Animating spirit, first cause

13 Years Ago This Week

By Moristotle

[Published originally on September 27, 2009, the day after a walk with Ralph Earle, and republished in fond reminiscence of our conversation.]

A walk in the gentle woods of Hillsborough, North Carolina, yesterday prompted me to revisit what it is about “God” that I don’t believe. Not the walk, actually, but the conversation with my good friend Ralph, with whom I walked and talked. Ralph said two things that gave me pause. The first was that he finds it impossible to deny that God exists. While he is as clear as I am that “the Christian God,” as he puts it, does not exist, he says that God as the animating spirit of the universe, its first cause, does necessarily exist.

11 Years Ago Yesterday: Animating spirit, first cause

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 27, 2009.]

A walk in the gentle woods of Hillsborough, North Carolina yesterday prompted me to revisit what it is about “God” that I don’t believe. Not the walk, actually, but the conversation with my good friend Ralph, with whom I walked and talked. Ralph said two things that gave me pause. The first was that he finds it impossible to deny that God exists. While he is as clear as I am that “the Christian God,” as he puts it, does not exist, he says that God as the animating spirit of the universe, its first cause, does necessarily exist.

Seven Years Ago Today: Saint Ayaan

By Moristotle

[Originally published on August 20, 2010, not a word different, same image as then.
    And I did read a “Travis McGee” in the days following, but it didn’t have the same zing that it had had for me when I read it twenty or thirty years earlier.]

To my admiring mind, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a contemporary heroine, a person who, were she a Catholic (and passed on to her reward), might very well be nominated for canonization.

Sunday Review: Wadjda

Saudi Arabian firsts

By Morris Dean

Wadjda (2012 [2013, US], in Arabic with English subtitles) is the first feature film made in Saudi Arabia, and its writer-director, Haifaa al-Mansour, is the first female filmmaker in Saudi Arabia. She had to go elsewhere for the education she wanted (in literature at the American University in Cairo, and in directing and film studies at the University of Sydney), and elsewhere to work with and learn from professional filmmakers.

Third Monday Musing: Mashrabiyah

Exclusion

By Eric Meub

1. I’m writing this in Mecca. Let me clarify: I am sitting at a conference table in a university whose grounds lie within the metropolitan limits of Mecca. I am not, however, within the precinct of the Holy Capital, the spiritual center of Islam and the most important city in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where entrance is forbidden to non-Muslims. On all sides of the university campus, I can see the infrastructure and venues for the yearly hajj, the act of devotion each Muslim must make once in a lifetime, when over a million pilgrims flood the region for a week of fastidious following in the footsteps of the Prophet (‘alayhi s-salaam – or “Peace be upon him” – should be uttered after any mention of his name).

First Saturday as the World Turns

The 2014 election

By Ed Rogers

[This is the first of Ed Rogers's new monthly column.]

It would seem that for all practical purposes the “Tea Party” has shot itself in the foot—both feet to be correct. However, many things need to happen before you will be able to call the beast dead.

Thor's Day: Which days are holy?

By Morris Dean

Which day or days do you think are holidays—in the literal sense of holy days?
    My own answer to the question has been settled for a number of years, and has served me well. I'll say more about that in the concluding paragraph.
    Two books nicely epitomize two contrasting ways of answering the question. The first is Yann Martel's 2001 novel, Life of Pi, which I reviewed on Monday. The other is a book mentioned recently in a local newspaper; I'll identify it later. For now, consider the following passage from Life of Pi:

Review: Life of Pi (the book)

The author of Life of Pi

An inconclusive
theological analogy

By Morris Dean

After reading Yann Martel's 2001 novel Life of Pi, I went back and read Jonathan Price's review of the movie (December 9). I haven't seen the movie yet, but it appears that the movie story and the book story have several significant divergences. It wouldn't do to dwell on them.
    The book is structured in three parts, plus a foreword by the author. The foreword appears to abet the fiction that follows, attempting to cast it as a true story that the author learned about from someone he met who told him if he wanted a compelling story to write, he should go find Piscine Molitor Patel. "Pi" could tell him "a story that will make you believe in God."

Thor's Day: The tie that binds

By Morris Dean

The English word "religion" derives through Old French from the Latin religiō, whose ultimate origins are obscure, but some modern scholars favor the derivation from ligare (bind, connect), probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e., re (again) + ligare, or "to reconnect." [Wikipedia]

Orange Terrorist alert justified

I finished reading John Updike's 2006 novel Terrorist this afternoon. After acknowledging five days ago Christopher Hitchens's Orange Alert that Terrorist might be "one of the worst pieces of writing from any grown-up source since the events he has so unwisely tried to draw upon," I was actually hoping that it would turn out to have been a false alarm. I hoped that John Updike, ill or not, could still have written an excellent and entertaining book. I mentally readied myself to conjecture how Mr. Hitchens could have got it wrong. He was deficient somehow when it came to literary criticism. And why was that? I prepared to adjust my uniformly high opinion of his judgment.

Terrorist (2006: John Updike) [Fatherless eighteen-year-old Ahmad—half Irish, half Egyptian—has been under the influence of imam Shaikh Rashid since he was eleven. Ahmad's Jewish guidance counselor in his inner-city New Jersey high school offers help, but Ahmad agrees to commit violence for his religious beliefs] 05-2012

My high opinion of Christopher Hitchens remains intact.
    Terrorist portrays aging Jewish guidance counselor Jack Levy convincingly, as I hoped I showed by my excerpts. But his young would-be terrorist Ahmad is a clichéd, one-dimensional acolyte, extensively indoctrinated in the Koran and continually reminding himself that he is supposed to abhor sex and hate America and Americans. He shows little sign of being a New Jersey teenager.
    New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani (in "John Updike's Terrorist Imagines a Homegrown Threat to Homeland Security," June 6, 2006) seems to absolve Updike for this character by suggesting that "the reader cannot help suspecting that Mr. Updike found the idea of such a person so incomprehensible that he at some point abandoned any earnest attempt to depict his inner life and settled instead for giving us a static, one-dimensional stereotype."
    That's tepid absolution, which I don't think Mr. Updike would have been happy to acknowledge. But it's possible. How does one comprehend a jihadist? Updike may have been determined to write something pertinent to 9/11 despite simply not being well-suited to undertake that particular subject. This can only be spectulation, and unprofitable.

But the plotting. Surely Updike could have done better than concoct a plot with more convenient coincidences than a 43-minute made-for-TV special? Levy, Ahmad's guidance counselor, happens to have an affair with  Ahmad's  mother. Levy's wife's sister happens to work for the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. The secretary happens to suspect that a terrorist plot is hatching in the town where Ahmad and his assistant's sister happen to live. The secretary's assistant happens to speak frequently with her sister, who happens to tell her about this Arab kid her husband the guidance counselor has been trying to persuade to go on to college rather than become a licensed truck driver....
     Isn't it about time for another commercial?

Now back to reading Physics for Future Presidents, which among other things "presents the science behind terrorism...."

Physics for Future Presidents: The Science behind the Headlines (2008: Richard A. Muller) [Physics professor explains basic physics to help government leaders and their constituents make better decisions about issues they face. Presents the science behind terrorism, energy, nuclear weapons and power, space and satellites, and global warming. Debates the future of alternative eco-friendly resources and new technologies.]

    Terror, terror, terror—terrorism everywhere. Not frequently orange anymore, but there in static white noise everyday of our lives.

Reading Updike

Because I'd just finished reading Shibumi (whose Nicholai Hel is the world's #1 professional assassin, targeting terrorists), I next turned to my digital recording of Terrorist, by John Updike (2006).
    With Updike, the subject hardly matters. Who was it who said that Updike never wrote an uninteresting sentence?

The orange of the Gulf sign at the all-night gas station two blocks away is the only emphatic touch of color in the pre-dawn vista. Here and there in the neighborhood a wan, low-voltage night light warms the window of a child's room or a stair landing. In the semi-darkness, under a polished dome of darkness weakened by the climbing rot of city glow, the fore-shortened angles of roof lines, shingles, and sidings recedes to infinity. [at approximately the 55-minute point of a 10-hour, 37-minute reading]

(How could my Yale roommate Jim Carney possibly have been sincere in comparing my own collegiate letter writing to Updike's?)

When he wrote Terrorist, Updike was about Krapp's age, and mine—a few years older. And high school guidance counselor Jack Levy, who witnessed the scene depicted above, was only a year ahead of me in high school:

Prize student at Central High, Class of '59, before it felt so much like a prison and you could still study and take pride in the praise of the teachers.

Yes, those were the days.
    Jack has been lying in bed reflecting on his life:

It was like tuning the violin he used to play in his boyhood. "Another Heifetz, another Isaac Stern." Is that what his parents had hoped for?
    He disappointed them, a segment of misery where his own and the world's coincided. His parents grieved. He had defiantly told them he was quitting lessons; the life in books and on the streets meant more to him. He was eleven, maybe twelve, to take such a stand, and never picked up the violin again, though sometimes, hearing on the car radio a snatch of Beethoven or a Mozart concerto or Dvořák's gypsy music that he had once practiced in a student arrangement, Jack is surprised to feel the fingering trying to live again in his left hand, twitching on the steering wheel like a dying fish. [at approximately the 44-minute point]

    But now,

He lies exposed, as to a sickening blast of radioactivity, to an awareness of his life as a needless blot, a botch, a prolonged blunder imposed upon the otherwise immaculate surface of this ungodly hour.
    In the world's dark forest he had missed the right path. But was there any right path, or was being alive in itself the mistake?
    In the stripped-down history that he used to purvey to students who had trouble believing that the world didn't begin with their births and the proliferation of computer games, even the greatest men came to nothing, to a grave, their visions unfulfilled—Charlemagne, Charles the Fifth, Napoleon, the unspeakable but considerably successful and still, at least in the Arab world, admired Adolf Hitler. History is a machine perpetually grinding mankind to dust.
    Jack Levy's guidance counseling replays in his head as a cacophony of miscommunication. He sees himself as a pathetic elderly figure on a shore, shouting out to a flotilla of the young as they slide into the fatal morass of the world, its dwindling resources, its disappearing freedoms, its merciless advertisements geared to a preposterous popular culture of eternal music and beer and impossibly fit and thin young females. [at approximately the 49-minute point]

    It's the world in which American-born Muslim teenager Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy will be drawn (implausibly? see below) into a terrorist plot against "infidels"....

I'm on Orange Alert, however. Christopher Hitchens sent Terrorist "windmilling across the room in a spasm of boredom and annoyance," he wrote in his review in The Atlantic (June 2006, "John Updike, Part One: No Way") [p. 101 of Arguably]. He judged it "one of the worst pieces of writing from any grown-up source since the events he has so unwisely tried to draw upon" and judged Updike as "someone who has been keeping up with the 'Inside Radical Islam' features in something like Newsweek. [p. 103]
     Hitchens did allow, though, in his "Farewell to a Much-Misunderstood Man" (Slate, February 2, 2009), that "Perhaps Updike [1932-2009] was too ill by then. And something seemed to have gone wrong with his confidence toward the end. His 2006 novel, Terrorist, was a failure of nerve...."
     [Follow-up]

Another word game from Hitch-22

Indeed, that index entry on  p. 435 of Christopher Hitchens's memoir ("word games, ... 264-266") was good for another web log. It's from the chapter titled "Salman."

At all events there came a time when someone arrived late at a dinner party, complaining of having been stuck at an airport with nothing to read but a Robert Ludlum-style novel. This didn't seem worth pursuing until the complaint was refined somewhat: "I mean it's not just that the prose is so bloody awful but that the titles are so sodding pretentious...The Bourne Inheritance, The Eiger Sanctioni; all this portentous piffle." Again, not a subject to set the table afire, until someone idly said they wondered what a Shakespeare play would be called it if were Ludlum who had the naming of it. At once Salman was engaged and began to smile. "All right, Salman: Hamlet by Ludlum!" At once—and I mean with as much preparation as I have given you—"The Elsinore Vacillation." Fluke? Not exactly. Challenged to do the same for Macbeth, he produced "The Dunsinane Reforestation" with hardly a flourish and barely a beat. After this it was plain sailing through "The Kerchief Implication," "The Rialto Sanction," and one about Caliban and Prospero that I once knew but now can never remember. [pp. 265-266]

    This chapter follows the one in which 9/11 figures prominently. And, in his chapter on Salman, there's much more to talk about in the way of theocratic religion. Hitchens, who I trust I've already demonstrated seems to have been on hand for everything politically major during his seniority, was dining with Edward Said one evening "in late 1987 or early 1988" when

a courier came bustling up from the Andrew Wylie Agency in Midtown. He bore a large box, which contained the manuscript of a forthcoming novel by Salmon Rushdie.... [p. 267]

    The note that came along with the manuscript asked Said for his view on what would be published as The Satanic Verses, for Rushdie thought that it might upset some of the faithful. My readers don't need to be reminded that the book's publication provoked Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwah sentencing Rushdie to death for blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad and his wives.
    My readers should be able to predict what Hitchens said to the Washington Post when they telephoned for his opinion about the fatwah.

I felt at once that there was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian member of another country, for the offence of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment of the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved... [ellipsis Hitchens's; p. 268]

I've been trying to think of a good example of the title word game. What The Satanic Verses would be called it if were Ann Coulter¹ who had the naming of it: "Blasphemy: Liberal Lies about the Religious Right"?
    Well, it's an example anyway.
_______________

1. Titles of her books:
   • High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton
   • Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right
   • Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
   • How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter
   • Godless: The Church of Liberalism
   • If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
   • Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America
   • Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America

A "good" Muslim

Ayman al-Zawahri was barely mentioned in yesterday's post, but the point of the quoted New York Times article was that he had just been named to succeed Osama bin Laden. What can we say about him?
    Scary dude. He is possibly driven by a fiercer hatred of the United States than was Bin Laden himself, or than Sayyid Qutb.
    Zawahri helped Bin Laden plan the 9/11 attacks. The Miami Herald reports today (in "Zawahri succeeds bin Laden as al Qaeda leader" that

His fanaticism and the depth of his hatred for the United States and Israel are likely to define al Qaeda's actions under Zawahri's tutelage. In a 2001 treatise that offered a glimpse of his violent thoughts, Zawahri set down al Qaeda's strategy: to inflict "as many casualties as possible" on the Americans.
    "Pursuing the Americans and Jews is not an impossible task," he wrote. "Killing them is not impossible, whether by a bullet, a knife stab, a bomb, or a strike with an iron bar."

"One dark tale from Mr. Zawahri’s past" was reported by Scott Shane in yesterday's New York Times (in his article, "Qaeda Selection of Its Chief Is Said to Reflect Its Flaws"). The tale is

recounted in Growing Up Bin Laden, a 2008 memoir by Bin Laden’s son Omar bin Laden. He describes an episode in Afghanistan in the 1990s when a friend—a teenage boy—was raped by several men in the camp where they lived. The men snapped photos of the abuse and circulated them as a joke.
    Mr. Zawahri was incensed by the photos, believing that the young man was guilty of homosexual activity, Omar bin Laden wrote. Mr. Zawahri had the teenager put on trial and condemned to death.
    “My friend was dragged into a room with Zawahri, who shot him in the head,” he wrote. The episode was a factor, he said, in his decision to break with his father and leave Afghanistan.

    As a good Muslim, Zawahri might have had his own daughter stoned to death for dishonoring him by being raped. It's hard to discern what honor he might have fancied he was avenging in the case of the teenage boy.
    Shane reported that Zawahri said last week, in a videotaped eulogy to Osama bin Laden, that "Today, praise God, America is not facing an individual, a group, or a faction. It is facing a nation than is in revolt, having risen from its lethargy to a renaissance of jihad."
    "Praise God"? The lunacy manifest here (as in the act of executing the victim of a rape) is all but incomprehensible to, say, Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), the author of Psychopathia Sexualis: With Special Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct.
    Quaint phrase, "contrary sexual instinct." It might apply to Zawahri (and Qutb—remember his terror of teenage American girls?); Krafft-Ebing wrote:

While up to this time contrary sexual instinct has had but an anthropological, clinical, and forensic interest for science, now, as a result of the latest investigations, there is some thought of therapy in this incurable condition, which so heavily burdens its victims, socially, morally, and mentally. [Emphasis mine]

It occurs to me, though, that equally lunatic actions described in the Bible and the Qur'an (many of them attributed to God in the former and Allah in the latter) can be dismissed as merely "primitive" or "of an earlier time," before our race's average morality and cultural intelligence had advanced to its current state of almost being half-civilized.
    In other words, Zawahri is (as bin Laden and Qutb were) men planted firmly in a past the race hopes to have left behind.
    But it's not likely to be fully left behind until books like the Qur'an are no longer read believingly.

Today's Islamist oxymoron

Al Qaeda, according to The New York Times today (in "Bin Laden’s No. 2, Zawahri, Takes Control of Al Qaeda," by David Jolly and J. David Goodman), has announced that it will “seek with the aid of God to call for the religion of truth and incite the ummah to prepare and fight.” (Ummah is an Arabic word, in this context meaning the global community of Muslims.)
    If you're waiting for me to reveal the oxymoron, you weren't paying attention. Go back three sentences: "...aid of God...religion of truth," as though God and religion had anything to do with truth.
    It isn't clear whether the statement is cheap rhetoric to hoodwink (i.e., incite) gullible people or its author himself actually believes the pairing.

Sayyid Qutb, Bin Laden’s favorite philosopher, who spent most of 1949 in Greeley, Colorado, apparently terrified of women and fantasizing about American girls, made a similarly flawed pairing. He saw the sexuality of western teenage women as evidence of a spiritual banality that demanded the destruction of western civilization.
    In his 1951 book, The America I Have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values, Qutb wrote that

The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it.

    As Sam Harris noted Tuesday in his blog, in the entry "On Spiritual Truths, "What a relief it must have been [to Qutb] to know [from studying his holy book] that the Creator of the universe intended these terrifying creatures to live as slaves to men."
_______________
See sequel: "A 'good' Muslim."

"Thank God" I was an ID Boy?

Some years ago I participated in a musical performance at an all-hands meeting where I worked. Many large companies have such meetings, to inform and indoctrinate employees and try to improve the mood of their ever-changing, ever-vulnerable morale. To the tune of John Denver's classic hit, "Thank God I'm a Country Boy," the Information Development department sang lyrics specially written for it by one of the ensemble's members.
    You can see their performance on YouTube. That's me, fourth from the right, wearing suspenders to hold up my pants:

Below are the lyrics, written by my colleague in Cary Information Development, Bruce Korn (as indicated on YouTube). I found them printed in the January 1992 issue of What's Up?, the department's newsletter (of which I was the proud editor).

Well I write all day and I try to make a living
Developers are here and they're looking kind of coy
My wife never sees me; still she's loving and she's giving
Thank God I'm an ID Boy!

[refrain] Well I got me a pen, and I got my Xedit
Got a great big draft, but no one's ever read it
The pressure tries to get me but I'm never gonna let it
Thank God I'm an ID Boy!

The books are never done cause the code is always changing
My editor is here and he's eating Almond Joys
He says don't stop--you must keep on rearranging
Thank God I'm an ID Boy!

[refrain]

I'm working real hard but I'm never getting finished
My manager is here and she's working on a ploy
She assigns more people but the work just won't diminish
Thank God I'm an ID Boy!

[refrain]

The pubs are finally done, though I really don't believe it
Some customers are here and are filling up with joy
The work starts again though it's hard to just conceive it
Thank God I'm an ID Boy!

[refrain]

To review a rendition by John Denver, to try to decide which you prefer:

An aside was prompted by the comment of a friend who watched our YouTube performance:
    She emailed me, "Guess you weren’t always an atheist...," seeming to imply that an atheist (one acting with intellectual integrity, anyway) would not participate in singing a song that includes the phrase, "Thank God."
    First, of course, if she's right, atheists would have to find an alternative to United States currency. I haven't checked all of the denominations lately, but I believe that at least one of them has "In God We Trust" engraved on it.
    Second, it isn't relevant that when "ID Boy" was performed, I hadn't yet summoned the courage to face up to the more than adequate evidence that God does not exist. (I finally did so in the months leading up to September 9, 2007.)
    Third and finally, of course, we can read or utter any phrase we can decipher or wrap our mouth around, since we're capable of distinguishing between art, science, philosophy, history, journalism, and politics, on the one hand, and personal beliefs about what it's all about on the other. Well, "anyone" perhaps but religious fanatics who commit real crimes like burning down buildings or beheading other human beings to protest a fantasy crime like a cartoonist's or a novelist's lampooning the Prophet Muhammad or a thinking person's subjecting religion to rational and moral scrutiny.

Pray more, prey less?

There was a break-in this week not far from where I live. The thieves took a TV and a gun and a few other things. Sentiments expressed over the burglary included sadness that some people prey on others and prayerfulness that the thieves will be caught and punished.

At our department luncheon on Monday, while waiting for our pasta to be brought by the single waiter serving our table of twenty-eight university staffers, someone wondered aloud at how much Legos had evolved. "So many more options for my grandchildren than I had."
    "I had Lincoln Logs," another luncheoner chimed in.
    I had to smile, imagining them and me playing with toys fifty, sixty years ago, and more. "I had clods," I said, barely able to suppress a laugh.
    "Clods?" the Lego guy asked.
    "Clods. Hard lumps of clayey earth." I could no longer suppress my laughter. I was remembering an incident when I was four or five. "My cousin DeWayne and his parents came over when I was taking a nap. I never knew they were there. But when I woke up and pulled out my box of clods from under the bed, a lot of them were broken or smashed. Loose dirt covered the bottom of the box. I was chagrined."
    "Is that what they mean by dirt poor?" the Lego guy said.
    "I guess," I said. "I said, 'DeWayne, you'll never play with my clods again!'"

Years later, I guess it was in 2004, before the national election, I got an email from DeWayne. It was sent to about twenty-five people, mostly friends of him and his wife, I learned later. His wife probably sent it, actually. The email reminded us to pray for President Bush and let God tell us whom to vote for.
    I resented this sanctimonious, wrong-headed admonition so much that I replied to say so, copying everyone on the distribution list, just so they'd all know that I wasn't a member of that crowd.
    Right, pray for Bush, the do-good predator, presuming to bring the God of Freedom to the Middle East, where the God of Complete and Utter Submission to the Will of Allah prevails.
    This time it was DeWayne, or rather his wife, who said she wasn't going to play with me anymore. She blocked email from me, and I haven't heard from DeWayne since.

Protecting and defending the rights of women

From the back matter of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's 2010 memoir, Nomad: From Islam to America:

The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation was set up in 2008¹ as a charitable organization to help protect and defend the rights of women in the West, especially in the United States, against militant² Islam and harmful tribal customs. Its aim is to investigate, inform, and influence against several types of crimes against women, including the denial of education for girls, genital mutilation, forced marriage, honor violence, and restrictions on girls' freedom of movement.
    The AHA Foundation seeks to raise awareness in America that some of these violent practices against women are increasingly carried out in the United States. The foundation also exists to provide girls and women in distress with information and assistance, by creating a database of people and institutions qualified to deal with cases of maltreatment and abuse. [p. 275]

_______________

1. The AHA Foundation website gives 2007 as the year of foundation.
2. The use of "militant" here might be an attempt by the AHA Foundation to avoid the appearance of indicting Islam generally, but the tenor of Ms. Hirsi Ali's writings is that Islam generally promulgates values detrimental to women and personal freedom, due primarily to Islam's teaching that the Quran rules in all matters and that "Allah's laws" (including laws based on the practice of the Prophet Muhammad, who she said, "measured by our western standards, [was] a pervert") override all man-made laws. In other words, Islam, her writings seem to assert, is essentially totalitarian and therefore inimical to democracy, which would seem to raise some provocative questions about "freedom of religion" in America when it comes to Islam.

With respect to reflective belief

The second verse of Genesis puts being "in the same boat" in a mythically dramatic context; we're all "Afloat on the face of the deep."
    But I like to distinguish between people who come to believe in God in order to feel better about suffering and injustice (or to lessen their anxiety about dying¹) and people who believe but don't think much about it, believing simply because they have been indoctrinated to do so (even possibly by rote, as in the case of Muslims as portrayed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali²).
    Most people who "believe" may do so from indoctrination. Remember, as Bertrand Russell pointed out in one of the essays in Why I Am Not a Christian, most people who are religious, are religious because they were taught to be so as children, and Muslims who as children could have been raised to be Christians instead would now be Christians rather than Muslims, and vice versa. (The few exceptions might be those who reflect. And some of those become atheists rather than switch religions.)

If I'm in the same boat as believers, I want it to be with believers who are aware of, and troubled by, suffering and injustice, not with people whose "belief" is essentially merely sentimental and unreflective. I can't say that I feel much compassion for the latter folks, or even much respect.
    And of course I condemn those among them who, in the face of reason and morality, take their "holy books" at their word and out gay people, murder physicians who perform abortions, say "bring it on" to Armageddon, behead unbelievers, stone to death women branded immoral for having been raped, murder daughters for "dishonoring" their families, beat "disobedient" wives, rape sexually unwilling ones³, go into marketplaces with a bomb strapped about their chest, fly airplanes into buildings, etc.
_______________

1. I'm thinking of Tillich's characterization of existential anxiety as a person's awareness of his possible non-being.
2. From Nomad, p. 20:

   Sahra [her half-sister who has lived in England for years but still wears "the jilbab, a long black robe that covers your hair and all your body past your ankles and wrists, but not your face"] may choose to enroll Sagal in a Muslim school, where she will be isolated from the values that underlie success in Britain. Most of her fellow students will come from homes where English is a second language. Some of her teachers will have been selected more for their piety than their ability as educators, others for their willingness to cooperate with the norms of the Muslim school. Some teachers will have applied out of a strong sense of idealism; others will have been motivated by a combination of some or all of these factors. Education will be by rote learning and submission, not inquiry and an open mind. [emphasis mine]

3. All of these Islamic crimes against women are documented in Hirsi Ali's 2006 book, The Caged Virgin.

Thankful that not yet

A main thing I'm thankful for today is that there hasn't (yet) been another successful act of Islamic terrorism on American soil. Unfortunately, we have to qualify it with that "yet," for, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes in her latest book, Nomad: From Islam to America, A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations:

The uncritical Muslim attitude toward the Quran urgently needs to change, for it is a direct threat to world peace. Today 1.57 billion people identify themselves as Muslims. Although they certainly have 1.57 billion different minds, they share a dominant cultural trend: the Muslim mind today seems to be in the grip of jihad. A nebula of movements with al Qaeda-like approaches to Islamic precepts has enmeshed itself in small and large ways into many parts of Muslim community life, including in the West. They spread a creed of violence, mobilizing people on the basis that their identity, which rests in Islam, is under attack. [p. 205]

While I grant that the West has provoked the Islamic world in a number a ways, including support for the creation of Israel ("seen in the Muslim world as theft and arrogance," according to my friend Ken—himself culturally a Jew), and also grant that, "when they are ready to discuss their grievances at a political forum, we need to listen and be fair" (as Ken recommends), we must not overlook the menace of the jihadist worldview itself, of which Hirsi Ali paints a much more detailed, starker picture in her 2006 book, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam.

The Portable Atheist concludes

The 47^th "essential reading for the nonbeliever" included in Christopher Hitchens's Portable Atheist is Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "specifically written essay on her decision to say farewell to all gods." And the following paragraphs are its (and the whole book's) concluding ones:

Now I told myself that we, as human individuals, are our own guides to good and evil. We must think for ourselves; we are responsible for our own morality. I arrived at the conclusion that I couldn't be honest with others unless I was honest with myself. I wanted to comply with the goals of religion—which are to be a better and more generous person—without suppressing my will and forcing it to obey an intricate and inhumanly detailed web of rules. I had lied many times in my life, but now, I told myself, that was over: I had had enough of lying.
    After I wrote my memoir, Infidel (published in the United States in 2007), I did a book tour in the United States. I found that interviewers from the Heartland often asked if I had considered adopting the message of Jesus Christ. The idea seems to be that I should shop for a better, more humane religion than Islam, rather than taking refuge in unbelief. A religion of talking serpents and heavenly gardens? I usually respond that I suffer from hayfever. The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim version, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my grandmother's angels and djins.
    The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more. [pp. 479-480]

The point, though, is that, however much we might want more, we are not going to get it. An individual's project in facing la condition humain is as it has always been: Deal with it.
    I started to say that to deny the "nothing more" aspect of it (as religious indoctrination routinely programs children to do) is not to deal with it, but to avoid it. While in a purely semantic sense that is so, people "deal with" all sorts of things by simply avoiding them. If we aren't equipped to face up to something (and it takes a lot to be able to face up to the fact that we and all of our friends and relatives are going to die), what are we going to do? Many people party as much as possible—the "eat, drink, and be merry" approach...And others take shelter in the comforting myths of religion.
    Critical questioners like Ayaan Hirsi Ali find that they can't square that avoidance with the dicates of conscience and mental health.