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Saturday, November 27, 2010

Je n'accuse pas

About a third of the way through Ayaan Hirsi Ali's 2006 "emancipation proclamation for women and Islam," The Caged Virgin, I came upon her statement that she "denounces God." Earlier in the book she has said she is an atheist (which, by the way, in the context of her having formerly been a devout Muslim renders her subject to the death penalty). But denounces God? How are we to understand that?
    Perhaps she means, If God exists (which she has said she doesn't believe), then she would denounce him as evil (by virtue, for example—according to the Quran—of his having relegated women to the status of slaves of men?). If she doesn't mean to say it with some such qualification, then she seems to be contradicting herself.
    From her point of view (and from mine), the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers were superior morally to the God portrayed in the holy books of the Abrahamic religions. I think that's where her denouncement is probably coming from. It's a moral denouncement.
    I gather from reading Hirsi Ali's memoirs that she has directly experienced much, much more religious evil than I have (being forcibly circumcised, being subject to rote indoctrination in the Quran by a young teacher who refused to explain what the words meant but resorted to banging her head against a wall to force her to "learn," being given by her father in marriage to a man she disliked, being threatened with execution—in a handwritten note pinned with a knife to the chest of her murdered colleague...), but I haven't seen any reference in her writings to the food chain, which, to me, is a more fundamental evil for not requiring the complicity of human consciousness. After all, on my view, God had nothing to do with the penning of the Bible or the Quran; they're purely human (and essentially male) artifacts.

And yet, I am not ready to join Hirsi Ali in denouncing God if "he" exists. I think I may be more into accepting and suffering a world that simply is and only has a moral dimension because consciousness evolved from material chaos.

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