Positive Liberty

Mark Olson alerted me to the fatwa du jour, the one about adult breastfeeding:

A religious ruling by an Islamic scholar permitting women to breastfeed adults with whom they work has led to his suspension this month from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the world’s leading Sunni university.

Izzat Atiyaa had issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, offering his bold suggestion as a way around the prohibition in Islamic religious law against a woman working in private premises with a man who was not her close relative. Breastfeeding, he argued, would create a familial relationship under Islamic law.

Dr Atiyaa explained to the Egyptian newspaper al-Watani al-Yawm that: “A man and a woman who are alone together are not (necessarily) having sex but this possibility exists and breastfeeding provides a solution to this problem (by) transforming the bestial relationship between two people into a religious relationship based on (religious) duties.”

In Islamic tradition, breastfeeding at infancy establishes a degree of familial relationship between nurse and child even if there is no biological relationship.

Dr Atiyaa argued in his fatwa that if an adult male was nursed by a female co-worker it would likewise establish a familial bond that would permit them to work side by side without raising suspicion of illicit sex.

I know that scholars of the Enlightenment tend to see everything as though it were happening in the eighteenth century. But is this fatwa not a piece of audacious, Voltairean satire? I won’t even go into the reasons why no one could possibly take this seriously. I trust I don’t have to. But if it’s a joke, what kind of joke is it? Hint: It’s not just about flashing your boobs in an otherwise straitlaced society, although that, certainly, is funny enough in itself.

It seems to me that the real targets of the joke are the prudish legalists who have kept women out of the workforce, even when everyone concerned — men, women, employees, employers, colleagues — would much rather have them working. The satirist’s weapons are also those of the prudes — Atiyaa plays the Allah card, so to speak, and calls into question the faith of anyone who disagrees with him. It’s a turn that would no doubt have made Voltaire grin:

“The fact that the hadith regarding the breastfeeding of an adult is inconceivable to the mind does not make it invalid,” Dr Atiyaa said, in defending his ruling. “Rejecting it is tantamount to questioning the Prophet’s tradition.”

Disagree with me and you have deviated from true Islam. It doesn’t matter that you don’t understand. Indeed, your own failure to understand may just be the point, as it has been all along.

Compare this with Voltaire. After an exhaustive essay ridiculing the folly of all miracles, the gadfly of a different Enlightenment wrote as follows:

A great number of writers, whose misfortune it was to be philosophers rather than Christians, have been bold enough to deny the miracles of our Lord; but after the four priests already noticed, there is no necessity to enumerate other instances. Let us lament over these four unfortunate men, led astray by their own deceitful reason, and precipitated by the gloom of their feelings into an abyss so dreadful and so fatal.

Mock sincerity again unravels a repressive religious tradition. The faithful of his own era complained loudly and often about Voltaire, and he spent much of his life in exile. Yet the Christians of our day are better off for his work and for the work of all those like him.

The same, I hope, is now happening in Islam: Note that al-Azhar is the same university that expelled Abdulkareem Nabil Soliman — for writing, in a freethinking vein, about religion and politics on his blog. Writing as Kareem Amer, he denounced Islamic militants as bloodthirsty hypocrites; he proclaimed that all people have individual rights; he spoke out against repression. And he is now in prison. This last is thanks to the efforts of the university, which not only expelled him, but also reported him to the police.

Al-Azhar is the second-oldest university in the world and is usually described as the leading institution of Sunni Muslim learning. Today its best-known representatives are a satirist who ridicules fundamentalism and a student agitator who has done all he can to denounce the radicals, including serving time in prison.

Voltaire would be proud: In his own day, the Sorbonne never did so well.

In the comments section, James J. Goswick has repeated the following dubious information numerous times.

James Wilson, who later became a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, joined Thomas Mifflin in signing the U.S. Constitution, including Article VI, yet returned home to Pennsylvania to help draft the state constitution in 1790, which required that each member of the legislature, before he takes his seat, shall make and subscribe the following declaration, viz,

“I do believe in one God, the Creator and Governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked, and I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine Inspiration.”

Pennsylvania Frame of Government, Sec 10, in The Constitutions of the Several Independent States of America, Boston: Norman and Bowen, 1795, p. 81

If Mr. Goswick indeed got that information from the cited book, he should burn it, because it is sending him down the wrong road. The religious test reproduced above was from Pennsylvania’s Constitution of 1776 which document Ben Franklin helped to write. Yet, as I noted here, Franklin was against such provision, in part because he couldn’t pass it! Soon thereafter, as acting governor, Franklin helped repeal such illiberal test. And indeed, Franklin and Benjamin Rush thought the test violated the Declaration of Independence which grants men “unalienable rights,” the most important of which is “conscience.” And all men, according to such theory, regardless of whether they are Christian, possess unalienable rights of conscience.

So what was James Wilson’s relation to such Constitution? As this site notes,

Wilson opposed the popular new plan of government on the grounds that its unicameral legislature and its lack of a system of checks and balances would lead to mob rule rather than to ordered government. Because of this opposition, the leaders of the state government removed Wilson from Congress and relieved him of his militia commission. Wilson now took up residence in Annapolis, Maryland (1777-78), but this move only intensified the scandal since he was now charged with abandoning his state. As news of his opposition to the Pennsylvania constitution spread, his popularity continued to wane. In 1779, after he moved back to Pennsylvania, a mob attacked Wilson and a number of conservative state legislators barricaded in Wilson’s Philadelphia home. The skirmish that ensued resulted in casualties on both sides. Thereafter, the citizens of Philadelphia dubbed the old house “Fort Wilson.”

Wilson did ultimately return to PA and help to write their new constitution of 1790. And indeed, it did contain a religious test. Though, it was not a Christian religious test, but a theistic rationalist one. This is all the religious test required:

That no person, who acknowledges the being of a God and a future state of rewards and punishments, shall, on account of his religious sentiments, be disqualified to hold any office or place of trust or profit under this commonwealth.

This perfectly confirms what I wrote in this past post about our Founders desire for a religious citizenry — anything but atheists. Or, as the theistic rationalist Ben Franklin put it:

Here is my Creed: I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we can render to him, is doing Good to his other Children. That the Soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another Life respecting its Conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental Principles of all sound Religion, and I regard them as you do, in whatever Sect I meet with them.

Though, I prefer Art. VI of the US Constitution’s approach: No religious tests period. If the people want to elect an atheist, so be it.

Thesis: Islamic radicals’ insistence on extreme modesty for women tells us more about the radicals’ attitudes toward men, and about their own sexual mores in particular, than it tells us about women’s submission in Islam. It is precisely the hijab’s implications for men that make it so difficult a cultural issue.

Continue Reading »

From the New York Times:

As the… administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.

Hold up right there. Secret new rules? Isn’t that just like the Democrat Party, always thinking that government knows best? Why can’t the people — you know, the regular ordinary people — see what’s going on?

The psychologists and other specialists, commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, make the case that more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has yet to create an elite corps of interrogators trained to glean secrets from terrorism suspects.

While billions are spent each year to upgrade satellites and other high-tech spy machinery, the experts say, interrogation methods — possibly the most important source of information on groups like Al Qaeda — are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices.

Soviet interrogation techniques? Figures. Those Democrats, always nostalgic for the days of Uncle Joe Stalin.

The science board critique comes as ethical concerns about harsh interrogations are being voiced by current and former government officials. The top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, sent a letter to troops this month warning that “expedient methods” using force violated American values.

In a blistering lecture delivered last month, a former adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called “immoral” some interrogation tactics used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon.

Just goes to show that those liberal secular humanists have no morals. Bet they’re all secretly atheists, and they just pretend to be religious when it’s election time.

The order is expected to ban the harshest techniques used in the past, including the simulated drowning tactic known as waterboarding, but to authorize some methods that go beyond those allowed in the military by the Army Field Manual.

The Intelligence Science Board study has a chapter on the long history of police interrogations, which it suggests may contain lessons on eliciting accurate confessions. And Mr. Borum, the psychologist, said modern marketing may be a source of relevant insights into how to influence a prisoner’s willingness to provide information.

“We have a whole social science literature on persuasion,” Mr. Borum said. “It’s mostly on how to get a person to buy a certain brand of toothpaste. But it certainly could be useful in improving interrogation.”

The Dems always have hated the military. And the police. And capitalism. Figures they wouldn’t listen, and that a president like Bill Clinton would be lax in defending our civil liberties.

In an April lecture, Philip D. Zelikow, the former adviser to Ms. Rice, said it was a grave mistake to delegate to attorneys decisions on the moral question of how prisoners should be treated.

Mr. Zelikow, who reviewed the C.I.A. detention program as the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission, said the “cool, carefully considered, methodical, prolonged and repeated subjection of captives to physical torment, and the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral.”

Many of the techniques that have come in for such criticism were based on those used in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training, or SERE, in which for decades American service members were given a sample of the brutal treatment they might face if captured.

Because the training was developed during the cold war, the techniques later adopted by the C.I.A. and Special Operations officers in Iraq were based, at least in part, on how the Soviet Union and its allies were believed to treat prisoners. Such techniques included prolonged use of stress positions, exposure to heat and cold, sleep deprivation and even waterboarding.

None of which are a big deal to those moral relativists running the show in Washington. Cool? Methodical? Check. Immoral? Check. Isn’t it about time we had a Republican president?

I was thumbing through this yesterday at Barnes & Noble; it’s definitely on my summer reading list. The book is sort of a repackaging of a book he wrote just four years ago in 2003 called America Declares Independence.

So why did he need to write a new one? Back then as today, the religious right has been “revising” history, arguing America was founded on “Christian principles” to be a “Christian Nation.” Though he already debunked such notion in the past book, presently, books with similar themes are quite hot. So Dershowitz wants back in the game.

To support his argument from his last book, Dershowitz draws from Brooke Allen’s and Jon Meacham’s recent books on the matter. And, to make the book timely, he incorporates some recent controversies such as the Rep. Keith Ellison’s swearing in on the Koran, and the Stephen Williams brouhaha, where it was falsely claimed that this public school teacher couldn’t teach his students the Declaration of Independence, when, in reality, he was teaching them fraudulent history, complete with David Barton’s phony quotations. Continue Reading »

Now that James J. Goswick is starting to see that Madison was not a Christian just like him, he seeks to minimize his importance as a Founder and attack his character, both physical and personal. He calls Madison “a little fish compared to the other framer’s [sic]” and concludes:

In the end, Madison was a contradiction, who was weak in character as well as physically, changing his friends as well as views at the whim of a hat. No comment should be made about his faith….

Mr. Goswick claims I should pay more attention to Hamilton, G. Morris and Wilson. Well, from what I have studied, they are, like Madison, key Founders (though not as important as him). They, like Madison, played pivotal roles at the Constitutional Convention. And Hamilton, like Madison, was one of three primary authors of the federalist papers. They were all, also, like Madison, theistic rationalists, not orthodox Trinitarian Christians. Hamilton did convert to orthodox Christianity, but not till towards the end of his life.

Moreover, whatever personal problems Madison might have had — he was, through no fault of his own a physically small man, a hypochondriac, thinking he would die an early death (little did he know), and may have suffered a nervous breakdown — the other three had personal character issues which put Madison’s to shame.

G. Morris had a more active sex life than Bill Clinton’s; he was an avid fornicator and adulterer, going so far as to purposefully try to impregnate a married woman. Hamilton too was an adulterer and died in a very “un-Christian” duel, leaving his family behind. And Wilson was a deadbeat who lived the end of his life running from creditors and finally died a pauper after serving time in debtors’ prison.

A colleague recommended that if I wanted serious commentary and news from Russia, I should read the English-language version of the Russian journal Kommersant. (Pravda these days is running more toward salacious stories about Tom Cruise and Pamela Anderson. A recent headline: Nazi Germany achieved its technological advantage with aliens’ help.)

In any event, Kommersant had a great headline today about the U.S.-Iran talks: Great Satan Talks to Axis of Evil. Always have to be careful about how one describes one’s enemies…

Not the Lockean version for which I argued here.

This figure, the American Al Qaeda propaganda chief, Adam Gadahn, sounds as comically maniacal as Fred Phelps. The frightening thing is whereas the Phelps family are hated and marginalized (honestly, I wonder if anyone outside of the fifty or so people in their church supports their message), Mr. Gadahn speaks the Al Qaeda party line. Some small but significant percentage of Muslims actually support this vile evil. Even if it’s only 5%, 5% of a billion people is still large enough that it constitutes an ongoing problem that won’t go away unless we destroy (hopefully) or otherwise contain them (which in the real world, we might have to settle for).

Listen to his list of demands. There is no way in Hell America or the West should or will make these concessions. And as long as Islamofascists demand them, and are willing to commit terror in furtherance thereof, there will be war. As he notes, Iraq is just one small piece. Even if all of our troops were out tomorrow, Islamofascists like this still abound. And unlike Iraq, they directly threaten freedoms, for which not just the military but ordinary citizens ought to be willing to die. (He says American citizens deserve death simply for criticizing Islam or sending out anti-Islamic messages from our shores. One demands is that the American government gag its citizens from disseminating these messages else we deserve terrorist attacks.)

The big mistake of Iraq, from my perspective, is that it will make the war against Al Qaeda/terrorism more difficult.

And I hate to say this, as much as I like Ron Paul’s libertarian message (I know he has no chance anyway) I don’t trust him against Al Qaeda. As much as I dislike Rudy Guiliani’s authoritarianism and statism, I’d rather have him in charge to fight the terrorists like Gadahn and Bin Laden.

Remember the lawsuit filed against Warren Jeffs by one of his former deputies, Wendell Musser, who was trying to find his family? The reunion happened–but it wasn’t a happy day:

On Friday inside an auto parts store in Hildale, Utah, Musser saw Vivian Barlow Musser and their 18-month-old son Levi - but his wife rejected admonitions of love and refused to let the 22-year-old father cradle his son….

[The] meeting, arranged by Musser’s father, David Musser, could only have happened with church approval, Hoole said.

“They proved our point - that they control every aspect of these people’s lives,” [Wendell Musser's lawyer] said.

“They can make her appear when they want her to appear,” [the lawyer's partner] said.

Like much of what happens inside the secretive, insular FLDS community, the meeting was arranged and carried out with a kind of spy novel flavor.

David Musser called his son early last week, inviting him for visit and a “talk,” the attorneys said. Pressed for details about the conversation to be had, David Musser was vague, but instructed his son “not to bring anyone,” and sent Wendell a one-way plane ticket….

Watching outside the airport, [Musser's attorney] admits he had sentimental thoughts about a reunion between a father and son whose relationship had gone chilly and who hadn’t seen each other in months.

“As soon as the plane landed and taxied up to the gate, his father flipped out his cell phone,” [he] said. “And to me it was clear he was reporting back on the status of things and all that sentimentality went out the window. This was not a reunion…it was someone telling Wendell’s father ‘Do this….””

Streamline Automotive is owned by Vivian Musser’s father, Anthus Barlow. It was he who led his 20-year-old daughter and grandson into the store, Greg Hoole said.

A telephone number for Anthus Barlow in the Hildale phone book was disconnected Saturday and no one answered the phone at the business.

Also present were Helaman Barlow, an officer with the Colorado City town marshal’s office and two Washington County sheriff’s deputies in the area by coincidence and invited to participate for an unknown reason, the attorneys said.

“She wouldn’t look at him at first. He said she was like a robot,” Roger Hoole said. “She was very well coached. She wouldn’t let him hold the baby.”

After refusing to meet privately, Vivian, who in 2004 married Wendell Musser in a hastily arranged religious ceremony in a Kanab, Utah, motel, peppered her husband with questions and accusations.

“She asked, why are you persecuting the prophet?” Greg Hoole said.

More here.

Kansas at their best. Icarus Borne on Wings of Steel.

See here.

It’s too bad Steve Walsh doesn’t sound like that anymore. Geddy Lee and Jon Anderson have done a much better job preserving their high, piercing prog-rock voices. Out of those three, Walsh, in his prime was my favorite.

Update: If you want to see how Walsh’s voice has changed, the following is “Icarus II,” recorded a few years ago. As you can see, he can still sing and phrase, but he has lost some tone and range. The lyrics to the first Icarus are about aviation and flying. The sequel’s lyrics are about World War II fighter pilots, very apt for Memorial Day.

Update II: I found a link which accesses the entire song Byzantium, which like, Icarus II, was recorded on their year 2000 album Somewhere to Elsewhere, and I think is the best song from that release. As you can hear, Walsh’s voice, though not what it used to be, still haunts in a way that few can.

I wish every libertarian who rhapsodizes about China’s alleged liberalization would listen to the outstanding interview with Gareth Hayes in this week’s Skeptic’s Guide to The Universe.

First, a little background, via BoingBoing:

You might think… that companies could avoid feature creep by just paying attention to what customers really want. But that’s where the trouble begins, because although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable, they also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in a store we tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It’s only once we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of simplicity. A recent study by a trio of marketing academics—Debora Viana Thompson, Rebecca W. Hamilton, and Roland T. Rust—found that when consumers were given a choice of three models, of varying complexity, of a digital device, more than sixty per cent chose the one with the most features. Then, when the subjects were given the chance to customize their product, choosing from twenty-five features, they behaved like kids in a candy store. (Twenty features was the average.) But, when they were asked to use the digital device, so-called “feature fatigue” set in. They became frustrated with the plethora of options they had created, and ended up happier with a simpler product.

Why doesn’t someone produce an operating system and associated applications as follows:

What you get, out of the box, is just enough to turn it on and to download additional components. There are no popups, no nag screens, no icons on your desktop, no icons in your system tray, no icons your quickstart toolbar, and only one icon in your regular toolbar. All you have — blessed simplicity! — is a web browser. With no plugins.

And by the way, who was the genius who decided that having four places to put icons was a good idea? All it does is encourage developers to want their products on all four spots. Far from being helpful, the result is just a deadweight loss, in OS form: When every icon is special, no icons are special. Why on earth should there be an icon in my system tray for an FTP client that I use once a year at most? Who do these developers think they are?

With your brand spankin new operating system you download the programs you want from a community portal that is maintained by users and enthusiasts. You download them one at a time, as you determine that you need them. Programs that you never need will never run or even appear on your system if you don’t want them.

And by never, I mean never.

Developers would be welcome to write programs, but those who behave badly will be banished to the outer darkness by the community’s literati. These developers would do things like, but not limited to the following: nag screens, duplication of icons, changing your file associations, starting processes that run needlessly in the background, spyware, and writing sloppy uninstallers that don’t complete the job.

Many of us still long for the days of Windows95. Not because it was a perfect OS, but because it was unambitious and nimble compared to the monstrosities we have today. The point of an OS should not be to see how many programs it can support at once, but rather to see how well it can run the ones you need — and only the ones you need.

At this point someone will probably recommend their favorite flavor of Unix. But I can’t play World of Warcraft on Unix.

The Prince of Darkness would have been 81 today.

Update: For some reason, YouTube embeds aren’t working, so here’s the link.

Reader James J. Goswick responded to my post addressing James Madison’s alleged Christianity. I will admit with Madison and Washington, because of their reticence to explicate their specific creed, until we find more of their writings (if we ever do), there will always be some question. As James H. Hutson put it,

Seeking evidence of his faith quickly leads to the conclusion that there is, in the words of the poet, no there there, that in the mature Madison’s writings there is no trace, no clue as to his personal religious convictions….With Madison, unlike Jefferson or any of the other principal founding fathers with the possible exception of Washington, one peers into a void when trying to discern evidence of personal religious belief.

And because of the level of generality about which Madison spoke on God, Hutson notes, “[t]he very paucity of evidence has permitted a latitude of interpretation in which writers have created Madison in the image of their own religious convictions.”

Madison oft-used generic, philosophical lowest-common-denominator terms for God. However, “The Great Spirit” is not one of those terms, as Mr. Goswick asserts. Terms like “Providence,” “Nature’s God,” “Deity,” “Almighty,” “Supreme Being,”…these are the generic terms which Jews, Deists, Unitarians, Trinitarians, and even Muslims could speak pretending such is the same God they all worshipped. All of these groups (even Deists and Unitarians) could, in some sense, claim to worship “The God of Abraham” as a generic lowest-common-denominator. Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin, in a sense believed they worshipped such God, except with all of His “unreasonable” attributes edited out from the Bible, so that only those parts which showed God’s warmth and benevolence remained.

“The Great Spirit,” on the other hand, like the term “Allah,” is a specific title that the Native Americans have given to God. Continue Reading »

I want to thank everyone for the links and discussion to my post on enlightening Christianity and Islam. First Ed; then Chris Ho-Stuart, then PZ Meyers; and finally Andrew Sullivan. Also see Jason’s and others.

PZ notes something that should be stressed: Even though the US, revolutionary for its time, disestablished religion at the national level when founded, other liberal democracies retained their established Churches which likewise enlightened. Indeed, Western Europe and its established Christian Churches became even more liberal and secular. He writes:

I’ll add, though, that other countries did set up state religions, and then seem to have modified that institution into similarly benign forms that have had a more lasting effect. The unofficial position of America’s founding fathers may have been wonderfully positive in the beginning, but we can see now that they flopped mightily at building enduring institutions that would maintain any kind of religious rationalism. I tend to think that if they had, for instance, declared Unitarianism the official US religion (with the same strong statements that religion was not to be a prerequisite for holding office, etc., and that it was not a declaration of exclusivity) we’d be better off today. There’d at least be one officially sanctioned brake on the excesses of our wildly proliferating looney-tunes churches.

Based on my meticulous study of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin, they probably desired Unitarianism as the “official” religion of the US. The same thing, however, that prevented the Founders from abolishing slavery in the original Constitution, prevented this desire — the states would never have ratified the Constitution were this to be done. Though, the Founders may have secretly intended to “de-facto” establish unitarianism or “theistic rationalism” as the US’s Founding creed.

The US Constitution makes no mention of God, Christ, or Christianity and only recognizes “religion” in terms of granting it rights (free exercise) and imposing restrictions (i.e., no establishment or religious tests) which ultimately relate to securing the unalienable rights of conscience. If any kind of creed can be gleaned from the US Constitution, it is latitudinarianism. Arguably though, no creed can be gleaned at all.

While we have a “godless” Constitution, based on other founding documents, (the Declaration et al.) and the public supplications and privately recorded beliefs of our key Founding Fathers, they did believe America to be a nation “under God.” However, as I’ve noted many times, such conception of a “civil religion” or “public creed” for the United States isn’t, or arguably isn’t Christianity, but a form of theological unitarianism which Dr. Gregg Frazer has dubbed “theistic rationalism.”

The responses which atheists (who don’t like any conception of God), or conservative Christians (who don’t care for “unitarianism”) can invoke is that we aren’t governed by the secret intentions of our Founding Fathers but the original public meaning of the text of the Constitution. And the Constitution a) is Godless (something atheists will point out), and b) allowed the states to establish and promote Christianity over other world religions or non-belief (something conservative Christians will point out).

Still, ideas have consequences. The fact that America is a religiously pluralistic nation which still favors religious oaths in courts of law but guarantees its citizens the right to use “any religious text, not just the Bible,” directly traces back to our Founding Fathers’ widely latitudinarian religious ideals.