Was I wrong on "Draw Mohammed Day"?

The Koran burning in Florida on its own is just an ugly incident, but one thing that's really been frustrating me recently is hearing people compare it to the mosque in New York. You often hear that both are legal but people should have the decency not to do either.

Why the Koran burning is legal but offensive is obvious. The pastor intends to be offensive, so there's not much discussion there. To consider the Cordoba Center offensive, though, you have to assume that Muslims are the same as terrorists. It's the only way to take offense at all, which means that you have to be either an idiot or a bigot to put them on the same playing field. Or, as Jon Stewart has recently put it, you're saying that burning a Koran and reading one are equally offensive. It's precisely this sort of understanding of what's "offensive" that leads people to burn Korans in the first place.

All this made me wonder - was I wrong in supporting "Draw Mohammed Day" several months ago (for the record, Evan was less supportive of it)? I don't think so. Even considering the offensiveness of the Florida pastor, I think I'm still confident in the decision, and the decision to post the winners of Draw Mohammed Day on this blog. In the end, I think there's a difference between satire and intimidation, and I think intentions and context are important. When you see a cartoon mocking the backwardness of al Qaeda or Ahmadinejad, for example, that's very different from a broader mockery of Muslims. You also have to consider what is being responded to. Choosing to draw cartoons specifically, in the aftermath of the threats to South Park, seems very different from choosing to burn Korans, in the aftermath of the Cordoba Mosque controversy. One is clearly directed at people who kill in response to cartoons, because of their fundamentalism. The other is clearly directed at the simple act of building a mosque, and the medium is a more general FU to Muslims. It's not targeted to terrorists or radicals in any discernible way.

You don't arrest a court jester or a satirist for treason. Why? Intent and context.

It does seem like a slippery defense - I'm OK but the Florida pastor isn't because I didn't intend to be offensive to Muslims generally. Does that work? Or was I wrong? My gut tells me it's fine, but I'm interested in others' thoughts.

Lovecraft on Race and Religion: Part 2

In an October 17th, 1933 letter to Miss Helen Sully, Lovecraft writes:

"Yes - I read George Moore in youth, and have always thought the Catholic system weak in its relation to individual character. Ironically, it is the least personally strengthening because it is the most purely religious. Theoretically - and as a matter of universal acceptance in pre-Reformation times - the function of religion is primarily to exalt and serve some mystical and intangible entity or group of entities outside mankind. It has relatively little to do with human conduct and character - hence in classical and pre-classical antiquity we find religion largely ritualistic and orgiastic, whilst conduct (based on reason) remained the province of the non-religious philosopher. Christianity - or rather, the Judaism on which it was based - was the first religion to take a primary interest in ethics and assume a responsibility for conduct and character. That was the unique contribution of the Semitic temperament to western civilization - a very doubtful gift, since it removed ethics so completely from the aesthetic and logical field, transferring it to the jurisdiction of a mythical belief, that order and good taste threaten to vanish upon the ultimate and inevitable decline of the mythology. It would have been far better if we had kept our classical conception of ethics as a matter of beauty, good sense, and taste - the province of the non-supernatural philosopher - for its survival would not then have been so imperilled by the decline of religion. As Aryans, lacking the almost savage ethical sense of the desert-bred Semite, we are vastly better adapted to the conception of character as related to beauty, reason, and pride, than to the notion of divine moral law. Meanwhile our dominant religion has always been torn between two tendancies - one to return to the Aryan concept and become a system of mystical adoration letting morals more or less slide or putting them on a bargaining and excusing basis, and the other to live up to the specifically Christian ideal and mould better and more harmonious characters in the immediate world around us. The first tendency breeds the Catholic psychology, and the second the Protestant. As a result, Catholics are more purely religious - since Protestants, being after all Aryans to whome the feverish Semitic religio-moralism is impossible save for brief periods (such as that of intensive and literal Puritanism in England and New England), tend to lay more and more stress on human character and good deeds as opposed to mystical adoration, and therefore exercise the functions of the classically conceived philosopher rather than the classically conceived priest."

The line of thought is reminiscent of a piece he wrote in a circular letter in April, 1921:

"Modern civilisation is the direct heir of Hellenic culture - all that we have is Greek. Since the transient Semitic importation of ascetic idealism has run its course, can we not recapture a trace of the old pagan lightheartedness that once sparked that Aegean? Surely we can think of life as having something of beauty, and only a glutton wants eternity".

I think these selections provide interesting background for Lovecraft's underlying and somewhat obscure anti-semitism. He doesn't see Jews as being biologically inferior - that idea he makes clear in the 1930s, mocks Hitler for, and demonstrates his commitment to when he marries a Jew (the marriage ended, but not because of anything having to do with his wife's Judaism). He mentions the cultural dominance of Jews and the way these cultural arbiters alter American tradition, but as I outlined in the last post he never seems to pull out anything as indulgent as a "Hitler in art school" move, blaming Jews for any failures of his own publications - this despite the fact that his stories were rejected by the very publishing house Lovecraft had at another time suggested was overrun by Jews. So while he certainly doesn't stop talking about this stuff, concrete objections on his part are quite illusive.

In this passage, though, he puts a finer point on the influence of Judaism which I think might underly some of his other concerns. Judaism, for Lovecraft, made the misstep of fusing morality and religion. What was once the realm of philosophers and ethicists merged in Judaism with the mysticism and erraticism of the priest-class. Mysticism for Lovecraft the atheist is actually quite acceptable - his fiction is nothing if not mystical. Mysticism serves an important purpose for the human species. But that purpose is not to provide moral guidance - morality should be governed by rational thought.

All of this can be taken in different ways. Lovecraft was not the only one to revel in the prospect of a pagan revival in the interwar period - it was an important feature of Nazism too. It could go that way. Of course, the decoupling of faith and morality has also been important for modern liberal secularists who constantly have to respond to the fairly odd, question begging inquiry of "but how would we know right from wrong without God?".

Elsewhere - I can't find the citation right now - Lovecraft remarked that "Christianity did not civilize Europe - Europe civilized Christianity". I'm of course just getting into this material, and I'm not even primarily interested in his views on race and religion - but I am getting the impression that this whole line of thought is an important driver of all that Lovecraft has to say in these fields. If Lovecraft uttered a word about the "inferiority" of the Jews I might think twice (he does of course attach this word to others), but he seems more often to be inverting the traditional anti-semitic formulation - it seems like the biggest thing he faults Judaism for is giving birth to Christianity (rather than killing Christ).

Of course all of this is tentative and based on a work in progress, let me know. He may turn out to be less nuanced than he first appears. The man is still a racist and an anti-semite, there's no doubt about that. And no veneer of sophistication excuses that. But I do think (1.) you need to engage what he thought about race and religion if you engage his social theory - even though the social theory isn't primarily based on his thoughts on race and religion, (2.) if you're going to do that you can't just throw him into one big monolithic "racist" pile, and (3.) as you read this stuff you do find interesting thought processes - for example, the sources of morality and the "classical philosopher" vs. "classical priest" point is interesting and worthy of exploration for anyone, regardless of these questions of racism or anti-semitism that it motivates in Lovecraft's particular case.

Lovecraft on Race and Religion: Part 1

As many readers are aware, I'm compiling notes and outlines on H.P. Lovecraft's political economy and social theory as I go through essays and letters of his that I'm collecting. I recently got a collection of his letters from 1931-1934, and the other depression years are on their way soon. Why am I doing this? (1.) Treatment of his thinking on these issues so far has been quite superficial where it's been treated at all. (2.) He thinks quite deeply about economic forces that aren't treated in very great detail in the discipline formally, but were of considerable importance for the average citizen and for the Institutionalist school in the early 20th century (namely, mechanization, technological unemployment, inequality, monopolization, overproductionism, etc.). (3.) He has very interesting commentary on how the changes observed in the 20s and 30s relate to views on political economy in the early republic.

That's all well and good - but you can't get anywhere with Lovecraft in politics or social theory without running up against two big walls: his fascism and his racism. He was both - a fascist and a racist - but his thinking on these things can be surprising as well. He is by no means a fascist in the sense that Hitler was. My read of him so far is that he is more what we'd call a "technocrat" than a "fascist" today - but in the early 30s before the meaning of the word "fascism" changed irretrievably that term worked. That's a discussion for another time. Like everything I'm running across, Lovecraft doesn't rely (exclusively at least) on platitudes. He works through his fascism very carefully and I can't really do his thoughts on it justice here.

The other wall is his racism. Unlike his fascism (which I think is overstated by critics), his racism is undeniable, virulent, and out in the open. But again - almost chillingly - it's very carefully thought through. I think we have a tendency to treat racism as the arena of unthinking mobs. It's jarring to read someone carefully walk you through his racism - to see that it is nuanced and even differentiated from the racism of others. Lovecraft, for example, repeatedly makes detailed distinctions between what he calls "race-stock" and culture. He's been presented by some reviewers as embracing Anglo-Saxon superiority. Maybe he does at some point, but in the 1932-1933 period he takes great pains to argue that no "race-stock" is superior, and relentlessly mocks Hitler for making claims like that. Lovecraft argues that almost all races are equal - simply different - and his greatest concern is the cultural tradition that evolves with a "race-stock". His concern is that when "race-stocks" mix, culture is depleted because it is watered down by the incorporation of new cultures - and that cultural depletion is what he sees as the source of Western decline. In the period that I'm looking at, Japan had recently gone through a coup d'etat that established a new militarist government. Lovecraft comments extensively on this as well and praises both the Japanese and the Chinese, lauding their respective "cultures" and the cultural maintenance he expects from the new militarists in Japan - which of course contrasts sharply with the "yellow peril" views of most American racists at the time.

Two points complicate this race/culture line of thought: the "race-stocks" he does identify as biologically inferior (Africans and "Australoids"), and of course the Jews. I haven't worked through all of these letters yet, but so far he pays very little attention to the inferior "race-stocks". I suppose there's not much to discuss there, for him. The Jewish question is very interesting for Lovecraft - again because he is undeniably anti-semitic, but he's jarringly complex in his anti-semitism. Again - he mocks Hitler's anti-semitism incessantly and dismisses any notion that there's something unique or inferior about Jewish genetics - he dismisses that idea regularly. And that shouldn't be paritcularly surprising for anyone that knows anything about Lovecraft's personal life: he married a Jew, after all! That fact has puzzled a lot of Lovecraft critics, but it's not especially surprising when you read what he actually writes about them. And yet, he's definitely an anti-semite - I'm not arguing that he's not! His anti-semitism rests on his view that Jews are commandeering and distorting major cultural institutions, which of course is not an uncommon line at all among rank-and-file racists. But even this more traditional line of thought is intriguing - he identifies Knopf, for example, as a publishing house in New York that has been commandeered by Jews. You would think, then, that he wouldn't submit his stories to Knopf - but he does! You would think that when they subsequently reject his stories he would blame "the Jews" like a young, dejected Hitler. Surprisingly, he doesn't at all! At least not in any letters that I've come across (and again I stress I've only been through some). He curses Knopf and takes the rejection very hard, but you don't see any citation of Judaism. This is especially surprising since he's already identified this publishing house as a source of Jewish influence on culture. Instead, he identifies the marketability of his stories as the problem!

So Lovecraft's anti-semitism is (1.) explicitly anti-Nazi, (2.) unrelated to genetics or bloodlines at all, (3.) willing to accept a Jewish wife, while (4.) engaging in the oldest, basest critiques of Jewish cultural dominance, and yet (5.) when these identified Jewish cultural critics reject his works he chalks it up to the limited marketability of his own stories rather than any imagined Jewish avarice. The guy is very hard to get a consistent picture of, and I'm only reporting my impressions of a three year period (and yet, one does get the impression that if one were to get a clear picture of him, it wouldn't be a pleasant one)! As Hitler (who he already critiques severely) gets more open in his violence and anti-semitism in the 1934-1937 period I fully expect Lovecraft's views to get even more complicated.

In Part 2 I'm going to discuss a very interesting critique of Judaism (really of Semitic monotheism in general - including Christianity and Islam as well, but which he traces back to Judaism) and the relationship between religion and morality.

*****

A semi-unrelated note: I came across a Cthulu emoticon that's kind of funny: (;,;)

Catalan on Progressives

Jonathan Catalan wrote a great post clearing up a bizarre assessment of libertarians on the "Ground Zero Mosque". Great until this line at least:

"Is the libertarian position regarding Islam and the United States “leftist”? If that means that the progressive-left position is similar to ours: yes and no. I think that the progressive-left offers Muslim-Americans prioritization over other Americans, for the sake of political correctness (when talking about Muslim rights in the United States). This is not the libertarian position. The libertarians hold Muslims equal to others, and this includes rights to property."

I'm going to refrain from the recent fad of whining that "Jonathan doesn't understand progressives", and simply say that "Jonathan is wrong". This is something I'd expect out of Arnold Kling, not Jonathan Catalan.

To borrow and paraphrase from Mayor Bloomberg, there isn't a single inch of the United States of America that is off-limits to Muslims or any other faith. If you don't like that, tough. If you repudiate that to win an election in Nevada, you're an asshole. If you think your small ideological cadre is the only group of people that thinks this, you're wrong and you need to get better acquainted with people who don't agree with you.

From the culture wars...

1. Politicians are ugly, ugly people.

2. I don't know if it's better or worse that Glenn Beck claims he didn't even know Martin Luther King delivered the I Have a Dream Speech on August 28th at the Lincoln Memorial when he scheduled his rally on August 28th at the Lincoln Memorial. That seems like it should be a 4th of July or December 7th or April 9th sort of date for Americans. I've had a tough time figuring out what I think on this. Ex ante, I can't figure out a good reason why this is inappropriate or why Beck shouldn't do this. But I have a strong suspicion that something will be done or said there that will make it inappropriate. He claims it will not be used to demagogue, and who are we to stop someone that makes that claim? But in all likelihood it will be used to demagogue and the worst part is, to his ears it won't even sound like demagoguing so when people criticize him for it he'll develop even more of a martyr complex than he already has.

Bloomberg, the Mosque, and Religious Toleration

I had of course heard about Mayor Bloomberg's unequivocal opposition to those criticizing the mosque project at the World Trade Center site. I hadn't read the whole statement, particularly the interesting history he provides at the beginning:

"In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue, and they were turned down. In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies, and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.

In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion, and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780s, St. Peter's on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site, and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center."

I know of at least one "formal political petition for religious freedom" in the American colonies before this 1657 event. In 1634-35, the town of Salem lodged a formal protest with the General Court of Massachusetts in Boston which demanded that they oust Roger Williams from the pulpit for his heresies. Eventually, under pressure from Boston involving some land deals, Salem relented and Williams left to found the colony of Rhode Island. Hopefully the supporters of the Cordoba Mosque initiative don't similarly buckle under pressure.

Scott Kuhagen has a great review of the issue here.

What are readers' fondest moments in the promotion of religious liberty in American history?

Concluding thoughts on the religion posts

Here, here, and here we engaged a lot of new commenters (who I hope will stay!) on the prospect of "knowing" God. This is way out of what I normally post on, so I'm going to leave it - but I had a few concluding thoughts.

First, in the comment section to his own post Evan says: "The thing that gets me is that "knowledge" is such a contested category to begin with, and I often feel like it's a waste of time defending the fort when all we're really fighting for is recognition of theological belief as "scientific" or "positive knowledge"."

I suppose I didn't see the debate that way because I never thought anyone ever thought of theology or religion as "scientific" or "positive knowledge" in the first place. My intent was not to knock down an understanding of religion that saw itself in these terms (because I never thought it did), but more to clarify points that I think are often left vague. A lot of the debate was around what was perceived as a stict epistemology on my part. This is why I wrote the second post - because I really don't have one. I'm a strong proponent of Berger and Luckman. I recognize social construction. I don't write off the prospect that our senses are fooling us and that we're just brains in vats. I recognize the fallibility of our perceptions (I critique the a priorism of the Austrian School of economics on these grounds all the time). I'm a fan of the pragmatist approach. My conclusions certainly don't follow (I don't think) from a strict epistemology. That's just a good first-draft way of looking at it. I tried to demonstrate in the second post that the prospects for knowing God don't improve when you start introducing these qualifications. They only improve if you invent ad hoc epistemologies specifically designed to assume your own conclusions (ie - Mike D's brief rendition of Platinga's model which uses the Holy Spirit - the existence and nature of whom we're trying to get at! - as a source of knowledge in its own right). Anyway, so I didn't intend this to be a stuck-in-the-18th-century epistemology flame war, and I hope it's progressed from that point. My point is only this: that belief in revealed religion is belief that we authorize ourselves to have, not belief that we are externally justified in having. This is faith and I still maintain that it's not that revolutionary of an insight.

My second concluding point is one that I haven't worked out completely, but that I'm thinking through. I think revealed religion is ultimately something of a Gettier Problem. A lot of this discussion has revolved not around substantive knowledge that anyone has of God, but around the prospect of substantive knowledge. The point, however, is that religions are not built on the prospect of knowing something. So we have a belief system that people hold to, that may very well be true, but where whatever justifications they think they have for believing what they do probably aren't valid justifications. All they really have is faith - self-authorization to believe - but that makes 21st century Westerners uncomfortable so they invent justifications for their belief which are not justifiable, but the belief itself may nevertheless still be true and justifiable by means of knowing that the believer isn't privy to. That sounds like a Gettier problem, which is ultimately a question of knowledge-semantics itself. But the dynamics of the Gettier problem - the question of who really knows what and on what basis, and the prospect of truth in the absence of justifiable evidence - seems to be relevant here. Does anyone know if anyone has done work on the Gettier problem as it relates to revealed religion?

OK - that's all for me on this subject for now.

A race to the bottom is no way to justify a cosmic order

There is a collection of related points that I had left unsaid and that came up in the comments that I wanted to address here.

Often in discussions, the strategy of choice isn't to elevate your point, but to bring the other person's point down. For example, in the comment section of this post, Mike D challenges what he alleges is my "classical foundationalism" on the ground that it is itself inadequate. Foundationalism itself, he argues, isn't basic or axiomatic. There's no obvious reason to take a foundationalist approach so it fails its own standards. I can agree with this to a certain extent. I'm not a strict foundationalist, and I've felt a considerable degree of safe harbor in a lot of pragmatist material that Evan has passed on to me. I'm pragmatically an empiricist and a rationalist, so I'll agree to the reservations that Mike D shares. So where does this leave us? Certainly without a proof God! Simply with a disproof of an argument for a lack of proof of God. Which if I've kept this all straight in my head is still a lack of proof of God. My claim was that we have no reason to claim knowledge of any revealed religion. We are not justified by any standard of knowledge to make those sorts of claims. If we eliminate all standards of knowledge that claim of mine still stands, doesn't it? Indeed, it stands even more firmly!

It seems to me this is all very similar to (although not quite the same as) a skeptic's "brain in a vat" argument... or for the kiddies, one might say that we're "plugged into the Matrix". We can't trust our reason and our observation - they could both be fooling us. So where does this leave us? Well, as I said before it still leaves us with no firm knowledge of revealed religion, but I at least have a pretty good basis for knowledge of the Matrix, right (at least a pragmatically viable basis)? If this is all just a dream world at least it is a dream world I can make claims about. Where does it leave a believer? Still without knowledge of revealed religion, still authorizing himself to believe what he believes, but now with an accusation that all I really know is the Matrix... ok, but at least I know something that I work and operate in on a daily basis. The initial question - the question of our knowledge of God - is still exactly where we left it.

I'm a big fan of Christopher Hitchens. Some of the work of his I'm least attracted to, though, is his work on atheism. It's not very sophisticated, it can be unnecessarily aggressive, and it's largely dependent on metaphors and analogies (sometimes I feel like I'm going to puke if I hear him use the phrase "celestial North Korea" again). But there are a few things about his approach to religion that I like, one of which is his persistent refrain that "even if we grant X, then all your work is still ahead of you". He often raises this with things like the cosmological argument that we brought up earlier in the comments. He explains why he thinks it's unconvincing, but then says that even if he were to be convinced "all your work is still ahead of you" in making that knowledge useful from the perspective of revealed religion. Who is this shell of a God you've just demonstrated with this medieval logical display? How can we fill him out? What is his character? Is he even still here or did he pass from reality long ago? What does he think of us? What is his name? Even the answers to these questions (which I have no idea how one might answer) won't get you much farther than a vague Abrahamic tradition, if that. If we allow absolutely everything that Evan, Mike D, and Christopher Lake have insisted on - every sui generis epistemological get out of jail free card - we still get to a modest deism at best. That's not revealed religion! "All your work is still ahead of you," guys! And again - this is my fundamental point. We cannot know revealed religion. We authorize ourselves to believe it. And I can't stress enough that this is not some outrageous statement that I'm making. It's what (in my mind) the best positioned and most firmly founded revealed religion on the menu (Protestantism) claims for itself clearly and emphatically. Sola fide might be epistemologically inadequate, but at least it's honest and consistent.

This speaks to Evan's point too about valid and non-valid religious axioms. Perhaps assuming the authority of the Old and New Testament specifically is a bit of a stretch, he says, but we can axiomatically identify "scripture" as "a text that is spiritually authored and inerrant" (or whatever else you want to attach to the definition). The same can be said of God - perhaps we can't axiomatically claim anything specific about God, but we can definitionally identify God. This is no different from "all bachelor's are unmarried". Every man on Earth could be married and that would still be a valid axiom. So I'm perfectly willing to axiomatically define God and scripture in this way, and accept those axioms. But again, "all your work is still ahead of you". We still don't know if such things exist even though we've defined them. And even if we knew they existed "all your work is still ahead of you" because once again you only have a modest deism. Where is the knowledge of revealed religion? We still don't have it. We're still authorizing ourselves to believe these various and sundry claims that are mixed and matched by various people across the face of the Earth.

I think people are so busy poking holes in what I've said about epistemology (which is completely valid - I'm no philosopher), that they haven't realized that their case is still left unmade. And that was really my point from the beginning - that there is no case to make. The authority for these beliefs comes from one place - from ourselves. Just be honest about it.

A Firm Foundation? Knowledge of Revealed Religion

The other day Evan and I got into a discussion about proof of religion, and I wanted to bring it over to the blog. The spark for the discussion was this post about a blogger who decided to convert from the Presbyterian Church of America (a more conservative brand of American Presbyterianism) to Roman Catholicism. Evan actually has a very good comment on the blog critiquing the fault that the convert found with the Presbyterian Church. My bigger concern was this statement (again, from the convert):

“Should I just continue to form opinions and interpretations
with lots of prayer and reflection? Should I just do my best to be part of the
group I feel conforms most closely with Scripture? No, I can't because any
options within this paradigm of Sola Scriptura lead to the same fateful
conclusion that I am my own authority.”

My concern with this approach – and the implicit claim that Catholicism would remove this autonomy – is the fundamental problem that it doesn't recognize that all revealed religion is self-referential and its “own authority”. If we take revealed religion at its word, then the self-referencing authority is a being of some sort. If it’s an all-powerful being, then perhaps that’s reason enough to submit. But the point is, what we’re trying to get at the truth of is precisely the reality of this being. If we’re unwilling to take revealed religion at its word (which presumably we aren’t if we’re asking the question “what is true?” in the first place), then what is self-referencing is the revelation itself. Having lost the author of that revelation we come back to this convert’s initial conundrum: any conclusion based on revelation is going to be a conclusion derived from our own authority, our own interpretation – from ourselves. This is the heart of what it means to have "faith" - it is to trust in your own authority and assessment of something that you have no other evidence for. If you have faith in something someone else told you, then you are authorizing them to provide you with truth, but you are still the source of any authority that you actively or passively ascribe elsewhere (to a text, to a cleric, etc.).


Standard Epistemological Foundation 1: Rationality

Traditionally, standards of what is considered "knowledge" have had to be based on more external foundations. We derive knowledge logically that is indeed contingent knowledge, but it is still independent contingent knowledge. Given a set of axioms and given a set of rules, we say that a deduction is true. This knowledge is contingent on these givens, but it is independent insofar as (1.) the axioms are not argued from authority, but from consensus and mutual agreement, and (2.) there is consensus and mutual agreement on the rules of logic. Nobody can assert axioms or rules on his own authority or on the authority of some magisterium. Moreover, the useful knowledge that we derive in this way is derived. We don't consider the axiom itself to be useful knowledge so much as tautological or definitional knowledge. In Real Analysis, you start with the "field axioms" - all the various real number properties, the existence of the additive identity, the existence of the additive inverse, etc.. Likewise, we axiomatically claim things like "all bachelors are unmarried". The claims of revealed religion (authority of scripture, apostolic succession, reality of God) are treated as axiomatic in this sense (and we can think of theology as the body of knowledge derived from these axioms), but there is a problem with this. Axiomatic claims are supposed to be simple, basic, tautological or definitional if possible, and a starting point of broad agreement and concurrence. Or, if not broadly agreed upon at least useful assumptions (neoclassical economics, for example, is built up from some dubious axioms that we explicitly assume - but then the conclusions we derive are tested for veracity).

With revealed religion or theology, the axiomatic presupposition is in fact exactly what we want to prove! God is assumed. The authority of scripture is assumed. And details are derived from there. This, of course, is backwards. It's a way of churning out volumes of doctrine, but it's not a way to find assurance of the most important questions: is there a God? and has He interacted with us? These important questions are just asserted and the less important questions are the ones that are derived or proven (if we choose to think of the tenets of a faith as axiomatic).


Standard Epistemological Foundation 2: Empiricism

Another epistemologically valid option is inference from empirical observation. This doesn't necessarily have to be rigorous if we're willing to attach an element of doubt. In other words, we can make valuable, useful inferences about the nature of water fowl without strict falsification if we keep in mind the possibility of a black swan. "Almost all swans seem to be white, but I guess there could always be a black one" is a piece of knowledge that we can work with and use in every day life, that is based on empirical evidence, even if it is weaker than the definitive "all swans are white". Revealed religion isn't based on this form of knowledge either. To the extent that people cite empirical evidence, it is exceedingly vague. It is a feeling or an intuition. For a moment we can put aside everything we know about brain chemistry and moments of euphoria, and simply observe that even if this intuition or feeling is genuine, it can't be conclusively attributed. Did it come from the Holy Spirit? Or did it come from Allah? Even assuming that it is a genuine external force acting on us, how do we have any confidence in attribution? Often, the confidence for believers comes from corroboration. An intuition is consistent with Scripture, for example ("test the spirits"). But what value is it to be consistent with Scripture? Again, the authority of Scripture is ascribed (either by oneself or by an institution to whom one attributes authority), not inherent. What revealed religion does is take a prefabricated understanding of the universe and overlays that on top of feelings and intuitions that on their own could not be ascribed to any source. There is something that objectively exists - a feeling, an intuition. That's not the problem and the observation of that feeling or intuition is not the problem. The problem comes from what sort of knowledge is derived from it. To put it in swan terms, revealed religion says "I see many, many white swans and I conclude that the white swans are black swans that have painted themselves white". The problem here isn't the observation per se (the observed white swans are analagous to the spiritual feelings or intuitions that I'm not trying to deny happen) - it is the fact that every important element of the knowledge that we try to derive from these feelings and intuitions is brought to the experience or speculated, and not inherent in the experience itself. Approaching our knowledge of revealed religion as an empirical endeavor is problematic for much the same reason that approaching it as a rational endeavor is: every informational contribution that meets epistemological standards (either rational or empirical) is vague and unattributable to any god, much less a specific god; every informational contribution that provides clarity, specificity, and significance is information that is assumed or self-referential.

This is all obviously extremely problematic. We like to think that the strength of an argument for the truth of a claim should be proportional to the significance of the claim we are making. "I am the Son of the one true God and I have come to Earth to be sacrificed, an act which will absolve your sins" presumably requires considerably more evidence than "the sky is blue". A casual, unscientific empiricism suffices for the latter. And yet the former many of us treat as axiomatic! Why? How? Scripture? That just regresses the problem back one step - what is the authority of Scripture? That too is axiomatic. The convert from Presbyterianism to Catholicism cited earlier is concerned with the shakiness of this step back to Scripture. His solution? The magisterium! But from whence does the magisterium derive its authority? God. And how do we know the magisterium derived its authority from God? Two ways: Scripture and that the magisterium told us so! It's all axiomatic! And unlike definitional axioms like the associative property or “all bachelors are unmarried”, these axioms are complex, specific, and ultimately precisely the points that we wanted to verify!

Conclusion

This may sound harsh to revealed religion, but it shouldn’t be understood that way. What I’m being harsh with are the claims of individuals who make inappropriate claims for revealed religion. Ultimately where all this leads us to is the self. Belief in revealed religion is belief in something that you authorize yourself to consider “true,” not belief in something that any established epistemological standard (either rational or empirical) allows you to claim is true. In terms of the truth-claims of revealed religion all authority is vested in the believer. Now, if those claims are indeed true, then perhaps other types of authority reside elsewhere – perhaps with God. But the claim itself by the believer is made on the authority of the believer. And that believer may delegate authority to a text or to a cleric or to a magisterium. This is what faith is – it is the self-authorization to believe something that you have no justification for believing aside from your own self-authorization to believe it (of course we can mix faith and evidence. I can say “I have faith that my wife won’t cheat on me”, which is based on observational evidence of her past behavior as well as a hope that I authorize myself to maintain for sentimental reasons, or just to keep myself sane).

Being serious and honest about the epistemological problems with revealed religion actually reinforces a lot of what (at least Christianity – particularly Protestant Christianity) has to say about itself. Whether faith is a wise choice is another question entirely, and I’m not even sure how one would answer that question.

I’d conclude with another hesitation – the point that what we are trying to understand here (the existence and nature of God) by definition eludes epistemologically sound verification. We are talking about an invisible or spiritual being that wants to let humans have a substantial degree of free will and free reign. It is a singular being supposedly – we don’t have lots of them to compare and look at, as we do with the classic case of the swans. It is a being that withholds judgment for quite a while. It is a being that said his piece two millennia ago and let a Spirit take the initiative from there. This is a being which, if we were trying to pursue empirically, we would not expect to get very far with. The noise swamps the signal. The appropriate response to this situation isn’t to declare its non-existence, but to say that we “fail to reject the null hypothesis”. We can’t make a claim one way or another, but we do declare that we are unable to embrace the affirmative.

Reasons, Freedoms, and Offense: the point of drawing Mohammed

Daniel discusses "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" below, and solicits responses.  Here's mine.

My concern about this is the extent to which emotionalism and vague sentiment are being packaged up as reasons and free thought.  I could conceive of a situation where drawing a likeness of Mohammed would serve some useful purpose, despite the fact that it may offend some people.  In these cases, I'd of course advise prudence with regard to the display of such images, but I don't see any reason for one person's conscience to be dictated by another's.  The question, then, is whether such useful purposes are present in the recently declared holiday.

In the poster for the event, and in many statements by organizers, it's claimed that this is about the First Amendment and free expression.  This seems obviously false.  A media corporation censored the South Park episode, not the government.  And, while I'm no expert in the contracts involved with such endeavors, it hardly seems as if the free expression of Parker and Stone has been squelched, even if we set aside the fact that we're not dealing with citizens' rights vis-à-vis their government. There's nothing stopping me from drawing a picture of Mohammed right now, scanning it, and posting it on this blog for all the world to see (or at least all of the places where Google has a grip).  Parker and Stone can surely do the same.  What has been restricted is not their free expression, but rather the extent of corporate backing that would allow them to broadcast their work to millions of viewers in a branded, highly advertised, and moneyed project under the Comedy Central name.  Forgive me if I don't shed any tears for their hardships.  It is a damn shame that they have to express themselves like the rest of us in this case, rather than take for granted the provision of soapboxes and loudspeakers by one of the largest media conglomerates in existence.

So basically, it's absurd to make this into a free expression issue.  This is show business, not a Vietnam War protest, and Parker and Stone knew as much quite well when they signed on for their big fat paychecks, signed over the rights to their creation, etc.  The fact that they decided to be corporate tools and we decided to pay for their cable channel in order to get a good laugh doesn't mean that their artistic or philosophical sensibilities are our burden.  Nor are their sensibilities the burden of Comedy Central or Viacom.  Not to shatter everyone's blissful misconceptions of the matter, but no one who produces or consumes the product that is South Park cares very much about the personal expression of its producers, or what they think about anything. 

But this also doesn't mean that "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" is only about South Park.  In addition to a claim to being about the First Amendment, the poster advertising today's festivities says that they seek to "water down the pool of targets".  Awfully noble.  After all, the big concern is that threats have been made against the creators of South Park, as they have been made (and sometimes even carried out) against cartoonists over the past few years.  This is a serious issue, and while certain offenses may justify violent response (human rights abuses, terrorists attacks or other crimes, imperialism, etc.), the offense of certain images against religious sensibilities (which we shouldn't deny are real) doesn't seem deserving of death, at least for those committed to liberal values.

Daniel wants to embed this liberal sense more objectively, to draw a distinction between whether simply anger or violence is provoked by these actions.  I don't know how helpful this is.  The images only subjectively provoke one thing rather than the other given certain assumptions.  And I share those assumptions, to be sure, but the whole reason why we have a problem here is that some people don't share those assumptions.  Violence is only unprovoked in a situation where the drawing of a likeness of the Prophet doesn't deserve violent punishment.  If it's our contention against those who disagree that no such punishment is deserved- ever- it hardly seems sensible to just assume that everyone take this to be the case on our say-so.  Better to say, perhaps, that (objectively) the comics have provoked anger and violence, that (subjectively) they don't obviously provoke anything, either anger or violence, and that we don't think it's reasonable for people to respond in violent fashion to the offense they entertain at certain images, although we do think it's reasonable (though not necessary) to respond simply with anger and objection.  This, I think, prevents us from hiding our own imperative statements behind the cover of "that's how things are".  We can then take full responsibility for our own values, and push them on people openly.  This strikes me as the only honest way to have an ethical dialogue unless we are prepared to argue from natural law, divine command, or whatever other solid foundation the objective and enduring basis of the free expression of religious blasphemies. Daniel may be prepared to do this, but I'm not.

So much for the reasons for this day.  I've tried to separate the substantive from the non-substantive and clarify how I think a substantive response would best proceed.  Granting that we've made such an argument, though, what of the drawings themselves?  Is this how we should express our concerns?  If, as Daniel says, the founders of this holiday "aren't trying to marginalize or intimidate Muslims in general [...] they're quite clearly singling out a particularly totalitarian and illiberal segment of Islam", it seems questionable to me whether images of the Prophet will serve the intended purpose of the day.  What will it accomplish (for? against?) the totalitarian and illiberal segment?  More anger?  Perhaps a feeling of being cornered?  Marginalization?  Disgust?  Boredom?  Confusion?

If we want to convince people to abandon violent tendencies, or at least stop them from such tendencies, it seems worthwhile to ask how practical it really is to piss them off further.  I don't personally see why someone with goals of alleviating violence would do something to fan the flames (even if they think such flames are unjustified in the first place).

...which is why I suspect that this is one big pissing contest between partisans of a rather unenlightened liberalism and partisans of a rather unenlightened religious despotism.  Which is why I'm not especially interested.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

So what do readers think of this "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" business? A couple weeks ago, I had a quick post supporting the creators of South Park after they were threatened with violence for their satire. Evan was a little concerned about it (I reproduced one of the Danish cartoons in the post), but as a good skeptic of censorship (self-imposed and externally imposed), he was fine with me putting it up. And since the South Park incident the threats and violence keep coming. However "provocative" these artists and writers may be, the worst they provoke is angry words. They are indeed provocative - that's obviously the point. But that doesn't mean this violence is what they've provoked. They have provoked anger, but the violence I think needs to be considered unprovoked, because there is nothing that can even begin to justify it.

Anyway, it's not like I'm going to doodle a cartoon and post it. I have no real objection to that, but no inclination either. However, I am curious what people think about this. Some perspectives are deserving of ridicule. Nobody is plastering mosques attended by peaceful Muslims with these ridiculing cartoons (that I'm aware of). The people involved here - Vilks, van Gogh, Parker, Stone, Rushdie, etc. - aren't trying to marginalize or intimidate Muslims in general. I think they're quite clearly singling out a particularly totalitarian and illiberal segment of Islam, and because they're doing that it's natural for me not only to take their side, but also to have a degree of respect for continued deliberate satirical efforts, like Draw Mohammed Day.

But maybe I'm just a jackass. What do readers think of this effort?

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan linked to this about a month ago. It shows depictions of Mohammed in art by Muslims. Muslims haven't always had the hang-ups that some do today.

Of Miracles

Who has taken the time to read their Hume?:

A.) The Insane Clown Posse

B.) Christopher Hitchens

Here's a tougher quiz. Who is more entertaining and offensive to the tender, mild-mannered mainstream:

A.) The Insane Clown Posse

B.) Christopher Hitchens