and well-intentioned.  But these people should consider the following: if you were a Nazi in Germany during the 1930s and ‘40s you simply cannot escape at least some culpability for Nazi atrocities.  Let’s be absolutely clear that the term Nazi refers to a very particular and closed group of people, namely members of the German National Socialist Workers’ Party of the 1930s and ’40s; the contraction Nazi stands for members of that party, and that party alone.  Curiously enough, it was pretty hard to find anyone in post-war Germany who admitted to having been a Nazi.  I imagine it’s pretty similar to any effort in Cambodia today to find anyone willing to say they were members of Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge.

By the same logic, an aid or charity worker operating under the auspices of a religious organisation is by definition a supporter (or collaborator) of that religion.  No amount of philosophical or academic reflection from Aly can change that fact.

Dogma, fundamentalism, evangelism and Brady

Jessica Langrell asked: Mr. Hitchens – you typically stereotype religious people as dogmatic and fundamentalists.  How is this, when people who listen to you feel as if you are the one being dogmatic and fundamentalist in your evangelical pursuit to convert the world to atheism?

There was some discussion, but mostly in what seemed like an effort to stay away from embarrassing the questioner.

As far as I can tell, Langrell presented an opinion, a gross generalisation, not a question.  What can you say?  What people say Hitchens is dogmatic?  How is it possible for an atheist to be dogmatic or fundamentalist?  What is the strict set of beliefs he adheres to?  Isn’t his project to challenge strict beliefs?  And on what basis is he an evangelist, the definition of which is one who preaches the gospels?  In other words, it is a dumb question based on a false premise.  Langrell should consult a dictionary or encyclopedia before misusing the words dogmatic, fundamentalist and evangelical.

On a more sinister level, however, it is a favourite ploy of fundamentalist evangelists to use such rhetorical stratagems against their critics.  To illustrate that point, and the dangers of arming the gullible and the stupid with such strategies and disingenuous rhetorical devices, let me recount a chance meeting with a young guy, let’s call him Brady, earlier this year.  We were both staying at a mutual friend’s place and I learnt a little about him in the days following his arrival.

My first impression of Brady was of an awkward teenager with bad skin, a dyed and teased pseudo-mohawk hairdo and trendy “clubbing” clothes.  You know the kind: baggy denim pants worn low on the hips to expose the designer-branded waistband of his underwear.  Garish printed tee shirts worn over long sleeved skivvies or collared shirts.  Overpriced “sports” sneakers.  Altogether a look that always says to me: “Look at me, I’m a young dickhead with no idea or taste of my own.”

It turned out that he was a pastor in a fundamentalist (Pentecostal) church somewhere in regional Queensland.  It also turned out that the last time he’d been in Brisbane he’d had some homosexual experiences he was now ashamed of and regarded as “mistakes”.  My own take was that his inimitably camp mannerisms and the hours he spent posing in front of mirrors wherever he encountered them meant he was merely repressing his true sexuality, possibly using his new-found “faith” as the alibi for his true “chastity” and “moral uprightness” (my quotes).

The Brady doctrine.

Brady came armed with some copies of a glossy magazine called Creation which seemed to be dedicated to priming its readers with a whole bunch of nonsense arguments to use against the Darwinian theory of evolution.  I remember flipping through a copy and coming across many short propaganda articles seeking to discredit the theory of evolution with such obviously illogical, simple-minded sophistry that they were cringingly embarrassing.  More telling, however, was an article on fundamentalist Islam which contained the following advice –

So has the term fundamentalist passed its use-by date for Christians?  It may well have.  Therefore it is probably not helpful for us to call ourselves fundamentalists these days.  Perhaps we should simply say we are “Bible-believing Christians”.

(Grigg, Russell, “Anyone for fundamentalism?”, Creation, Vol 30, No 4, Sep/Nov 2008, pp 15-17.  Published by Creation Ministries International.)

This advice is an acknowledgement that the term “fundamentalist” now carries many deservedly negative connotations.  Never mind that it remains an accurate descriptor of most evangelists, particularly the American variety on the Christian Right, but also Brady’s Pentecostal congregation.

In conversation I asked Brady what denomination he belonged to.  He had no idea what I was talking about, making disparaging remarks about Catholicism and Anglicanism when I mentioned them, referring to himself as “just a Christian”.  I found out what flavour by surreptitiously reading some of the literature he carried with him.  I also asked him what version of the Bible he used.  “King James, I think,” he answered, but that was not true.  His Bible was something called the New Living Translation first published in 1996 and “revised” in 2004; re-inventing the scriptures at will?  I challenged him about this but he said the book was obviously an accurate translation because many “experts” were listed in the preface.  In his opinion it was the Catholics and Anglicans who had it wrong and who used an inaccurate or “false” Bible.

I didn’t have the heart to discuss the history of the Christian scriptures, biblical forgeries, apocrypha and the contexts created by dogmatic re-interpretations with this immature, irrational young man.

I made no impression on Brady at all when I opposed his adamance that creationism should be taught in science classes alongside Darwin’s theory of natural selection even though the latter could be backed by scientific evidence while creationism apparently depends entirely on attacking Darwinian theory and blind faith for its proof, with not a skerrick of scientific evidence in its own right to speak for it.

Not only was his ignorance about his own religion alarming, so was the temper tantrum he dissolved into when I countered his comment that God talks to him with: “Most people who hear voices no one else can hear are locked up for being psychotic.”  And yet this kid is accredited to provide counselling to high school children in Queensland.  A scary thought.

If Henderson is looking for an example of atheists labelling the faithful as stupid, Brady is it, but not because he has faith, only because he is stupid.  Faith is incidental, though the mixture of faith and ignorant stupidity is truly dangerous, as has been alluded to elsewhere by Hitchens.

It seems appropriate to quote historian and novelist Antony Beevor on something he calls “counterknowledge” –

A populist notion has developed that any individual has the right to correct or change the truth according to their beliefs.  It is, of course, the democratic ideal taken to its most grotesque extreme.  But in reality it is the opposite of democratic.  It is the easiest way for the demagogue to exploit gullibility and ignorance.

Hellloooo Brady!  Beevor goes on to say –

Significantly, Islamic websites have also been learning from American creationists and have eagerly embraced their theory of intelligent design, which attributes the origin of life to a higher power and opposes theories of natural selection.

(The Weekend Australian Review, 21-22/02/09, p 2.)

In other words, fundamentalists are fundamentalists everywhere and prone to twisting facts to suit their doctrines.  Such bad habits contrast sharply with Hitchens’ record, which shows he is prepared to present his case rationally, logically and with factual illustrations, such as those about Mother Teresa and Hamas.

Religion, sexuality, freedom of choice and liberty

After the relatively non-committal responses from the Q&A panel to Langrell’s “Dorothy Dixer” faded out, an unforeseen question came from the floor –

Audience member: This question is for … Frank and Waleed.  You said that we live in a pluralistic society … .  What [are] your views on gay marriage and why is it there seems to be such opposition from the Christian and Muslim societies against it?

Brennan, who increasingly reminded me, at least in appearance, of the Irish Roman Catholic priest I encountered when I was 14, adopted his characteristically mild-mannered counselling mode, but was cautious to the point of being dishonest about his own church’s stance on the issue –

… people of a religious disposition may have a view about what they call the sacramentality of marriage.  I would see that as a separate question from the civil institution of marriage.  Now, in terms of the civil institution of marriage, I think one of the welcome developments in Australia is we’ve got to the stage of saying that discrimination against people on the grounds of their sexuality should be wiped out completely and that we’re a better society for that being the case.  In terms of the next step, whether or not in civil law there should be a recognition of the bond between two men or two women as being the same as marriage as it’s presently understood, the real issue, I think, is whether or not that decision is best made by our elected politicians or whether it’s made by our elected judges.  And I think at the moment, in Australia, the view has been that that should be a decision of our elected politicians.

Not really an answer to the question, and no mention here of the oft-repeated Catholic position that homosexuality should be condemned as a sin.  A position that has considerably influenced supposedly secular laws.  Aly remained silent, possibly relieved not to have to take a position on the issue, as Tony Jones interrupted to bring on the next question.

Joseph Bromely asked via video: Hello Comrades. Can we ever hope to live in a truly secular society, when the religious maintain their ability to affect political discourse and decision-making on issues such as voluntary euthanasia, same-sex unions, abortion and discrimination in employment?

This time Aly spoke, and almost convincingly –

The idea of secularism, the reason for it coming into existence, was to open the public discourse to a range of views: religious; irreligious; and otherwise. It’s about the separation of church and state.  That is, it’s about removing the levers of government, the levers of power, from a religious institution like the church.  That’s a different thing from saying that arguments that have their grounding in some kind of religious commitment cannot be aired.

Aly was right.  Secularism should censor no opinion.  Shame that the faithful aren’t quite as generous.  For example, some Islamic hotheads (many living in Western secular states) threaten fatwas of violent retribution on Western critics for “slandering,” critiquing and poking fun at Mohammed.  The most famous example of this was the 1989 fatwa by Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini ordering the murder of British author Salman Rushdie and his publishers in an announcement on Tehran radio –

I would like to inform all the intrepid Muslims in the world that the author of the book entitled ‘Satanic Verses’ … as well as those publishers who were aware of its contents, are hereby sentenced to death.  I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult Islamic sanctity.  Whoever is killed doing this will be regarded as a martyr and will go directly to heaven.

(http://middleeast.about.com/od/religionsectarianism/qt/me081002.htm, accessed 6 October 2009.)

Shortly later Khomeini placed a $5.2 million bounty on Rushdie’s head, causing the author to have to live on the run with around the clock security.  The fatwa was not formally revoked until 1998.

Perhaps as the direct result of the Rushdie fatwa, there were the threats leveled at Danish cartoonists who had depicted Mohammed, and bomb threats against the newspaper that published them.

More recently the German publisher Droste dropped the novel To Whom Honor is Due by Gabriele Brinkmann because the story, about the despicable practice of honour killings, contained passages possibly offensive to some Muslims.  Felix Droste, head of the eponymous publishing firm, is quoted by Reuters saying that “After the Mohammad cartoons, one knows that one can’t publish sentences or drawings that defame Islam without expecting a security risk.”  (http://www.reuters.com/article/artsNews/idUSTRE5952Y120091006, accessed 7 October.)

An example closer to home occurred in 2003, when the Jewish Community Council of Victoria took action before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal in an attempt to prevent the Melbourne Underground Film Festival from screening The Search for Truth in History, in which holocaust revisionist David Irving denied that the holocaust took place.

I also have personal recollections of being punched, jostled and jeered at by Christian protesters as I queued to see Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.  What I don’t recollect is any condemnation from Christian churches of this violence, which was widely reported at the time.  Hardly an experience that convinces me that Christianity is a harmless, tolerant religion.

Free speech is either free speech whether we like what is being said or not, or it ain’t free speech.  Paying homage to religious (or secular) doctrines should never be accepted as grounds for censorship.  I know that this creates societal frictions on questions about where to locate the boundaries of free speech and, say, malicious or racist vilification.  But that is still no excuse for bowing to theological or ideologically motivated ambit claims that impinge on free speech.

The violent anti-Scorsese, anti-liberty demonstration mentioned above led me to the conclusion that if there were a higher power, it would not need human agents to interpret or enforce its “will,” whether politically or violently.  Those who argue otherwise implicitly acknowledge that the higher power is not omniscient and all-powerful.  Moreover, if the faithful resort to human intervention in matters of faith at all, they assert their own semi-divinity in an unspeakably arrogant presumption of greater insight into the will of God than they accord to others.  The only other way of interpreting such actions is hypocritical, cynical, deliberately deceitful manipulation and naked, self-serving lust for power, which would surely constitute a major sin in any faith.

After some banter on the question of secularism, Hitchens cut to the chase on homosexuality –

… I think it behooves the religious to say what they genuinely mean.  Now, Frank just talked about homosexuality as if the church had never condemned it as a mortal sin.

And –

And I’m sorry, Waleed, it’s the same.  Islam says the same.  You cannot be a good Muslim and publicly be a homosexual.

Again the point about saying it like it is, not avoiding the consequences of supporting religions that have condemned, among other things, homosexuality.  This goes to the point I made above about accepting responsibility for tacitly supporting one or another religion.

Anne Henderson once again interrupted, presumably because she hadn’t heard her own voice for some seconds, and completely disregarded the reality of collaboration when she said –

… if you are a cultural Catholic, as I am, I don’t listen to what the Pope says every day and take my guide from him.

It’s really no excuse.  If you label yourself as a Catholic you support Catholic doctrine unless you come out publicly in opposition.  But on the issue of homosexuality this would be unlikely for an unreconstructed reactionary right-winger like Henderson.

Aly was a little more inventive in trying to side-step the direct challenge, but he also exposed himself as a collaborator with Islamic homophobia, never mind recognition of same-sex marriages.

The Catholic tradition has a church which has a kind of divine imprimatur and authority.  The Islamic tradition is a far more anarchic tradition in a sense.  There is no centralised authority, especially in the Sunni tradition.  So to say the Islamic teaching on anything is X is a position that immediately becomes contestable.  You can try to verify it statistically or otherwise but the point is that, at the very least in theory, if not in practice, any position that you take is a position that you take that may or may not – that may be fallible and is open to being contested by other Islamic theologians or other Muslims and so on.  So on any question, whether it be homosexuality or it be anything, you will find a position that the majority take.  And on the question of homosexuality, undoubtedly, if you took a poll in the Muslim world, you would find that most people would consider it sinful behaviour.

Aly appeared to be ignoring the reality of contemporary Islam.  It’s all very well to talk “no central authority,” but there are very real Islamic societies with very concrete interpretations of what it means to be a Muslim and what is the nature of sin in an Islamic society.  Academic debate about the meaning of Islam does not help the homosexual sentenced to death for sodomy under Shariah law.

At Hitchens’ prompting, Aly did concede that:

… as religion has become an identity movement, rather than something that’s actually anything to do with spirituality and faith, in my view, particularly in the post-colonial world, that religiosity, Islam has become instrumentalised as a list of conclusions, as a political ideology, as though there is some manifesto you can just download from a computer and install into a society.

But it’s a nothing point.  There has been a long debate about religion in the Christian world too, both within and outside the Catholic stream.  That doesn’t mitigate actual practice as opposed to what exists on paper, what might have been, and may yet be.  Aly seemed not to be prepared to admit the ugly face of the Islamic world today, as it is in practice rather than in theory.  He did, however, illuminate a point that may have been lost otherwise: religions in practice are often less to do with spirituality and faith than with political motivations and the imposition of rigid dogma to underwrite the tyrannical exercise of power.  This, I believe, is precisely the case in contemporary Iran.

The next question touched on a related topic –

Heidi Crieghton asked: Yes, my question is for Christopher Hitchens.  With many voters using a politician’s religious persuasions to influence their vote, do you expect to see, in your lifetime, a day when someone who is openly atheist be appointed as a leader of a nation like Australia, Britain or the United States?

There seemed to be general agreement among the panellists that it was possible for an atheist to become a leader in Britain and Australia, but not in the US, and that it was likely that some leaders may have professed faith for public show, but did not necessarily actually believe.  Surprise, surprise.

Tony Jones muzzled Hitchens to begin with, sounding out the rest of the panel first.  Brennan had this to say –

… perhaps not so readily in the United States or if in the United States the presidential candidate were atheist he or she would probably still proclaim some religious conviction in that that’s part of the United States.  But I think here in Australia whether or not one of our political leaders, I would think, was an atheist or of a religious persuasion, I think is almost an irrelevance to the Australian community.

It appeared that Brennan acknowledged that in the US the WASP establishment makes it all but impossible for public figures not to profess a Christian faith of some description, whether this is a sincere belief or a necessary lie.  This opinion accords pretty closely with my own perception about American politics.

Henderson couldn’t resist taking a shot at Hitchens –

… if you went around, like Christopher, bagging all the churches and anyone who believed, I think it will be a long time before that happens and I would be very surprised if it ever did happen.  You could be an atheist, but I don’t think you’d go around telling everyone that you thought everyone that was a believer was an idiot.

She’s right, of course.  A political leader could not afford to be openly critical of established Christian churches, or insulting to the faithful.  However, it is my observation that harsh critiques of Islam are not entirely unpopular in the US, Britain and Australia; a bit of them-and-us hypocrisy when really there is very little ethical or ideological difference between fundamentalist Christians and Islamists.

Waleed Aly was silent on this issue and Jones didn’t prompt him to contribute.  Shame, really, an Islamic perception on this question might have been instructive.

Hitchens offered some cases in point –

I’ll make a quick point about the United States.  It’s a good thing that atheists are not banned from holding the office, because we would have missed Mr Lincoln, for example.  And, in my opinion, Mr Jefferson and one or two other people probably worth having.

And –

… in England the life of James Stewart Mill, in America the life of Benjamin Franklin, they were quite well known publicly, you would think, secure, confident professional thinkers who didn’t say – didn’t think it was advisable to let people know what they thought in public because that’s how dangerous it could be in a pious regime and it seems that and all people of faith can apparently congratulate themselves upon it, that faith still demands professions of faith by people who don’t hold it that are, by definition, hypocritical.  So congratulations to religious opinion for bringing that beautiful thing about in what’s supposed to be a secular democracy.

It does seem that a degree of hypocrisy is demanded of public figures, a little like having to be a member of the communist party in the former Soviet Union and the present People’s Republic of China was/as a prerequisite for any kind of successful career.  A dangerously illiberal phenomenon, but a reality nonetheless.

It seems to me that the only way to counter this kind of hypocrisy is to do what Hitchens does and openly criticise the undue power of religions in supposedly secular societies, and the sinister effect of theological considerations on public policy.

Roman Polanski: crime and punishment

But back to Q&A.  The next question was really quite strange, even if topical –

William MacKenzie asked: Does talent excuse pedophilia? What are the panel’s opinions on the Roman Polanski situation?

Not surprisingly the panel was unanimously in support of prosecuting.  How could you not be?  The guy, by his own admission, drugged a thirteen year old, had sex with her, including sodomy, and fled the US to avoid prosecution.  He should and must be prosecuted no matter what his talent or how much time has passed.  Not to do so would undermine the integrity of that nation’s justice system, as pointed out almost passionately by Aly –

You cannot, I think, as a justice system, tolerate or reward someone just because they managed to get away with it for 30 years and say, “Oh, that was a long time ago.” Well, no, there is a reason that the criminal of law doesn’t have a statute of limitations that applies to it, by and large.  And that is because we deem crime to be of such significant import that it must be punished irrespective of how – what time has elapsed between the commission of the offence and the finding of the offender.

Just so!  What excuses can possibly be made?  Coming from an existentialist perspective, I think it might be an “authentic” choice made by Polanski when he broke the law, but his action implies that he understood the consequences and accepted responsibility for his actions.

To clarify, an existentialist position may accept, as authentic, arguments about the possibility of informed consent by a 13-year old girl, or arguments about the arbitrary nature of the age of consent, but from an existentialist position there’s no escaping the reality and knowledge of a social contract that subjugates everyone to the same set of laws.  The same position asserts that any act entails responsibility for it, and that any breach of the laws of the day necessarily entails consequences.  The two key words being responsibility and consequences.  Polanski should and must be prosecuted.

On a more personal note, Polanski’s actions were a breach of what I think a man’s “duties” to his society ought to be, which include protecting the vulnerable and weak, especially children, from any harm that might be headed their way.  Using children for sexual gratification does not fit my conception of protecting them at all.  While my personal moral code might seem old fashioned, it is really just an extension of the Hobbesian social contract.

Back to Q&A.  Interestingly enough, Jones himself waded into the debate with a bit of personal angst about the Polanski question –

… I’ve actually been to see several of his films in that period.  I’ve watched others on DVD and when you think about it carefully, is that somehow supporting him?

That thought would never really have occurred to me.  But I suppose I shouldn’t tell people what they should or should not beat themselves up about.  I’ve seen countless prison/true crime movies, including Chopper and the incredibly brutal story Bronson, but I never felt that by doing so I was absolving the crimes or exonerating the criminal.

Israel: justification for Iranian intransigence?

Speaking of reducing an argument to an absurd simplification, the next question presents a simple-minded oversimplification that has the potential to set the world on fire –

Basak Yildiz asked: Why is it that the Islamic country is the threat to the peace in the world and not the Zionist?  Is it America’s support of Israel?  Well hundreds of people are getting killed in Gaza and West Bank everyday with the support of America.  The Israel and Palestinian war has been going on for 61 years and still we fear about what has not happened, instead of worrying about what actually is happening?

Hmmmm.  What are we to make of this?  My own immediate reaction is that it’s a deliberately provocative propaganda fabrication to equate Zionist extremists with an entire nation.  That would be akin to saying all Italians are members of some Jesuit order, or of Opus Dei.  I don’t even believe that all Israelis are practicing Jews, let alone Zionists.  And how can we ignore both internal Israeli opposition to its policy on the Palestinians, and increasing pressure from the West, led by the US, for Israel to find a solution that offers Palestinians a state of their own?

Sally Warhaft.

I’m no fan of the self-righteousness with which the Jewish lobby world-wide defames critics of anything Israel does as anti-semitic, but I’m acutely aware that Israel has never made a threat to wipe an entire nation off the face of the Earth.  Iran has and continues to do so.  I’m also mindful of the fact that there is a big difference between the ability to use nuclear weapons and threatening to actually do so.

In the words of Spanish intellectual George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  It may be, as Yildiz argues, that Iran has not shown any nuclear threat yet, but its support of aggressive terrorism is not a good omen of things to come.  I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but in light of Santayana’s quote, should we not remember the moment on 30 September 1938 on which British PM Neville Chamberlain proclaimed: “Peace in our times.”  Only to have that moment followed by almost seven years of the bloodiest conflict the world has ever seen?  No, Ms Yildiz, we should and must be concerned about Iran’s potential nuclear capability without being sidetracked by questions about Israel’s own nuclear programme.

It’s a lesson that should have been learnt by all Europeans, whose offspring are white America and Australia, and whose ancestors have fought countless incredibly brutal, bloody and merciless wars, who instigated feuds and persecutions, and who were all sorry about the results at the end of their endeavours, most of which were justified on the basis of religious and secular faiths different from those professed by the ones they killed, tortured, raped, maimed and buried.

This cultural experience gives the West the right to say to the merchants of theologically-based hatred, torture, and murder: “Hey Joe, we’ve been there, done that, don’t expect us to respect your insane desire for an imitation replay.”

It is my belief that the foundation of what is called “Western Civilisation” is the struggle between the free expression of ideas and the crushing yoke of vested interests cloaked in theological/ideological claptrap.  In the West the voices of reason have kept the voices of no reason more or less in check since 1945.  But it’s a fragile thing, because the ideologically/theologically “superior” who would prefer conflict are still clawing at the gates of reason, lending aid and assistance to other loony-tunes bent on the destruction of Western civilisation by their very intellectual kinship with their supposed ideological and/or theological opponents.

Think of representatives of the KKK, the evangelist Christian Right, UK’s BNP and its fellow travellers, the reactionaries in the Australian Labor, Liberal, National, and One Nation parties, and all the world’s Islamist extremists getting together for a (Halal?) barbeque and you will have an almost instant meeting of closed and narrow minds who can agree on only one thing – persecuting and/or killing someone seems like a good idea.

Get together a whole bunch of “unbelievers” and they might not have a barbeque at all, but they sure as heck won’t be leaving their assembly determined to kill some imagined enemy.  They will disperse in groups to talk some more and work out how to live without pissing each other off enough to resort to Armageddon, even if they find out they don’t really like each other.

At the risk of sounding trite, this is the great European tradition of liberalism that millions of people gave their lives for, at times fighting as much a civil war as a war against non-European aggressors, and learning along the way that killing each other is a thankless, sad, and internecine task.

And yes, of course Europeans have been aggressive imperialists.  But so were Islamic countries.  European imperialism of the past neither excuses Islamic aggression in the now, nor does it negate Iran’s own ambitions to become the pre-eminent power in the Islamic world.  What are Westerners to make of the calls from nation states and splinter cells about killing the infidel and creating an Islamic hegemony in the world?

Hitchens took a different approach –

I should perhaps preface this by saying that with Edward Said, the late professor Edward Said, I wrote a book about the rights of Palestinians and the way in which these have been negated by Israeli policy.  But I know a lot of people in the Arab and Muslim world who are fed up with having the subject changed to Israel whenever human rights for them comes up.

A very good example of this just last week in Tehran, where the government has an official Al-Quds Day, as it’s called, the day of Jerusalem, where school children and others are paraded.  It’s a more or less compulsory demonstration to say they’ll give their blood and their lives for Palestine, and hundreds of thousands of Iranians turned up to say: “No, we’ll only give our blood for Iran, thanks.  We’re fed up with being told by the regime that they represent the oppressed of Palestine.  That we can’t talk,” and they are having to shed their blood because the regime keeps on killing them for wanting to have a say in their own internal affairs.

And a regime that does this and has just pulled off a blood-stained military coup.  It’s overturned the results even of an already pre-determinedly fraudulent election that says … it takes three women in a court against one man; that uses torture and rape as policies in prison and so forth.

If you want a regime like that to have nuclear weapons, you’re welcome, but you should say that’s what you don’t mind.  Are you going to say that?  Are you going to say you’ve no objection?  That the real problem is the Jewish state?  Come on, be serious.

The questioner was obviously confused.  She asked Hitchens whether he meant that Israel had no nuclear weapons.  Hitchens chided her by asking whether he had actually said or implied anything of the sort, to which the answer was no.

He went on to point to his reportage of Israel’s “illegal” nuclear programme, and then posed a perfectly valid question –

Does this, in your mind, make the destruction of human rights in Islamic countries okay or not?

Spot on.  How does Israel’s possession or non-possession of nuclear weapons have any bearing on Iran’s repression of its own people?  Even Ms Yildiz agreed it did not.  Aly almost illuminated the issue –

The minute the conversation turns to Iran, it is going to be deflected towards Israel.  And so the problem is that if you’re interested in disarming Iran or somehow reigning in that regime, it’s very hard to do that in isolation without also engaging in some kind of agreement that’s going to bring Israel into the mix and, of course, the US, who also have nuclear weapons.

I’m encouraged by the fact that President Obama is talking about a nuclear free world and that when he headed the UN – presided over the UN Security Council this week, which I think is the first time an American president has ever done that, the vote to rid the world of nuclear weapons was unanimous.

That’s all good.  But now the really, really tough politics stars, and that is the politics of dealing with an Iranian regime that frankly probably sees very little incentive, if any, to try to disarm or to become less evil.  It’s got every reason to remain as evil and perhaps even become even more evil than it is.

Yes, it could be that the future of Israel is part of any discussion of the future of the region, though I can’t quite see what this has to do with a virulently anti-Israel regime in Iran possessing nuclear weapons.  If Israel already possesses such weapons and hasn’t used them against Iran so far, what reason would it have to do so against a non-nuclear Iran in the future?

I don’t quite understand how Aly can label Iran as evil, and then argue that there’s no incentive not to be evil, and that there might actually be an incentive to become more so.  Does Aly mean that Iran is an international pacifist and will step away from militancy only if the entire world disarms?  To me that sounds like an absurd proposition.

The way is open for Iran to be welcomed to serious discussions on the international stage, and to gain the support for its own security and prosperity from many other nations, including the US, but not if it continues to take the same belligerent stance exhibited by Ahmadinejad at the United Nations Durban Review Conference in Geneva, Switzerland (April 20, 2009), where he said –

The global Zionism is the complete symbol of racism, which with unreal reliance on religion has tried to misuse the religious beliefs of some unaware people and hide its ugly face… we should try to put an end to the misuse of international means by the Zionists and their supporters.

(http://www.adl.org/main_International_Affairs/ahmadinejad_words.htm?Multi_page_sections=sHeading_2, accessed 23 October 2009.)

The incentive for Iran to become “less evil” seems clear to me: the lifting of sanctions, greater economic prosperity, and a respected place in the international community.  This is, in my assessment, precisely why the people of Iran are taking to the streets; they want all of the above and more.  They want freedom from theological dogma as devised by intransigent old men caught up in the bitterness of the past.  They want a future free from the self-perpetuating hatred and murder of jihad.  They want to determine their own futures, not look to the past forever.

I don’t believe that ordinary Iranians want to wage war against Israel, let alone a nuclear war.  But if Iran, under its present regime, does develop nuclear weapons, is it not a reasonable fear that such weapons might find their way into the hands of Iranian-sponsored Hamas extremists, let alone be used by Iran itself?  Would the consequences not be catastrophic?  Is that not reason alone to fear a nuclear-armed Iran?

Can we, in this context, ignore the fact that Iran’s present leadership has repeatedly advocated wiping Israel from the face of the planet?  Should Americans not be concerned about repeated calls of “death to America” and “America is the enemy of Islam”?

Tony Jones weighed in on this issue by asking his own question of Hitchens –

Israel, of course, did try and stop Iraq acquiring nuclear weapons by bombing a reactor. Would it be justified, in your opinion, for them to do the same in Iran?

Hitchens’ answer was pure Edmund Burke, eschewing dogma in favour of responding to political and strategic considerations at a specific time –

What Israel did [to] the Osirak reactor was what the Iranians had tried to do – everyone forgets this – with their own air force a couple of months before.  The Iranians had a huge sigh of relief when the Israelis pulled off a raid they couldn’t bring off themselves and disarmed Saddam Hussein.

There were a lot of people in the Sunni Arab world, believe you me, who hope that the Israelis take out the Iranian one in turn, but they can’t say so in public, anymore than the Iranians could before.  My own view is that Israel both cannot and should not attempt such an attack.

It’s a somewhat surprising answer.  I don’t believe that Hitchens really thinks the Israelis couldn’t pull it off.  I also think that Hitchens knows that there might come a point at which Israel may decide it has no choice but to attempt such a mission.  As for the morality or realpolitik of it, if I were the Israeli PM I would defer to the US until the threat was so real and US action so unlikely that there were no other options.

It is an issue that has the potential to lead to the flashpoint that ushers in World War III.  There are no easy answers.  The best strategy for the US might be to offer moral support to the Iranian opposition, and, perhaps, to offer material support to an Iranian attempt at overthrowing the current regime.  That said, the US has a less than distinguished record when it comes to meddling in the internal affairs of other countries.

The rights of women in Iran

Jones accepted an unscheduled question from a blancmange of a woman in the audience with what sounded like a Sydney Western Suburbs accent –

Look, my one question is basically – or my one comment or passing comment is that so many times you’ve brought up women and Islam.  I’d just like to correct that I’ve read the Qur’an and all Muslim scholars would agree with me that Islam gives women a lot of rights.  We over and over give Islam women – in Islam, through the Qur’an, I may not say it through individuals who preach the religion but Islam, through the Qur’an, gives women a lot of rights and I need that to be heard. I need to have everyone to understand and hear that.  I mean, I am a young Muslim woman myself.

I sit before you.  I have a voice and I can speak to you and I can look you in the eye and I do have my rights.  And when I go to Iran – I’m actually Iranian, as well.  So when I go to Iran I also have my rights. I need it to be heard that the Qur’an – the Qur’an, Allah, (indistinct) Allah, gives us our rights.  People – individuals in countries and people who represent our religion may not and they may do the wrong thing to sort of stand in front and show us religion and preach us religion, but Islam does.

It seems to me that this woman is confused about the difference between the Koran and its interpretation in the Islamic world.  The Koran is not Islam and grants no rights at all.  Islam is the practice of Islamism as informed by specific interpretations of the Koran, and the rights of women are those granted by the Islamic regimes in charge.  The blancmange woman is obviously not the brightest spark, failing to understand the difference between being a tourist in Iran and living there.

Hitchens, too, would have none of it, arguing that she would not have the rights in Iran that she enjoys here.  Despite her attempts to contradict Hitchens, he seemed to have gained the support of the audience when he said she was insulting her sisters in Iran, who were being raped every day, by saying that women have rights in Iran.

There was a bit of a slanging match here not worth repeating in full, but the woman did say something about covering her head with a scarf to guard her modesty while she was in Iran, as commanded in the Koran.

Personally I find the whole notion of women covering themselves up as an act of pious modesty vaguely offensive.  It implies that men are incapable of controlling their sexual urges, and that women who do not cover themselves from head to toe are somehow immodest.  Both propositions are manifestly absurd.  It seems much more probable that the modesty commandments in the Koran have been used as a crude method in some Islamic countries of perpetuating the status of women as the chattel of men and of maintaining the power of men over women.

I noticed that the woman making the comments was not wearing a head scarf in the studio, though other women in the audience were; does that mean the modesty commandment applies only if you are beaten when you don’t obey?

Recanting atheism

Jones shut down what was fast becoming an all-in verbal brawl to usher in the last question.

Pam Collocott asked: Many non believers facing death change their minds about religion.  Is that fear or comfort?

Another of those really simple-minded questions about faith.  Brennan and Henderson agreed that it was both fear and comfort.  The tousle-haired Warhaft, looking withdrawn and contemplative, like a pale Ophelia, had not spoken much at all during the programme.  Her comment on this point was pretty straight forward –

I would say God knows. I mean, unless you’re from a team that, you know, dies repeatedly.

Aly took a rationalist position, saying that at the point of death, what do you have to lose.

Hitchens was a little skeptical –

When Voltaire was dying the priest came and said, “You should renounce the devil,” and he said: “This is not the time to be making enemies.”

It’s a religious falsification that people like myself scream for a priest at the end.  David Hume very famously didn’t and was witnessed by James Boswell not doing so.  Most of us go to our ends with dignity.  If we don’t and if it is the wish for fear or comfort, then both of these things are equally delusory, as religion is itself.

A little harsh on the dying, maybe, but a valid point nonetheless.  I would think that in my dying hours I would not seek to suddenly change my convictions.  And I’m with Warhaft: if there were a higher power, it would know about the sincerity of a deathbed conversion.

Hitchens revisited

I came away from the talk show enthused about the intellectual rigour Hitchens had injected into an otherwise vacuous debate that typified what passes for “informed comment” in Australian media, but what was exposed rather starkly as mealy-mouthed, self-serving and empty rhetoric underpinning a certain smug bourgeois self-righteousness that does Australia no credit.  Hitchens seemed to have been the only panellist with anything concrete to say.  The others made comment, but carefully stayed away from saying anything you could hold them to.  It was like they were all very careful not to offend anyone (except, perhaps, Hitchens himself) and not to say anything that might be construed as “outrageous”.  The end result is that they used a lot of words to say nothing at all.

Chief practitioner of this empty rhetoric was Brennan.  It would have been difficult for a lawyer to pin him down on a single tangible position on any of the questions raised, let alone on his Catholicism.  Warhaft didn’t have a lot of talk –time, but she also appeared to remain aloof from taking a concrete position on the issues.  Henderson worked hard at coming across as being informed, but actually just used a lot of words to offer shallow “insights” into bourgeois Australian thinking.  Aly, being the academic he is, adopted a fairly philosophical perspective which tended to make his comments so academic they offered only generalities, never concrete answers to the specific points raised.

Christopher Hitchens.

The general sense I got from watching Hitchens was that he revelled in the impetuous imperfections of humanity, in challenging established orders, in crafting new visions for the future and throwing off the hide-bound shackles of doctrines of the past.  People being at their best when they challenge the goals of those seeking to assert their notions of perfection.  In that light one might think of the critic of some supposed great achievement as the quintessential Western anti-hero.  The persecuted dissident as the champion of what is truly human rather than what is dogmatically enforced as perfection.

This is a theme that echoes in our myth-making for thousands of years, even in the Christian Bible, the playbook of the very people Hitchens excoriates for their narrow-minded conceptions of how things should be.  The Bible seen as not only a historical and cultural artefact, but also as the inspiration for much of the morality and rules of conduct forced on Western peoples by other Western peoples for at least the past 2000 years.

Consider a notion of my own thinking: biblical Eve was the first Judaeo-Christian anti-hero because she challenged the perfection of the Garden of Eden and God’s commandments, thus creating the human out of what was previously a sterile “state of grace”.  At the same time, if Adam and Eve were God’s creations, and therefore the product of divine inspiration, were they not bound to commit the first “sin” as part of a notionally infallible divine plan?

Is such an interpretation blasphemy or just a humanist illustration of the triumph of a human will towards self-determination?

But back to Hitchens.  He is certainly no rebel without a cause.  On Q&A he was convincing because he did not assume anything that was not said and he vocalised all that he meant, often with credible anecdotes about events and people.  At the same time he held his interlocutors to account for what they said and implied.  He rejected the notion that unspoken sentiments or assumptions should flow automatically from what was actually articulated.  His motivation appeared to be a kind of post-modern rejection of ideological or theological “colonisation” of the mind.

The same cannot be said of his fellow panellists, who frequently accused him of taking a point of view he had never actually articulated, and who themselves spoke in tones that made it clear that their audience was to read a broad range of sub-texts into their statements; a kind of dishonest and conceited shorthand in contemporary Australian debate.  Dishonest because what is meant is not openly and honestly articulated, and conceited because there is an assumption that the audience should share the prejudices and ideologies under which the implied sub-texts were conceived.

I suspect that I came away with a greater degree of respect for Hitchens’ position and intellect than I had when I started to watch, but I still don’t really know what sort of a man he is.

A British and American citizen, former Trotskyite who abandoned socialism, apparently in disgust with his former comrades for their timid reaction to the threat of fundamentalist Islam, he denies any leanings towards conservatism despite his support for the Iraq war.  Wikipedia notes that –

Hitchens along with fellow atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett have often been referred to as “The Four Horsemen”.  He is a humanist and anti-theist, and describes himself as a believer in the philosophical values of the Age of Enlightenment.  His main argument being that the concept of God or Supreme Being, is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, believing that literature should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization.

Hitchens is known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and also for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, amongst others.  This along with his argumentative and confrontational style of debate and writing, has gained him both praise and derision.  The San Francisco Chronicle referred to Hitchens as a “gadfly with gusto”.

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens, accessed 1 October 2009 for the full article and references.)

There appear to be some contradictions in Hitchens’ intellectual make-up.  How can a sincere atheist nevertheless have faith in socialism, an ideology I would call a secular religion?  I would have thought an atheist would be inclined to reject any faith-based doctrine.  There are suggestions that Hitchens has now turned his back on his earlier Trotskyite beliefs and is more of a “cultural Marxist” than a committed socialist, but this didn’t happen until mid-career.

It is an issue that has often puzzled me about Jean Paul Sartre, the high priest of post-war existentialism, a philosophy that asserts the sole authority of individuals over their own consciences and actions.  Despite advocating this view, Sartre was both a socialist and a Catholic.

My own point of reference here is that many people make the mistake of giving semiotic equivalence to the terms agnosticism and atheism.  The former is the position that one cannot know about the existence or otherwise of a higher power, while the latter is the position that there is no higher power.  Perhaps Hitchens and Sartre started out as agnostics rather than atheists.

I tend towards the belief that there is no higher power than man, not even a doctrine or movement devised by man.  Ergo, adherence to secular religions like the ones called communism, socialism, liberalism, feminism, environmentalism, etc, should logically be anathema to an atheist as much as theological doctrines.  Likewise, how can existentialists be the sole authorities over their own consciences, thoughts, and behaviours if they subscribe to doctrines that prescribe what should be thought and how people should behave?

I have been asked from time to time what this means in terms of my own fondness for the existentialist position, arguably a secular religion in itself.  My answer has always been that I aim to be eclectic, picking what appears to make sense from all doctrines, and from my own judgements, to suit particular circumstances rather than to formulate a set of principles applicable to all eventualities.

I have been accused of being incredibly arrogant to presume that my prejudices and judgements are somehow superior to long-established doctrines with millions of adherents.  So be it.  That’s actually what it means to be an atheist, an existentialist, a free voice in a supposedly secular society.  I have always been willing to be proven wrong, to change my mind, and to debate my ideas openly, but I will never agree that it is arrogance to form my own opinions and assert them.  In the context of this latter position I think my comment that Hitchens and I might share some common intellectual lineage was accurate.

My friend Leigh Wayper once said to me that the terms atheism and agnosticism are really no more than tools used by the faithful to control the debate about faith and lack thereof, and to stereotype people who do not share their beliefs.  There is some truth to this.  What does it matter what my beliefs are, or are not, in a debate about the justification for imposing on me the ideas of a belief I do not share?  Attacking or seeking to invalidate my beliefs is never a justification for imposing a different set.  In that vein Henderson was deceitful in attributing to Hitchens the misdeed of calling all faithful people idiots just because she implies that this is what atheism is.  I didn’t once hear him call the faithful anything.  What I heard was that he condemned religion as a poisonous artefact, and he condemned as dangerous those of the faithful who would allow religion to become poisonous.  There is a difference, whether Henderson recognises it or not.

It’s not just religion that can have this effect.  Doctrinaire views imposed by secular zealots are just as dangerous.  There are also examples of secular persecutions based on no discernible ideology at all.  Two notable examples come from the land of the brave and free itself: the McCarthy witch hunts of alleged communists in the 1950s and the underreported persecution of people who appear to be of Arabic descent since 9/11.

And what do these thoughts have to do with Hitchens?  Firstly, that his activities encourage me further to trust my own opinions in an environment that does not value them.  Secondly, that Hitchens’ own views are a reminder that rational, logical debate is always superior to dictate beholden to dogma or ideology.  Thirdly that Hitchens’ critics may call him what they will, but his intellectual lineage stretches back to Socrates, a greatly revered Athenian philosopher who was sentenced to death by his democratic city state for his iconoclasm and “blasphemy”; it seems ironic and yet entirely relevant to modern liberal democracies that democracy, philosophy, science and art in Athens declined after the purges that claimed Socrates’ life.

The lesson in this historical detour?  Modern liberal democracies should not allow religious and ideological fervour to devour or silence its children.  Rather, it should nurture rational, logical critique and free debate as a means of retaining its strength and vigour.  I think Hitchens is one of the people who does that in the Western world.

Another way of thinking about this is the political process in liberal democracies: without a strong and vocal opposition the people in charge face no barriers to the misuse of power.

The significance of Christianity in Western culture

This brings to me what may be my major point of difference with Hitchens.  I cannot bring myself to condemn all religion or seek its complete exclusion from the culture of the West or the societies we live in.  The Judaeo-Christian tradition is so intricately interwoven into the fabric of Western culture that it would be impossible to speak of that culture to the exclusion of the associated religions.  To that extent I feel I have little choice but to acknowledge that Christianity has played an integral part in bringing about the development of modern, notionally secular liberal democracies.

Nor do I have a great desire to see all religion banned or driven underground.  People must be free to pursue whatever faiths they choose as appropriate for them.

That leaves me with the boundary issue of exactly where and how religion should be separated from the state and from public policy.

It seems fairly clear that there is some way to go in Australia to achieve any kind of separation when our state and federal parliaments incorporate overtly Christian ceremonies in commencement and swearing-in ceremonies.  My argument is that such ceremonies and their equivalents in our courts and public service should be stripped of all religious references, no matter that they are mere window dressing.

It is in the application of “popular” measures, “public standards,” “acceptable” behaviour, the regulation of social conduct, individual liberties, freedom of speech, and unfettered access to information that the real separation between religion and the state must be achieved.

To accomplish this, there must first be a recognition of what is and what is not religious influence, and what the negative effects of this might be on those who do not have religious faiths, or who do not share the dominant faiths.  This would require the sort of honesty we clearly cannot expect from politicians, most of whom are skilled in enlisting the support of religions for their own demagogic efforts, or, at the very least, are unwilling to oppose the major organised religions in the country.

So, until there is a sufficiently powerful coalition of the disaffected to force such a separation, it is likely that it will be a case-by-case “battle” on issues such as censorship, same sex marriages, voluntary euthanasia, etc.  These individual battles will be fought largely by public intellectuals, of which there are almost none worthy of that description in Australia, but of which Hitchens is a good example.

In that context I wish him well in his endeavours, and I hope that his audience will swell over time, even if he were no longer agitating.

On the subject of frictions with fundamentalist Islam I can only hope that the tolerance and openness characteristic of some Islamic societies in the Middle Ages makes a comeback.  But that’s really up to the people of contemporary Islamic societies to determine for themselves.

I would urge Islamists to consider the fundamental transformation of radical black American activist Malcolm X on making his now famous pilgrimage to Mecca, where he realised that Islam was not defined by conflict and hatred, but rather by a universal brotherhood of the faithful from all continents, of all skin colours, and with many different interpretations of the Koran, but united in a common faith and extending the hand of friendship to others regardless of their beliefs or politics.

Until that occurs, however, I, like Hitchens, support a hawkish policy towards fundamentalist Islam, and particularly the currently belligerent and unpredictable Iranian regime.

ENDS

14,265 Words

My sweetie pie.

Aly dresses up for school. Yes school. She definitely looks better than the mummy!

We’re back to deliberating what cakes the kids (ours is already covered..lol) will have for their bdays.
This was Aly’s last year:

Aly's 1st Birthday Cake

Holy crap, that’s a big pic, sorry!! (BIG sorry to anyone on dial up – yikes!!) While it looked like play-doh, it actually tasted yummy.  It was a marshmellow fondant, so easy and fun to do.   Aly ripped through it like a tornado, the end result was bits and pieces here and there with coloured fondant everywhere.

Jai’s was a basic store bought cake + toy toppers, why? ’cause thats what he chose.  He said this year he’d like me to make his, a fondant one – possible a transformers theme.  SO MUCH FUN!  I think maybe we’ll check bakeries around for a cool one.  I can’t see him enjoying a fondant cake.  The boy needs chocolate.  I cannot find a pic of it right now, darn comp!

We also do a “family” celebration for each birthday, with that we have a cake too.  yummy ones like thse:

I’m racking my brain trying to come up with ideas.  I’ve seen some character stuff but I am not so sure I wanna go that way.  Suggestions are greatly welcome.    Has anyone tried cupcake cakes?? How did they pan out?  Sounds like an easy possibility.

Aly n her lion project. Kewl.