Now this is religion getting a “free lunch”, David Robertson.
Further to my recent post on 59-year-old Harry Taylor receiving a 6 month suspended jail sentence, 100 hours unpaid work and ordered to pay £250 in legal costs for leaving “offensive” and “obscene” religious images in the multi-faith room at Liverpool John Lennon Airport, I am appalled to read this story in The Daily Mail:
A Muslim protester who daubed a war memorial with graffiti glorifying Osama Bin Laden and proclaiming ‘Islam will dominate the world’ walked free from court after prosecutors ruled his actions were not motivated by religion.
Tohseef Shah, 21, could have faced a tougher sentence if the court had accepted that the insults – which included a threat to kill the Prime Minister – were inspired by religious hatred.
But – citing a loophole in the law – the Crown Prosecution Service chose not to charge him with that offence and he escaped with only a two-year conditional discharge and an order to pay the council £500 compensation after admitting causing criminal damage.
Yesterday the decision was attacked by politicians and veterans who were shocked by the desecration of the memorial in Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire…
Shah sprayed the words ‘Islam will dominate the world – Osama is on his way’ and ‘Kill Gordon Brown’ on the plinth of the memorial in December.
He was arrested after his DNA was found on the discarded spray-can but refused to give an explanation for his actions or show any remorse, a court heard.
The story has also been posted on website of The Freethinker.
What really beggars belief is that the Counter Terrorism Division of the Crown Prosecution Service in London decided that the incident was not racially or religiously motivated saying, “While it was appreciated that what was sprayed on the memorial may have been perceived by some to be part of a racial or religious incident, no racial or religious group can be shown to have been targeted.”
Does not all 4.5 billion non-Muslims in the world today not count as a racial and / or religiously defined group?
Shah, who reportedly lives with his parents in a £200,000 detached house, has a picture of a flaming lion’s head superimposed on crossed Kalashnikov rifles on his Facebook profile.
This latest legal debacle angers me in particular since during my first debate Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable?, against Scottish Presbyterian Pastor David Robertson, author of The Dawkins Letters, a “flea” response to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, scoffed that I was “living in a fantasy world” for claiming that the New Atheists were attempting to break the taboo of criticising religion our in social discourse, which I remarked had been receiving “a free lunch”.
Following his most recent appearance on Unbelievable?, Robertson is now pushing the myth on Premier Christian Community’s online debate forum that Joseph Stalin was converted to atheism after reading Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of The Species and it influenced his brutal politics, despite being corrected on an earlier occasion by yours truly that the Russian dictator rejected Darwinism in favour of Lamarckism that lead to Lysenko’s insane “miraculous” agricultural programme which was responsible for the starvation of millions.
Robertson is also insisting that evolution leads to immorality, refusing to accept that the human species’ survival depends on co-operation and altruism even though his answer was “I don’t know and I don’t care” when I asked him whether he actually believed in the scientific truth of evolution during our second debate.
After comparing my report on the heavy-handed treatment of atheist Harry Taylor – who never threatened anyone with violence – with this latest episode of religious beliefs receiving special treatment, I hope Robertson will revise his views. But then again, I think that our good Pastor has a preconceived notion of the World and picks and chooses arguments, facts and authorities to back that up while ignoring a wealth of contradictory evidence and even contradicting his own reasoning.
As with his preconception of Darwinism being inherently immoral, it is part of Robertson’s worldview that Christians are persecuted for their faith. In a similar way that the pseudo-fact of Jesus’ disciples dying for their faith, this is held out as evidence for the truth of doctrine. And no evidence or argument is going to change his mind any time soon.
manicstreetpreacher comments on what will hopefully (yeah, right!) be the last time we will have to put up with this clown.
Islamist hate-preacher, Anjem Choudary, made a complete fool of himself on Tuesday night’s edition of Newsnight (11 January 2010) when he debated Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation on the UK government’s decision to ban his crackpot fundamentalist organisation, Al-Muhajiroun, also known as Islam4UK.
The full interview can be viewed over at BBC iPlayer. The report begins at c. 20 minutes and it will be available until 11:19pm on Tuesday, 19 January 2010. I will update this piece to include the YouTube videos as soon as some kind person edits and uploads them. 😮
UPDATE 29 January 2010
The YouTube clip is below.
Choudary comes across incredibly badly and will not make any friends from this appearance. He relies on shouting and talking over people as a tactic in debating and by being evasive and deceptive. Harry’s Place has listed all the lies and evasions that Choudary spouted during the interview:
Lie 1
“Al Muhajiroun is not a HT offshoot” – ALM was set up by Omar Bakri who used to be the leader of HT in the UK and set up ALM after he had been expelled from HT.
Lie 2
“I was never with HT” – Anjem was an activist with HT for a number of years and met Bakri through HT lectures. I personally met him when he was with HT, as did many others including Maajid.
Lie 3
“I have never met Maajid Nawaz” – Anjem represented Maajid in a legal case at Newham College in 1993 and they met again on The Big Questions last year.
Lie 4
“I have not received any money from the government” – Anjem and his family of 4 have been living off state benefits for over 10 years.
Lie 5
“We don’t believe in appealing against man made law” – Yet Abu Izzadeen (ALM member) lodged an appeal at the court of appeals in 2008.
Lie 6
“Islam4UK got banned because it was exposing the Government foreign policy” – Islam4UK is working to bring convert Britain into a Caliphate under Shariah law and they support the Taliban and Al Qaeda in places like Afghanistan. They also approve of terror tactics and praise terrorist attacks. It is not a lobby group that exists to highlight bad policy – there are many such lobby groups that have not been banned.
Lie 7
“Britain is an apartheid system” – Anjem clearly does not know the meaning of this word. He lives freely in the UK, has the same legal rights as everyone else, is free to express his anti-western views, speak out against British Foreign policy and claim generous state benefits. As Maajid pointed out, he has not spent any time in jail and is regularly invited on various TV shows to express his views. Clearly, his organisation has abused these privileges to incite violence, support terrorism and spread fear and hate. As such they deserve to be banned.
Questions avoided
“Are you on the dole?”
“Will I (Maajid) be executed in Anjem’s version of the Khalifate?”
“Is non-Muslim blood halal for you”
Choudary’s and Nawaz’s previous clash on BBC One’s The Big Questions from March 2009 can be viewed below:
Part 1/2
Part 2/2
I was left rather cold by Nawaz after seeing him against Choudary on this occasion. He attempted to portray the mad mullah as a fringe radical who was a perverting “true Islam” and his use of the “serious scholarship” card (known to atheists as “The Courtier’s Reply”) made my eyes roll. I have recently given my thoughts on this brand of religious moderation, but in a nutshell, Choudary may well be a nasty piece of work who risks giving demagogy a bad name, but he is no psychopath.
A layman listening to Nawaz would not think that the core texts of Islam were to blame, when I know that they are most definitely are. I have to disagree with the writer of the above Harry’s Place post on a few points. While Choudary is a “charlatan” with “neither principles nor basic manners” and “how anyone can look up to the guy or regard him as a leader” is indeed beyond me, he is still a man guided by his faith. He does really believe this stuff.
Nevertheless, Nawaz redeemed himself on Newsnight by playing a blinder in asking Choudary the same three questions over and over again without getting a straight answer. Even the usually stone-faced Paxman was practically in stitches as Choudary avoided Nawaz’s questions about whether he would be executed as an apostate under Choudary’s caliphate and how much in state benefits he was claiming. It was all rather reminiscent of Paxman’s notorious interview of former Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard where he asked his subject 12 times about his alleged overruling of the head of the Prison Service, Derek Lewis without success.
However, what is utterly tragic about Choudary is that a few years ago, he was a hard-drinking, hard-smoking, soft-core porn reading student who had a sense of humour like the rest of us.
I only hope that now his pathetic jihadist organisation has now finally been criminalised, mainstream television can stop giving him airtime, even if it is to wheel out the court jester.
manicstreetpreacher finally has his answer as to what one of America’s top Christian apologists has to say about the butchery of the Old Testament.
Is the good loved by the gods because it is good, or is it good because it is loved by the gods?
– Plato
Earlier this year, I reported on the Craig/Hitchens debate at Biola University. I had been wondering about Craig’s views on evolution for a while, but during the debate he finally revealed that he did not accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. According to Craig’s “science” based on John Barrow and Frank Tipler’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, evolution was so “improbable” (surely Craig’s favourite word in the English language) that the sun would have burned out long before Homo sapiens could have evolved.
Craig has stiffened his position in the last couple of years. During his 2007 debate in London against embryologist Lewis Wolpert, author of Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, Craig stated that he “neither believed nor disbelieved” in evolution, but had reservations over it on the grounds of improbability.
In the Hitchens debate, however, Craig rubbished evolution completely. I suppose it was the only way he could overthrow Hitchens’ “98,000 Year Wait Gambit” that in order to believe Christianity in the light of what we now know about the origins of the human race, you have to believe that Homo sapiens crawled painfully on their hands and knees for tens of thousands of years with low life expectancy and massive infant mortality with God watching with folded arms before finally intervening with a human sacrifice in a very remote part of the Middle East, the news of which still hasn’t permeated large parts of the civilised world.
As I wrote at the time, even to me as a non-scientist this was “a load of anthropic bunkum”. Richard Dawkins convincingly argues that the Anthropic Principle is similar to evolution: it is an alternative to the design explanation. We on Earth just happen to be lucky that our planet possesses the right “Goldilocks qualities” of being “just right” for life to emerge. After all, physical parameters ought to be irrelevant to an omnipotent God; he could have designed us to survive in a cold, hard vacuum if he wanted.
In addition, Craig appears totally ignorant of the fact that evolution is about small steps producing gradual, but ultimately massive change over very long periods of time. Improbable, my foot! Far from Craig “following the evidence wherever it leads” as he is so proud of saying, he is massaging the scientific evidence to ensure that his fantasy of the universe being designed with him in mind can remain in tact.
My other great Craig-curio was what he thought of the atrocities of the Old Testament. Craig teaches at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University where I understand that the students are taught that the Bible is free from error in all its words. I’ve always wondered what Craig made of the God-ordered massacres of the Old Testament, however, in the debates I have seen up until now; he has always cordoned off that topic.
I was mildly disappointed that Hitchens did not tear Craig in half like he usually does at the lectern. Craig smugly declared himself the victor of that clash. However, as good as it would have been to see Hitchens wipe the floor with his opponent he showed Craig as a right-wing fundamentalist. It was almost like watching Ted Haggard or Pat Robertson adopt the guise of a “serious scholar” as Craig harped on about the Gospels’ promise of eternal life as embodied in the resurrection of Jesus.
Continuing this gradual breaking down of Craig’s shell, I recently came across this audio clip of Craig on YouTube replying to The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation author Sam Harris (homepage / The Reason Project) and his objections to the barbarism of the Old Testament:
You will note that Craig says that rather than being an argument against the existence of God, the violence in the Old Testament that was apparently mandated by God is a question of whether the Bible is inerrant. It is open to debate as to whether the Israelites correctly interpreted the word of God in slaughtering all those poor Canaanites.
However, Craig well and truly lets his veil slip by stating that the Israelites were carrying out the will of God in dispensing with his enemies after emerging from 400 years in Egyptian captivity! Craig admitted that their acts would have been immoral but for the fact that they were ordered by God. The acts of murder and genocide became moral because God had ordered them.
Craig even admits that God has the right to end the lives of everyone on Earth this second if he so chooses. Talk about self-imposed slavery!
I couldn’t believe my ears and wanted further proof that this really was Craig’s view. After all, this is a man who argues that objective moral values such as the wrongness of rape and torturing a child can only come from God and therefore the existence of objective morality is an argument for the existence of God. As Craig puts it:
If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist;
Objective moral values do exist;
Therefore, God exists.
Seeking further evidence, I came across this article on Craig’s ironically titled website, Reasonable Faith, written in response to a couple of email questions on the violence of the Old Testament and discovered that it just keeps on getting worse.
For your shock, if not your consideration:
[T]he problem isn’t that God ended the Canaanites’ lives. The problem is that He commanded the Israeli soldiers to end them. Isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder? No, it’s not. Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder. The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their on initiative, it would have been wrong.
God can do anything. Even make genocide morally right:
On divine command theory, then, God has the right to command an act, which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been sin, but which is now morally obligatory in virtue of that command. [My emphasis]
This segment clearly demonstrates that Craig knows that murder, rape and torture are wrong independently of any divine command. But he says that they can be morally right if ordered by God as per Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma quoted at the head of this article.
Do you see what Craig has done there? He has totally undermined his own argument that without God there can be no objective morality!
Craig goes on to explain that the destruction of unclean races by a super-race favoured by God is a virtuous thing (three guesses who tried to put that one into practice in the last century?):
By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.
The murder of children is all fine and dandy as long as we think that God wants it. It was for their own good and they’ve actually gone to a better place:
Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.
But please spare a thought for those poor child murderers:
So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.
Someone please pass me a bucket. I’m about to blow chunks over all this moral relativism:
But then, again, we’re thinking of this from a Christianized, Western standpoint. For people in the ancient world, life was already brutal. Violence and war were a fact of life for people living in the ancient Near East. Evidence of this fact is that the people who told these stories apparently thought nothing of what the Israeli soldiers were commanded to do (especially if these are founding legends of the nation). No one was wringing his hands over the soldiers’ having to kill the Canaanites; those who did so were national heroes.
It always brings a smile to my lips when apologists claim that God can be the only source of objective morality, yet when a sceptic pulls out a nasty passage from the Good Book, they go all relativist on you and say things like, “Well ok, but things were a lot different back then. Genocide, rape and slavery were the norm…”
No, genocide, rape and slavery were not morally right, even for people living 3,000 years ago. Perhaps books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy were the Universal Declaration on Human Rights of their day when simply compiling a short list of reasons to kill your enemies was an improvement over the general barbarity of the time. But values such as self-sacrifice, charity and love were still admired while murder and rape were reviled.
If we are unable to say that it was morally wrong of Moses to issue an order to his troops, as Thomas Paine put it in The Age of Reason, “to butcher the boys, massacre the mothers and debauch the daughters,” (Numbers 31: 13 – 18) then conversely, we cannot say that him leading the Children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt was morally right either!
Craig’s response continues by contending that Osama bin Laden has it soooooo wrong:
Now how does all this relate to Islamic jihad? Islam sees violence as a means of propagating the Muslim faith. Islam divides the world into two camps: the dar al-Islam (House of Submission) and the dar al-harb (House of War). The former are those lands which have been brought into submission to Islam; the latter are those nations which have not yet been brought into submission. This is how Islam actually views the world!
No, Dr Craig, those nineteen pious men who showed your pious nation the social benefits of this level of blind faith on 11 September 2001 were not trying to convert anybody that day. They were exacting what they saw as retribution from their god for America’s decadence and moral depravity. Rather like the Israelites exterminating the Canaanites in fact. If you are in any doubt as to this, perhaps you should take a look at this clip from two men whom you worryingly resemble:
Craig’s final conjecture can only be settled once and for all by force of arms:
By contrast, the conquest of Canaan represented God’s just judgement upon those peoples. The purpose was not at all to get them to convert to Judaism! War was not being used as an instrument of propagating the Jewish faith. Moreover, the slaughter of the Canaanites represented an unusual historical circumstance, not a regular means of behavior.
The problem with Islam, then, is not that it has got the wrong moral theory; it’s that it has got the wrong God. If the Muslim thinks that our moral duties are constituted by God’s commands, then I agree with him. But Muslims and Christians differ radically over God’s nature. Christians believe that God is all-loving, while Muslims believe that God loves only Muslims. Allah has no love for unbelievers and sinners. Therefore, they can be killed indiscriminately. Moreover, in Islam God’s omnipotence trumps everything, even His own nature. He is therefore utterly arbitrary in His dealing with mankind. By contrast Christians hold that God’s holy and loving nature determines what He commands.
The question, then, is not whose moral theory is correct, but which is the true God?
Why don’t you and the Muslims settle it once and for all by stepping outside, Dr Craig? This has clearly been the approach of certain Jewish rabbis in the upper quarters of the Israeli Defence Forces which continue to this day, not least during Israel’s military strikes against the Palestinians at the start of 2009. As Hitchens reported in March this year:
I remember being in Israel in 1986 when the chief army “chaplain” in the occupied territories, Rabbi Shmuel Derlich, issued his troops a 1,000-word pastoral letter enjoining them to apply the biblical commandment to exterminate the Amalekites as “the enemies of Israel.” Nobody has recently encountered any Amalekites, so the chief educational officer of the Israeli Defense Forces asked Rabbi Derlich whether he would care to define his terms and say whom he meant. Rather evasively – if rather alarmingly – the man of God replied, “Germans.” There are no Germans in Judaea and Samaria or, indeed, in the Old Testament, so the rabbi’s exhortation to slay all Germans as well as quite probably all Palestinians was referred to the Judge Advocate General’s Office. Forty military rabbis publicly came to Derlich’s support, and the rather spineless conclusion of the JAG was that he had committed no legal offense but should perhaps refrain in the future from making political statements on the army’s behalf…
Now, it’s common to hear people say [that violent passages in the Bible are] not intended to be “taken literally.” One also often hears the excuse that some wicked things are done “in the name of” religion, as if the wicked things were somehow the result of a misinterpretation. But the nationalist rabbis who prepare Israeli soldiers for their mission seem to think that this book might be the word of God, in which case the only misinterpretation would be the failure to take it literally. (I hate to break it to you, but the people who think that God’s will is revealed in scripture are known as “religious.” Those who do not think so must try to find another name for themselves.)
Possibly you remember Dr Baruch Goldstein, the man who in February 1994 unslung his weapon and killed more than two dozen worshippers at the mosque in Hebron. He had been a physician in the Israeli army and had first attracted attention by saying that he would refuse to treat non-Jews on the Sabbath. Now read Ethan Bronner’s report in the March 22 New York Times about the preachments of the Israeli army’s latest chief rabbi, a West Bank settler named Avichai Rontzski who also holds the rank of brigadier general. He has “said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath … is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred.” Those of us who follow these things recognize that statement as one of the leading indicators of a truly determined racist and fundamentalist. Yet it comes not this time in the garb of a homicidal lone-wolf nut bag but in the full uniform and accoutrement of a general and a high priest… The latest news, according to Bronner, is that the Israeli Defense Ministry has felt compelled to reprimand Rontzski for “a rabbinal edict against showing the enemy mercy” that was distributed in booklet form to men and women in uniform (see Numbers 31: 13 – 18).
At least Craig is correct when he says at one point in the article that many Old Testament scholars are sceptical that the conquest of Canaan was an actual historical event, but that’s hardly the point. The Bible is supposed to be a document containing timeless social and moral codes while portraying the actions of people we ought to admire. In this exercise, it fails miserably. As he and Hitchens discussed in their Biola debate, Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov wonders whether “without God, all things are possible.” But as Hitchens argued, surely the corollary is true: that with God, all things are thinkable as well.
If one of the world’s foremost Christian apologists can issue such a grotesque defence of Yahweh that contradicts all of his own arguments for the divine source of human morality at a stroke, then it is unsurprising that PhD graduates in the 21st century will fly aeroplanes into buildings believing that they are morally right to do so and will be rewarded by God in the afterlife.
I don’t say that all religious people are mad, bad or sad per se, but they very often can be when it comes to their religious beliefs. As the Nobel Laureate physicist Steven Weinberg famously once said, “With or without religion, good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
William Lane Craig is living proof of this.
UPDATE 06/04/2010:
Since publishing this piece, I have come across a podcast on this topic as part of the “Reasonable Faith: Conversations with Dr William Lane Craig” series that Craig’s website produces if you can bear it. Lukeprog over at Common Sense Atheism has posted an excellent discussion.
I have also found this comment by Richard Dawkins posted on the debate forum of his website:
One of our commenters on another thread, stevencarrwork, posted a link to this article by the American theologian and Christian apologist William Lane Craig. I read it and found it so dumbfoundingly, staggeringly awful that I wanted to post it again. It is a stunning example of the theological mind at work. And remember, this is NOT an ‘extremist’, ‘fundamentalist’, ‘picking on the worst case’ example. My understanding is that William Lane Craig is a widely respected apologist for the Christian religion. Read his article and rub your eyes to make sure you are not having a bad dream.
manicstreetpreacher 