In spite of thinking this, I’ve recently started to wonder about Harris’ dismissal of religious moderates on the Muslim side, partly because of the controversy over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” organized by alleged moderate imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and also because of encountering criticisms of another alleged moderate Muslaim, Tariq Ramadan.

My doubts here stem from thinking about what makes a “moderate Muslim”–and what makes a “moderate Christian.” In the present-day US, the varieties of Christianity that manage to get any attention at all range from stereotypical fundamentalism (young earth creationist, sexually repressive, and convinced everyone else is going to hell) to uber-liberal Christianity (often atheism in all but name, as in the case of John Shelby Spong). The moderate label doesn’t get used much, though I suppose you could apply it to the sorts of religious academics who try to save as many beliefs of their conservative brethren as possible, while admitting the Bible may not be quite inerrant.

But put things in the context of Christianity’s 2000-year history, and it begins to look like even most of the “fundamentalists” deserve the name “moderates.” Most “conservative” Calvinists are moderate relative to the historical Calvin, insofar as they don’t support burning Unitarians at the stake. True, there are exceptions in the U.S., and the situation in the U.S. is not the global situation even today (see: killing gays in Uganda). But the fact that these strains of Chrsitianity exist today does not make them live options for most believers in the US.

In this environment, it is hard to see that the “moderate” strains of Christianity do much good. What many US Christians need isn’t someone to stop them from becoming Christian Reconstructionists. They just need someone to point out to them that they hardly believe any of the things they think they’re supposed to believe. Someone to tell them not to fear giving up their Christian identity.

With Islam, though, from what I’ve seen “moderate” Muslims tend to correspond to the US’s “conservative” Christians, or at best the more-nearly-liberal Evangelicals. Even Irshad Manji, in her book The Trouble With Islam Today, wasn’t quite willing to give up on Koranic inerrancy. This makes her closer to the Evangelicals who try to show the Bible never condemns homosexuality than to the uber-liberals of US Christianity.

When we talk about Muslim “extremists,” we’re talking about something whose Christian analog ceased to be a force in Europe and North America during the Enlightenment. But Muslim extremism remains a force in Islam’s traditional strongholds. There have been plenty of people in the Muslim world who’ve thought the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was just, or who’ve idolized Osama bin Laden. Muslims in the US tend to be of the “moderate” sort described above, but I understand that the “extremist” variety of Islam is having some success in Europe. (This is probably a symptom of Europe’s overall problems assimilating immigrants.) And importantly, US Muslims are still likely to be in contact with parts of the Muslim world where extremism is a force, creating an avenue for the promotion of Muslim extremism here.

In this context, it doesn’t seem crazy to think that moderate Muslims leaders are doing important work giving US Muslims an alternative to the extremists, and generally helping them assimilate into US society. This could be true even if there’s much to dislike about the so-called moderates. There’s much I dislike about Rick Warren, but I recognize that he’s preferable to Torquemada. Similarly it could be true that Rauf is, in Ilya Somin’s summary the charge against him:

seems to praise much of the ideology of Iran’s repressive theocratic regime, refuses to admit that Hamas is a terrorist group… claims that the US was ‘an accessory’ to the 9/11 attacks, and sometimes draws a kind of moral equivalency between US foreign policy and Al Qaeda

and at the same time true that he’s no bin Laden. The difference is just that we don’t need Rick Warren in order to convince people that the Inquisition was a bad idea, but it might help to have Rauf to convince people Al Qaeda is a bad idea.

Sometimes, a “moderate” Muslim leader will be suggested as a candidate for “Islam’s Martin Luther,” an unfortunate comparison given Luther’s ideas on what we should do to Jews. A more enlightening comparison might be to John Locke. Locke’s “Letter on Toleration” leaves much to be desired. It never made clear whether he thought anyone but Protestants deserved religious freedom, and appeared to endorse the idea that believing the wrong things would damn you–the very dogma which had provided the original need to suppress heresy at all costs. At the same time, the value of Locke’s letter is undeniable.

On the other hand, recognizing that the relatively moderate may do some good is no reason to refrain from criticizing them. The fact that Locke advanced the cause of liberty does not mean that Spinoza and Thomas Paine hurt it by attacking many of the traditional dogmas Locke held dear. So, in spite of what I’ve just said, we probably shouldn’t be afraid to criticize “moderate” Muslims.

Admirable as this attitude sounds, I think it exactly backwards: not saying who you’re talking about is a serious sin in any sort of discussion. It’s something we need to warn people off of more often, the way we warn them off the major fallacies or failure to cite sources.

This is something I’ve had to think about for awhile, since I regularly post harsh criticisms of things people say, with names attached. But I decided to write about it because of a series of posts by Phil Plait about his “Don’t Be a Dick” speech at TAM 8, and because of Jerry Coyne’s response to those posts. (Note: the first link contains a video of the talk, but if you’re pressed for time, there’s also a partial transcript that contains most of the important stuff. Previous comments of mine based on the transcript are here).

Coyne took exception to the insinuation that there were lots of skeptics running around calling believers “brain damaged baby rapers,” and suggested Plait’s behavior wasn’t all that different than that of “Tom Johnson,” the blog commenter who fabricated a story of Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers verbally abusing believers. He especially objected to Plait’s refusal to give examples even after people complained about his failure to do so. Plait claimed finding examples was “trivially easy,” a stance Ophelia Benson glossed as “Oddly enough, many of them pointed out the lack of evidence and examples. Hey there are lots, ok?!”

What’s ironic about the situation is that Plait is complaining about people misunderstanding him, and in particular complaining of being accused of targeting Richard Dawkins or PZ Myers. What Plait doesn’t understand is that such confusions could be avoided if he would simply say what he is talking about.

But not identifying your targets doesn’t just put you at risk of being misunderstood. It breaks fundamental rules of fairness. It makes it nigh impossible for your targets to respond to your criticism. And it makes it impossible for your readers to tell if you are being fair to your targets.

There may be something tempting in theory about trying to sort out all issues through abstract discussions, but in the real world, part of sorting out difficult problems is seeing what people have to say, and seeing how they respond to criticism. Refusing to name the targets of your criticism robs your listeners of the ability to do that.

And of course, the fact that Plait wasn’t explicitly attacking anyone in particular doesn’t mean he wasn’t attacking anyone. He just wasn’t naming them. That only served to make his attacks that much more unfair to his targets.

Chris Hallquist’s book, UFOs, Ghosts, and a Rising God, is a nice compendium of skeptical responses to Christian historical apologetics.

Oh! Thanks, Vic, that was much nicer than I was expecting. I intend to henceforth quote that as a positive review of my book.

This was followed by some criticism, but it felt a bit sparse for an “attack.” There’s just one point I want to respond to:

Further, while we are farther removed from the events than we are from, say, the frauds of, say, Peter Popoff/Steve Martin (see the movie Leap of Faith), the impact of these events on history is undeniable.

But the impact of the founding of Islam on history is also undeniable. I know, I know, there are standard Christian apologetic responses to Islam. One is that Islam gained converts by the sword from the very beginning, but this is a bit silly: Muhammad didn’t one day have his alleged vision, and the next day go around personally threatening people with a sword. While Islam attained political power much faster than Christianity did, both religions originally had to win converts through persuasion.

The other stock Christian line against Islam is that miracles aren’t so prominent a part of the Islamic tradition as the Christian tradition. But Victor doesn’t seem eager to dispute my claim that legends plus delusions explain the miracle reports associated with the founding of Christianity. Will Vic then say that while naturalistically-explicable reports of miracles aren’t good evidence for a religion, and historical impact alone isn’t good evidence for a religion, the two combined are good evidence for a religion?

Whatever he thinks, the criticisms struck me as half-hearted, which made me even more surprised to find Vic making the following assertion just a couple of days later:

the anti-apologetic arguments that we see from skeptics today are not at all new, and were answered by apologists long ago.

I am not sure what to make of this, except to think it might make good fodder for a discussion of the epistemic significance of persistent disagreement.

Since this letter is a bit long, I’m going to repeat myself just so there’s no confusion about what the point is. The only point I have to make in this letter is that I’ve never been able to think the following thought: “An all powerful God who loves us all might well have allowed a five-year-old girl to be raped, beaten, and strangled to death,” and that I honestly can’t begin to understand how anyone could think it, though apparently some do. The rest of the letter will provide an indirect sort of explanation as to why.

I’ve made it available via Google Docs here. Enjoy.

And to think that a few days ago, I was feeling all warm and fuzzy about how few religious people in the U.S. are consistent in their beliefs…

The truth is that there was a time when I took religion–my personal version of it–very seriously, and realizing that I didn’t actually believe in God was a big shock. Basically, my beliefs fit Bertrand Russell’s description of Christianity in “Why I Am Not a Christian”: There is a God, and Jesus was the wisest and best of men. Nowadays I’m inclined to agree with Russell that this is a very watered-down version of Christianity, but I took it very seriously at the time. Let me see if I can explain what that was like.

The becoming convinced that Jesus was super-wise started as I entered my teens, and was just starting to figure out the world. I realized, among other things, that people are good at convincing themselves that they’re always in the right and others are always in the wrong. Stuff like that. When this is a new discovery for you, all that stuff in the Gospels about first seeing the log in your own eye, and being careful to judge, seems like the height of wisdom. (Cut me some slack: lots of things sound mind-blowingly wise when you’re in your early teens.) It helped that he seemed to pretty clearly reject the worst of the Old Testament. I don’t know if I was aware of the verse about not having come to abolish the Law.

Then something weird happened. I reasoned as follows: some of the things attributed to Jesus in the gospels are wise, so he must have been a very wise guy, so all of the things attributed to him must be very wise. Since I knew that some of the things attributed to him included saying that staring at a woman’s chest was as bad as adultery, it got me a touch screwed up. I know this sounds like a very conservative thought, but please understand that I was never inclined to believe that the whole Bible was infallible. It’s just that this was Jesus saying that.

Occasionally, things would happen that would jar my view of Jesus’ wisdom. I read “Why I Am Not a Christian” for the first time, and thought Bertrand Russell was a very wicked man for questioning Jesus’ wisdom, and (because I was an aspiring fiction-writer at the time) thought I would write a short-story showing this. I don’t know how I thought that would work. Also, once, at church camp I made the mistake of reading the Gospel of Mark, which I found was very short on the Good Samaritan/Sermon on the Mount material of Matthew and Luke, and mostly consisted of Jesus walking around talking about how the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. This made me very sad, though I don’t remember having any particular response at an intellectual level.

At the time, it wasn’t obvious to me that I only had the opinion of Jesus I did because he was the central religious figure in my parents’ religion, but now it’s obvious that I wouldn’t have reasoned this way about anyone else. On the other hand, it wasn’t strictly a matter of having been taught to think that way. I hadn’t been. I now suspect part of it was a human desire to believe in saints who vastly exceed others in moral wisdom, perhaps because we like imagining the possibility that we might be such a person.

I also believed, for awhile, that God was necessary for morality. I think my reason went like this: there were what looked to me good reasons for thinking there was no such thing as objective value or morality, and I found this very depressing, but I could make the depressing thoughts go away by telling myself that maybe there was a God. Why that should be relevant, I don’t think I ever worked out, but it got me hoping there was a God.

At some point, I read someone on an online discussion forum saying had stopped believing in God in part because of asking himself the question, “If I don’t believe in Zeus or Thor, why do I believe in the Christian God?” Somehow, the post didn’t provoke an angry reaction from me, and I just filed it away and let it gnaw at me for awhile.

I eventually realized that hoping there was a God didn’t amount to believing there was a God, and stopped pretending. Logically, one might think this should have had the following effect on me: I’d go from expecting the world to work the way it would if it would if it were ruled by a benevolent power to not expecting it to work that way. In fact, I don’t think I ever had that expectation.

Instead, my deconversion had effects like this: I stopped feeling obligated to think everything attributed to Jesus was wise. I stopped feeling the need to like Evangelicals who said things that scared me. I could admit to myself that God did nothing at all to secure objective morality. And I stopped automatically assuming that non-believers were somehow morally suspicious. Now, looking at someone who thought this way, I would be tempted to say that I never believed in God and “God” was just code for a collection of commitments like those. That’s not what it felt like at the time, though.

There’s my story. Hopefully, telling it will help some of you reading this understand the apparently wish-washy liberal theists you encounter, and hopefully sorting it out in my head will help me do the same. There’s one thing, though, that I can’t much help with: while I got an early start thinking about these things, I still figured out I was an atheist at 16. So, while in a sense I know what it’s like to be a liberal Christian, I have no idea what it’s like to think about religion a great deal and remain any kind of believer. Seeing people do that still baffles me.

Here’s how he starts off:

Instead of relying on the merits of the arguments, which is what critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning is about, it seems that vitriol and venom are on the rise.
…

Let me ask you a question: how many of you here today used to believe in something — used to, past tense — whether it was flying saucers, psychic powers, religion, anything like that? You can raise your hand if you want to. [lots of hands go up] Not everyone is born a skeptic. A lot of you raised your hand. I’d even say most of you, from what I can tell.

Now let me ask you a second question: how many of you no longer believe in those things, and you became a skeptic, because somebody got in your face, screaming, and called you an idiot, brain-damaged, and a retard? [Very few hands go up]

Okay, obviously that kind of behavior is unlikely to be productive. The problem is that, to my knowledge, literal screaming in-your-face name calling sessions are rare. I’ve never seen one take place, even during a game of bait-the-street-preacher.

Things that could be called vitriol and venom, sure. But it’s not clear at all that they’re on the rise. Worse, even though they seem obviously negative, it’s hard to find much reason to think they do much harm.

First of all, skeptical people being dicks has a very long and honorable history. David Hume and Bertrand Russell, two of the greatest free-thinking philosophers who’ve ever lived, were also world-class penners of dickery. Here’s Hume:

Were there a religion (and we may suspect Mahometanism of this inconsistence) which sometimes painted the Deity in the most sublime colours, as the creator of heaven and earth; sometimes degraded him so far to a level with human creatures as to represent him wrestling with a man, walking in the cool of the evening, showing his back parts, and descending from heaven to inform himself of what passes on earth; while at the same time it ascribed to him suitable infirmities, passions, and partialities, of the moral kind: That religion, after it was extinct, would also be cited as an instance of those contradictions, which arise from the gross, vulgar, natural conceptions of mankind, opposed to their continual propensity, towards flattery and exaggeration. Nothing indeed would prove more strongly the divine origin of any religion, than to find (and happily this is the case with Christianity) that it is free from a contradiction, so incident to human nature.

and Russell:

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.

Somehow, skepticism and freethought managed to survive having such dicks for advocates. But then again, Hume and Russell tempered their attacks with irony, and on the whole managed to retain an air of being refined, sophisticated Brits and not at all the sort of people who scream insults into someone’s face.

So maybe Phil wasn’t talking about such sophisticates. Maybe he was talking about the sort of people who compare the beliefs they want to debunk to belief in fairies. Like James Randi. Okay, so I’m not the first one to make this point but I’m going to repeat it, because Randi is such an excellent example.

At his height, Randi had an enormous reputation for being a dick. I once heard one of his targets refer to him as a “hatchet man,” and even Carl Sagan (very politely) called Randi a dick in The Demon Haunted World. But not only did this not prevent him from being extremely effective in his exposes of Uri Geller and Peter Popoff, but Randi’s main contribution arguably was that he was willing to be such a dick.

When Geller was big, there were lots of other magicians who had the expertise to see through Geller, but a lot of them were saying “oh, leave him alone, what he’s doing is silly and harmless.” Part of Randi’s contribution was to get up and say, “no, he’s a fraud and a disgrace to honest magicians.” And to point out that the excuses being made for Geller were similar to the excuses Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had made for belief in fairies. Would Randi have been more effective if he triangulated his way to a position like “I tend to think that Geller is more than a bit silly and might possibly do some harm”?

So when Phil talks about a rise in “vitriol and venom” he has to be talking about someone worse than Randi. At this point he only thing I can think that he might be referring to is the fact that yes, the internet does provide a platform for people who have nothing better to do than call people idiots all day, and for whom anonymity removes all fear of doing just that. In other words, there are people within the atheist internez who act like /b/tards. However, as someone who spends a lot of time on atheist websites, I don’t encounter these people very often. Literally none of them ever build a following. (You don’t have to like the Rational Response Squad, but no, they are not an example of this.)

So much for that. But one other bit of the transcript got me thinking:

I think I can sum up my points like this: first, always ask yourself what your goal is. […] Is this argument necessary? What is your goal? What are you trying to accomplish? Before you talk, before you leave a comment, before you engage a pseudoscientist, before you raise your hand, before you sign that email, ask yourself: is this going to help? Is this going to allow me to achieve my goal? And you also need to ask yourself: will this impede me from achieving my goal? Is this just to make me feel better, or am I trying to change the world?

Again, this sounds commonsensical. But again, when you think about this, it makes very little sense. When has it helped to pause before speaking to ask yourself “will this help to change the world?” Who ever knows what the long range effect of an utterance on the world as a whole will be? Who even knows in retrospect what the long term effects of some particular utterance were? On the other hand, in retrospect it seems an awful lot like we make progress through people speaking their mind without worrying overmuch about the long term effects of their utterance.

So, as long as you’re not risking offending relatives or losing your job, don’t worry too much about the effects of particular instances of speaking your mind. Seriously, you often can’t know which means you’ll go crazy if you do. And it’s the negative reactions that people always shove in your face, which can give you a skewed perspective. I hate to think how history would have turned out if humanity’s great thinkers had taken that kind of shit seriously. But if you make a habit of speaking your mind whenever you’re likely to get away with it, you can go to bed at night knowing that you’re participating in something that will have a good effect, in the long run, probably.

Note: after I figured out what I wanted to say with this post, I found this post suggesting that Phil’s speech was a response to problems on the JREF boards. Aside from the fact that I think my post is more interesting if we ignore that possibility, if that’s what was up with Phil’s speech, it should have been directed towards members of that board, not vaguely aimed at the skeptical community as a whole.

But atheists need to be careful here. They should be aware that theologians have developed a response to this that they need to grapple with. Unfortunately, this response is often not explicitly stated explicitly in philosophy of religion textbooks, but it is quite well established, and it goes like this: “of course believing in Thor would be crazy, but it’s OK to believe in God because God is infinity times better than Thor.”

Unfortunately this response is not so compelling once made explicit.

Also, if any adults actually believed in God, can anyone doubt that the same people who complain about Dawkins’ ignorance would say that this is just an expression of bigoted ignorance of what Santa Claus believers belief? After all, Santa Claus is not the sort of being who is subject to ordinary laws of physics. Santa Claus is a magical being. The Santa Claus that the argument refutes is a Santa Claus nobody believes in.

I’ve reached a strange place in my thinking about religion. On the one hand, I’ve studied religious apologetics long enough that if I needed to defend belief in God in a debate-team context, I could hold out for a very long time, and handily beat weaker opponents. In other words, I understand how theists are able to go about saying plausible-sounding things in defense of their views. On the other, at the end of the day the arguments against belief in God seem to me so simple and obvious that I no longer understand how, psychologically, thoughtful believers are able to go on believing.

I need to spend more time in face to face conversations with believers, asking them, “what do you really think about these issues? I know the stock responses that get published in respectable venues, but what do you really think?”

First, they say they had good reason for banning Ophelia:

she was sending us emails demanding to have other posters’ comments deleted. We had a better solution.

So the issue wasn’t so much that they thought she was leaving nasty comments, but they thought it would be so funny and ironical if they banned her for telling them (privately) they needed to keep a better leash on their nastier commenters?

Then they tell us that Benson is wrong about what happened, and to “set the record straight,” they tell us:

These claims are meritless…

Indeed, we have checked our logs, and the first appearance of the “bilbo” who also turned out to be “Tom Johnson,” “Milton C,” etc, was in September of 2009. Long after Benson had been banned.

Except Ophelia never said otherwise. She said that she was banned, and a guy who called her a liar wasn’t banned. Actually, she’s pointed out that a lot of people were calling her a liar on the Twins’ blog without getting banned, she’s just highlighting the fact that one of these people was also an incredibly dishonest person himself (and blatantly so, such that the Twins should have figured it out much sooner than they did). The order of events wasn’t part of Ophelia’s point, nor was there any reason it needed to be. There were, however, other people calling her a liar on the Twins’ blog before she was banned.

I almost dashed off an e-mail to Ophelia telling her not to worry so much about the Twins, though looking at her blog post I think she has the right attitude:

These are not honest people. We knew that, but boy does this underline it. These are shockingly dishonest people.