I learned a long time ago that part of what makes people of different faiths about to get along together is to not mock one anothers’ beliefs. If I wish tolerance for my own world view, I must offer it to others. This ethic is what makes a culture of multiple belief systems work.
Which is why the London Daily Mail, and the New York Post, as linked today on Memeorandum, ought to be ashamed of themselves and apologize as soon as possible, even though the apology is owed to a man accused of a crime.
They are ostensibly reporting on embattled New York City Councilman Dan Halloran, who stands accused of corruption in an attempt to short-circuit the astonishingly arcane nuts and bolts of New York election law so as to get a political ally on the ballot for the upcoming race to elect a new Mayor of New York City.
Whether Halloran is or is not guilty of corruption is one thing. That’s not what these articles are about.
What is shameful is the point-and-laugh articles pretty much openly mocking Halloran for embracing a restated version of ancient Germanic polytheism. He worships the old gods. And that’s his right as an American citizen.
It’s our obligation as a people to disregard the apparent silliness of his religious beliefs and judge the man on the content of his character. Let us focus on the moral and legal merits of the man’s case. He’s only interesting to anyone outside of New York because of the corruption accusation. Is he guilty or not? If he is guilty, ought what he did be deemed a crime at all? His religion is irrelevant to such inquiries.
It doesn’t look any more or less bizarre to me, an atheist, for a modern-day politician to worship Thor and Odin than it looks to me for a modern-day politician to worship the 2,000-year-old zombie of an itinerant rabbi. Or to venerate a four-armed man with an elephant’s head. Or to follow the lyrical ravings of a pederast warlord as holy writ. None of it stands up to critical, mean-spirited attempts to portray it as ridiculous by a non-believer.
And to the believer, my atheism looks just as bizarre and nonsensical to them as their belief looks to me.
Which is why, on those rare occasions I still interact with organized atheists, I continually grow weary of them mocking the faithful for their beliefs — regardless of your belief or mine, we can all agree that we should be good citizens to one another.
Of course Halloran’s religion is not rational and looks silly to a nonbeliever. That’s the result of religion being handed down, generation by generation, from pre-literate ancestors of the Bronze Age. What matters about a person is not the particular flavor of ancient mumbo-jumbo they prefer. What matters is whether they behave in a morally upright fashion, whether they make good contributions to society. Atheists who mock the faithful aren’t doing much to contribute, in my opinion.
Choosing instead to look at someone whose faith is different than your own and saying, “Okay, we believe differently, but so what?” is what makes it possible for all of us to live together in a culture where people actually have freedom of belief.
I don’t know if the authors of the Post and Daily Mail articles are atheists or Christians or whatever. It doesn’t matter. I know that holding Halloran up to ridicule for his pagan faith wouldn’t be tolerated for one damned second if he were Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or Buddhist. And if we’re going to say we’re a tolerant society that lets people believe as their conscience dictates, then pointing and laughing at someone else’s religion ought to be called out as inconsistent with that ethic.
If Halloran broke the law with respect to the elections in New York, let him stand trial and if convicted, pay the price for that. It has nothing whatsoever to do with his religion.
ADDENDUM:
After publishing the post, I came across, via No More Mister Nice Blog, an article from the Village Voice from November of 2011. Halloran apparently was not so keen on Cordoba House’s efforts to create a cultural center including a mosque near the World Trade Center:
In a video made by “Stop Islamization for America,” you can see Halloran seated on a dais near Pamela Geller before speaking at an event called “The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks.” … demonizing all Muslims for 9/11. Halloran then proceeds to align himself with his Irish, Roman Catholic, and cop roots, pandering in the crudest possible way to the audience’s fears.
“Would World War II veterans stand for a Shinto Temple to be built on the Arizona Memorial? Absolutely not,” Halloran says. “The greatest generation would not stand for something like that, and it has nothing to do with tolerance.”
Hypocrisy would be entirely fair game for mocking Halloran: “Tolerance for me, but not for thee” sits very poorly. But simply pointing out that to an outsider, his religious beliefs look weird is still not socially acceptable.
What is truly offensive is that anyone considers the New York Post to be of any worth.
Great piece, Burt. Sums up my thoughts on the broader matter to a T.
Can’t possibly be worse than the Daily Mail can it?
I dunno… I don’t speak British.
But is it worse than Mercatus?
The New York Post is a great paper. Alec Baldwin’s 17-year old daughter Ireland, who is 6’2″ and looks like Kim Basinger, just did a big bikini spread for them.
“I continually grow weary of them mocking the faithful for their beliefs ”
…but still don’t hesitate to employ intentionally derogatory language two paragraphs earlier. Also, “pederasty” refers to, ahem, “man-boy love.” If you’re going to insult the Prophet with an anachronistic and, according to some scholars, likely inaccurate reading of the tradition regarding his relationship with Aisha, you might as well get it right.
I get you were trying to make a point, Mr. Likko, but your language is still egregious, in my opinion, and the approach if not the logic remains closer to that of the Post and the Mail than to one more typical, at least in my experience, of the authentically pious in any religion.
I was trying to make a point with the unfair-to-the-point-of-inaccurate characterizations of more mainstream religions, Mr. MacLeod. And it seems that you understood it well enough.
I have mixed feelings, C.K. One the one hand, I see your point. And I also think the way something is said can also be part of what is said. And Burt’s apparent willingness to reprise the derogatory tropes in the service of an argument for greater tolerance partially detracts from that argument. At least in my opinion and at first blush it does.
On the other hand, I tend to be hypersensitive and carry a chip on my shoulder about such issues. So then, I have to look at what point Burt is trying to make, and I agree with it almost wholeheartedly, with the reservation that there could be a belief system that endorses values so repugnant that I could not tolerate them and that is deserving of mockery (I offer no thoughts here on whether such a system exists or what it would look like, just that I’m not willing to forgo considering it a possibility).
Mr. Corneille: I think we can be certain that many believing Christians and Muslims would find the language, and in the case of the Zombie Last Supper, the linked “exhibit” distasteful and offensive. The Hindus might I suppose just feel misunderstood, since at least their view is linked to a colorful and attractive piece of art, and is characterized as mystifying rather than as grotesque or repugnant. So to whatever extent I agree with the author’s argument, I regret that he’s compromised it in this way. The effect is somewhat similar to that of writing a post about sexism or sexual violence and using sexually explicit or violent pornography for illustrative purposes.
As for mockery, I guess I find belief systems more interesting than common attempts to mock them.
If the offense here is indulging in offensive language (and imagery) to demonstrate other kinds of offense, I’m guilty of that. Write quickly, regret later; this is ever the plague of the blogger. I shall have to draw upon such reservoirs of goodwill as I hopefully have built up elsewhere to hope that Readers will infer good faith to my intent, if not my execution.
I’ll strive to take the concession as a small victory, and in return will leave evocations of the noble and timeless Qur’an and of the reality of Resurrection to some other time and place.
“Write quickly, regret later; this is ever the plague of the blogger.”
I sometimes wonder if I have thick enough skin to handle the hyper-analysis of what I write that bloggers here have to go through. I’m not sure that such hyper-analysis is a bad thing–I certainly indulge in it–but it must not be easy to deal with.
Hey, you just outed yourself as an atheist blogger who dares to mock the Prophet, while Atlas Shrugged just covered a protest by hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis demanding the execution of atheist bloggers who mock the Prophet (PBUH). I’m not sure if it’s relevant to anything, but it is at least amusing.
Frankly, I think the Scandinavians were doing better as pagans, getting along with Muslims, Hindus, and Eastern Orthodox Catholics, even guarding Constantinople after they failed to sack it. But burn down one Irish monastery and everybody freaks out.
If you want a working canary in the coal mine of democracy, it’s not the odd-wad worshipper of Odd Gods but rather the Atheist. The atheists have been so routinely vilified and mocked, told they couldn’t possibly be ethical people, it’s a long and shameful record.
It’s true, atheism has been used a horrible excuse by various despots who persecuted religion. But nothing comes close to the crap that’s been thrown at the atheists by the God Squad. If the atheists you know are constantly a-harshin’ on the religious, it’s not as if they’ve started this quarrel.
>>> I know that holding Halloran up to ridicule for his pagan faith wouldn’t be tolerated for one damned second if he were Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or Buddhist.<<<
Absolutely! Now, if he were Mormon… should I really have to pull out all the "magic underwear" post linkages from this past election cycle? From both conservative (during
the primaries) and liberal (during the general) sites?
I don’t mind a Mormon becoming President.
I do mind a President who has assassins at his beck and call.
I wouldn’t vote Ratzinger for President either (not that the Pope has assassins… but mixing religion and civil society is not good for either)
not that the Pope has assassins
Which, of course, he does. And some of the best trained and least appreciated ones in history no less.
“Of course Halloran’s religion is not rational and looks silly to a nonbeliever. That’s the result of religion being handed down, generation by generation, from pre-literate ancestors of the Bronze Age. ”
asatru actually dates to the early 1970s iirc.
Which might as well be the Bronze age as far as I’m concerned, apparently they thought the world was cooling in those days.
don’t forget the pants. crazy times for pants.
Like the mockers could play center field for a championship team. (Seriously, is there a more oxymoronic name than Angel Pagan?)
Bob Walk is still my favorite, though I guess that’s more ironic than oxymoronic.
Anyway, 2 for 4 with an RBI against my Cardinals today. Luckily, Wainwright was able to scatter most of those hits, and the offense came to life.
The most ironic name I know of is “Knoblauch”, which is German for “never throws the ball over the first baseman’s head.”
It doesn’t look any more or less bizarre to me, an atheist, for a modern-day politician to worship Thor and Odin than it looks to me for a modern-day politician to worship the 2,000-year-old zombie of an itinerant rabbi. Or to venerate a four-armed man with an elephant’s head. Or to follow the lyrical ravings of a pederast warlord as holy writ.
I think that it is more bizzare, given the social context. Most people adhere to the religion they were raised to believe, because they’ve never really given much serious thought to the premises that underpin it. That’s not particularly admirable, but it’s the default. On the other hand, for someone not raised as a pagan to think about it long and hard and then say to himself, “Yeah. This makes sense”…there’s something wrong with that person. Either that or the belief isn’t really sincere and he’s just making a fashion statement, in which case he’s a wanker.
For the same reason, I’m generally accepting of Arabic Muslims and Indian Hindus, but roll my eyes at westerners who convert to those religions.
Not that any of this justifies being a jerk about it.
What do you say to people who convert, say from Christianity to Islam? Or someone like me, who was raised Christian but discarded that belief later in life?
Jesus and Mohammad are not Marvel Superheroes.
But this also relates to the way in which intuitively we don’t see Thor as a superhero as weird while if someone were to do Jesus or Krishna* as modernday superheroes in New York, there would be something mildly profane about it.
*Of course Krishna may very well have been the first Superhero. The story of Krishna in fact follows so many comic Superhero tropes that the only thing they didn’t do was some kind of post mortem alternate continuity.
I’d watch that movie.
That’s just you. I’m sure you scored pretty low on the sacredness foundation in Haidt’s moral foundations test right?
Have you ever read Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light? It’s about people who (using future gosh-wow technology) transform themselves into the Hindu pantheon.
I’ve read the first few. Its got some Hindu and Buddhist themes, but its not overt.
I think you’re thinking of something different. It’s a novel, and the characters are named after the Hindu gods.
The Ramayana would make for an awesome movie. So would accurate versions of the Illiad and Odyessey.
Not a movie. Think miniseries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramayan_(TV_series)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharat_(TV_series)
As I said in the second paragraph, I do look somewhat askance at western converts to Islam. Atheism actually does make sense, so obviously I don’t have a problem with that. Of course, I’m assuming that I’m right about that, but logic gets weird if you start from the assumption that you’re wrong.
That said, I don’t see Asian converts to Christianity the same way I see American converts to Islam. I’m not exactly sure why. Probably because I perceive a conversion to Islam as a big “Fish you” to western culture, whereas I see conversion to Christianity as an embrace of western culture. I’m not a big fan of Christianity, but Christendom is pretty great. Especially the Protestant regions.
Some of us who take our Christianity seriously believe we’re following the example set by some guy who didn’t speak a Romance Language. Aramaic, I think that’s what he spoke. He did meet up with some Romans though. Does that count?
He probably had working knowledge of Koine.
I think there’s enough congruity between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism to make conversion from one to another understandable. And I really don’t see the “fish you” to western civilization in converting to Islam, not that there aren’t some people who so convert in order to say “fish you,” but that I don’t think it’s necessarily implied in such conversion.
Francis I of France taunted the Pope, saying he was going to convert to Islam. He got on wonderfully with Suleiman the Magnificent.
Aramaic to Koine is a small change.
It’s all greek to me.
“He’s got a package with a red bow tied around it! Run away!”
There’s also mocking of him for being a lousy pagan. Some reports are claiming he tried skipping out on his sect’s religiously mandated one-year period as a thrall/slave to another; there’s a reputed flogging for some manner of abusive treatment of a female thrall; and word of his two-faced pandering to the monotheistic majority while in office.
But that he’s pagan? That just makes him a little unconventional.
Christians sin all the time; their behavior periodically falls short of the aspirational goals for morality defined by their religion. So do Muslims and Jews and everyone else. So it should hardly be a surprise that a pagan might also fall short of the ideals of his religion.
Some reports are claiming he tried skipping out on his sect’s religiously mandated one-year period as a thrall/slave to another;
If that’s really a requirement (which I’m skeptical of) I stop seeing his particular sect as respectable.
It might not be what it sounds like it is, but whatever it is, it does seem to be a requirement sufficiently serious so as to at least threaten to cause schism.
I did some googling, and there seem to be two things going on, one silly, one not, but neither evil. This particular sect models itself after ancient Scandinavia, and that means that one of the social niches is “thrall”. But being one amounts to a novitiate: you don’t have any of the privileges of full membership yet, and you study what you’re told to and perform services for the group like cooking for or cleaning up after a get-together. Not that different from being a fraternity pledge, except that they don’t seem to go in for hazing.
So like a fraternity, but civilised?
And mixed with the SCA.
It doesn’t look any more or less bizarre to me, an atheist, for a modern-day politician to worship Thor and Odin than it looks to me for a modern-day politician to worship the 2,000-year-old zombie of an itinerant rabbi.
Or the simplistic platitudes of a senile ex-actor.
If we have a belief of any sort and it is not the consensus main stream. Then we shall be mocked for it.
We should not mock others if they are fascist, Nazis, vegetarians, communists, Christians, Muslims, gay, salesmen, liberals, paedophiles, ex convicts, etc etc
I think we have to decide how far we want to go down the road of political correctness and we have to also expect no more of others than we expect of ourselves.
I’d go pretty far down the road of political correctness,* but I reserve the right to mock nazis and communists and pedophiles, unless such mockery is deeply offensive to the victims. (I also reserve the right to mock salespersons, too, but I didn’t want to lump them in with the others.)
“we have to also expect no more of others than we expect of ourselves.”
I mostly agree and slightly disagree. I think we should be wary of demanding that others do what we won’t require ourselves to do. But I also think that what we expect of others might be a sign of what we ought to expect of ourselves, in a process of ratcheting up expectations for our own behavior. That doesn’t necessarily go against what you said, but it’s an elaboration I’d like to make on it.
*Please note, by political correctness, I mean what I should do and my belief about what other people should do. I don’t mean laws that establish speech codes or forbid certain kinds of speech. I bring this up because I have been accused in the past of supporting speech codes just because I sometimes said “political correctness has a point.
“simply pointing out that to an outsider, his religious beliefs look weird is still not socially acceptable.”
I reserve the right to point out that he was a hero to a lot of people who have no interest in religious tolerance — not just the Pam Geller crowd but Fox News, which made him a regular commentator even as it sowed fear of Muslims and railed against a “war on Christmas” because some shopkeepers prefer to ask staff to say “Happy holidays” in December.
But simply pointing out that to an outsider, his religious beliefs look weird is still not socially acceptable.
Ahh, but it is! And that’s why you wrote the essay.