Click Here for an Example of Moderate Muslim Response

Click on the title to this post to see an article about a website that represents the kind of moderate response to which I was referring in the previous post.

Cartoon Controversy

Does the recent controversy over the "Muhammud cartoons" represent a collision of cultures? Maybe, but I suspect there is more to the story.

My undergraduate degree is in journalism, and I take the right of the press to function freely and without intimidation to be essential in a modern democracy. In this country, the mainistream press has been embarrassingly hypocritical in its coverage of the cartoon fiasco, almost every venue refusing to reproduce the cartoons out of "respect for the religious beliefs of others." This sense of respect did not, however, keep journalist (e.g. CNN's Wolf Blitzer) from displaying Islamic cartoons that disrespect Jews. Perhaps the more accurate reason for not displaying the Muslim cartoons comes under the "responsibility" excuse, which I take to mean "fear of reprisals."

The thought that fear, in this case, fear of violence, would silence journalist, sickens me. Part of living in a society with a free press is that you will find yourself, no matter who you are, ridiculed and disrespected by someone with a printing press, or t.v. transmitter, or . . . computer, but that is part of the price we pay for the right to criticize others--they may also criticize us.

But is this a sign of a conflict between two civilizations--Christian and Muslim, or . . . modern and, well . . . Muslim?

I don't think so. We might ask who is the main audience for all of the violence and outrage over the cartoons. I doubt that the audience is the (secular) West. Rather, it seems to me that the audience for these (violent) demonstrations was the Muslim world. As Reza Aslan has argued (in his book, No God but God), the Muslim world is in the midst of a "reformation" in which Muslims are struggling over the very issue of what it means to be Muslim. Aslan notes, for example, that the very day before the most recent London bombings, almost all of the top Muslim clerics in the world had issued fatwas condemning just such terrorist violence and the bombings in London occured not in the financial or tourist areas of London, but in neighborhoods populated by large groups of Muslim immigrants.

It seems to me that the extended circulation, debate, and protest over the cartoons has been a way of drawing Muslims around the world into a debate over the nature of Islam. It has presented a challenge to those Muslims--in fact, the vast majority of Muslims--who increasingly emphasize tolerance, personal ethics, and spirituality to reject western institutions. In this discourse the cartoons represent the irreverance of the west towards Islam and reinforce the idea that the west is hostile towards Muslims. I suspect the purpose of this rhetoric is more to critique tolerant Muslims than it is to engage "the West" in a meaninful way.

But the West is not alien to this problem. Remember the sixteenth century? Europe endured over a hundred years of intense religious controversy, violence, assassiantion, and, yes . . . terrorism. I believe Aslan is right: Islam is working through its own "reformation" right now.

If he is right, then the repeated attempts to frame this moment as a "clash of civilization" is to undermine the position of the vast majority of Muslims who advocate tolerance, respect the religious beliefs of others, and want to live in societies where dissent can be expressed. This is not a conflict between Christian and Muslim "civilizations." This is yet another chapter in the saga we call "modernity."

CBS Poll Says we Don't Believe Darwin

According to a CBS poll, have of American do NOT believe that evolution is a valid theory. Does that mean that most of us don't live with the kind of intellectual crisis of "normal nihilism" that Nietzsche assumed characterized the modern world?

I think the opposite. It shows how frigtening Darwin's ideas still are. We have not yet found a way to live with all of our feelings and instincts and to face them. Instead, we find ourselves burdened by the emptiness. We cannot yet value our own place in the universe, and this cannot but make me wonder if we have yet to recover a real sense of value for the divine. If we really valued God, why would we fear to face our own place in God's universe?

Nietzsche vs. Religion

“Authenticity, in religious practices or otherwise, offers no secure protection against the sense of loss that accompanies a recognition of the groundlessness of all one’s practices. Only average everydayness or inauthenticity could do that, and the one is doomed to be periodically shattered and the other is (presumably) not available to the smart folks like us who have now read Nietzsche and Heidegger.” --James C. Edwards. The Plain Sense of Things. p. 148.

I’m grading essays on Nietzsche’s use of the term “nihilism” in Beyond Good and Evil. Some of my students can’t seem to deal with the assignment at all because they are so blinded by the fear and rage they feel over Nietzsche’s apparent atheism. Some of my students aren’t enraged, but they still want to know if Nietzsche was an atheist.

It seems to me he probably was, but I don’t think his thought requires atheism. What it requires is an interrogation of, and thus, a possible rejection of our belief in God as ___________. For many of us belief in God, like a host of other beliefs, appears to us as a necessity. Without God, life would be meaningless, valueless, and devoid of moral judgment . . . at least that’s how many of us feel, so we cling to the belief despite all the evidence against that proposition.

Of course, there could be no evidence against the proposition “God exist” because the terms “God” and “existence” are so slippery, one might even say, “so devoid of content, that no logic or evidence could falsify such a claim (unless “incoherence” counts as an argument against such a proposition).
But Nietzsche, at least in Beyond Good and Evil, only asserts that most people have lost faith in the “discredited” God as “father,” “judge,” “rewarder,” etc. It seems to me that he is right about this. Many (all?) premodern people did see the world as essentially “just,” with God, or karma, or something punishing the evil and rewarding the good. (The sorority girl version of this dogma persists: “I believe everything happens for a reason.”) But in the modern world we doubt this. (We don’t assume that only bad people get cancer and only good people get rich.)

And yet . . . we cling to the notion of God as rewarder, or we push the rewards and punishments more securely into another (invisible) realm (either heaven/hell or some psychological state of satisfaction/torment), but in the end, Nietzsche would argue, this is wishful thinking and, worse, a denial of the importance of our lives here and now and a failure to analyze the cause of our psychological torments and satisfactions.
Worst of all, the modern believer is so thoroughly soaked in his own nihilism he must (violently) repudiate the differences he sees in others. The rewarder/judge he claims to see in God (but doesn’t really see because the modern religious person is biggest nihilist of all) must be made present through the actions of the “believer” himself who then goes on to judge and reward in God’s place, including judging and rewarding himself.