Some kind of editor

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My cell phone rang on the commute van about half-way to Chapel Hill this morning. It was loud, which reminded me of the van's policy of limiting cell phone usage so as not to bother other riders, which in turn reminded me how I'd complained of the driver's playing religious stations on the radio when I first started riding (I told her I'd signed up to commute, not to attend Sunday School).
    It was my wife. "The Chapel Hill Herald published a letter of yours this morning."
    "Yes, I know."

I'd looked at p. 2 immediately after collecting the paper from the driveway and was surprised to see my letter printed there, looking longer on the page than it had in the submission box. (In a comment on Monday—"'Daughters of thy uncles and aunts'"—I expressed doubt that the paper would print my potentially explosive missive.)
    Maybe I was even apprehensive that it would print it. I had come to feel unsure about my tactic of appropriating Hurley's logical space for the purpose of extending his criticism of Islam to Christianity. After all, my letter was suggesting that a Christian's belief in heavenly reward for assenting to the literal truth of a myth borrowed from pagan precursors to Christianity was no more credible than a Muslim's belief in heavenly reward for blowing himself up in order to kill a few enemies of Islam.
    But I continued to hope that my concluding "joke" about swimming trunks had lightened the tone, if not enough to defuse the bomb, at least enough to dampen its explosion in this nominally Christian society.

"Daughters of thy uncles and aunts"

The Holy Book

The writer whose letter to the editor provoked me on June 22 has responded to my request that he "possibly tell us a bit more about where he is coming from" when he complained about not making an "al-Qaida-linked" hit list.
    His reply was printed on p. 2 of the July 1 edition of The Chapel Hill Herald, under the title "Letter writer sets record straight":

Reader Morris Dean in a June 24 letter ("Hurley should give rest of the story" [the editor's title, not mine]) wonders whether my June 22 letter mocking Islamic terrorists ("Terrorists' hit list omission lamented") was motivated by some family military history [sic] event.
    No (though we do have various experiences and connections there).
    Instead, I like to think that taunts like mine might aid the national effort to separate the terrorists from the sea of Muslims in which they swim. It shouldn't be too difficult. Mohammed's OK of first-cousin marriages 14 centuries ago has ensured that we're not dealing with real high SAT scores here. I hope Mr. Dean continues to "criticize and occasionally ridicule Islamists" on his blog.

Uh, come again? Mr. Hurley seems to be saying that the Jihadists have descended through so many first cousins that they're less intelligent than Muslims who descended through fewer.
    First, though, it does seem that Muhammad did "OK" marriage to first cousins:

Allah says: “O Prophet! We have made lawful to thee the wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers; and those whom thy right hand possesses out of the captives of war whom Allah has assigned to thee; and daughters of thy paternal uncles and aunts, and daughters of thy maternal uncles and aunts, who migrated with thee; …”
    Allah has made marriage with first cousins lawful. There is no dispute about this in Islamic Law. Anyone who wishes to dispute with this is placing his own religion in serious danger. [http://en.islamtoday.net/node/1265]

    But getting back to what Mr. Hurley might be saying, does his apparent contention that terrorist Muslims will be less intelligent than other Muslims mean, for example, that if a Muslim's ancestors married enough first cousins, he'd be prone to believe things like, "If you blow up some infidels by detonating yourself, you'll go straight to Paradise"?
    And if his ancestors didn't marry quite so many, he might only believe things like, "If your daughter gets raped, you'd better have her stoned to death to preserve your family honor"?

But people marry their first cousins in other cultures, too. Doesn't Mr. Hurley's sort of eugenicist's approach imply that if a Christian's ancestors married enough first cousins, he'd be prone to believe things like, "Simply believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and you'll have eternal life"?
    And if his ancestors didn't marry quite so many, he might only believe things like, "The Bible is the literally revealed word of God"?

But what does that have to do with Mr. Hurley's taunting the terrorists in order to "aid the national effort to separate the terrorists from the sea of Muslims in which they swim"?
    Does he think that they're so much less intelligent than other Muslim swimmers that taunts will cause them to stop swimming and walk out of the sea so they can be arrested?
    Maybe someone will ask him.
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July 6. I decided to ask him myself. My letter was published this morning.

Moral indignation

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) realized that population growth would have to end at some point, as its exponential tendency ran up against the linear growth of the food supply. Other factors were involved as well, like the amount of waste produced (including not only pig excrement fouling our drinking water, but also green-house gases raising global temperature).
    It occurred to me this morning that moral indignation might be another factor. Growing numbers of riled-up people are butting up against one another, their butting-up facilitated by 24/7 news.
    Of course, I've been feeling some moral indignation myself, to judge by some recent posts here—on al Qaeda, for example, or on eating animals. Not to mention a few on religion.

But my immediate provocations might have been a couple of items in local papers this morning. The first was a letter to the editor from a man indignant that he didn't make an "al-Qaida-linked" hit list:

Why didn't I make that list?
    Have my many letters to the editor expressing my contempt for the Islamists gone unnoticed? Does it count for nothing that I led the applause on our United flight when the pilot announced the killing of bin Laden?

    And he even tells "aspiring Muslim martyrs" where to find him and what inscription to look for on the "crusader T-shirt" he often wears. "I'll be expecting some loser yelling 'alla-hu akbar' or whatever," he says.
    A hit list was mentioned only in the third of three reports I found:

1. The New York Times, "Al Qaeda Urges Attacks in West" (June 3);
2. Kitat Konenut's New York blog, "Al Qaeda Urges American Muslims to Buy Guns for Terror Attacks" (June 6); and
3. newsmax.com, "Al-Qaida Website's Hit List Targets US Leaders" (June 17).

A friend might have been alluding to such a hit list when he emailed me in response to an "amusing conjecture" of mine. He had written:

I'm afraid you'll be taken to a beating by persons who will misconstrue what you argue. You're walking on a mine field.

    I wondered, however, why I would need to be misconstrued.

The other provocation was the front-page photograph of three boyishly proud-looking male adults that illustrated the article, "Men snag possible world-record catfish." They're shown with a 143-pound blue catfish across their laps.
    The pride was front-page news, and the article revealed the important information that one of the men will "get to talk junk to my brother and dad all year long."
    But there was no mention that the bottom-feeding catfish will never get to feed again.
_______________
June 24. As a result of a comment on this article, I submitted a letter to The Chapel Hill News yesterday. It was published this morning; the third comment on this post provides the letter's text.
    July 3. Mr. Hurley's response was printed on July 1. And I submitted a follow-up question this morning; its text is provided in the first comment of yesterday's post, "'Daughters of thy uncles and aunts'."

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."
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See sequel: "A 'good' Muslim."

May his 70 virgins (or whatever)

...forever withhold sex from Osama bin Laden.

Standing in the rain arguing

The evolution-creation question is settled. Man evolved and was not created. To argue the question with a creationist would be like standing in a driving rain and letting him try to convince you that it wasn't raining. Or vice versa. No mileage there. Forget it.

Same thing as regards arguing with jehovahs, evangelical Christians, Islamists, or other fantasists whether heaven exists or some other superstition is true. Especially Muslims with dynamite strapped around their torsos.

Putting that out there for you is my gift to myself and to you for my birthday today. Happy my birthday to you too.

Later the same day

Shortly after publishing those paragraphs, a birthday card arrived from one of my sisters. She appealed to me to read the Billy Graham clips she'd enclosed. There are three of them, apparently from a Q&A column of Dr. Graham's titled "On Christianity."

Question 1:

DEAR REV. GRAHAM: Do you think Christ will come again and the world will end in 2009? I get very discouraged when I see the way the world is going—the economic situation, terrorism, crime, warfare, etc.—and I wonder how much longer God is going to let this continue.

Do you get even more discouraged when you realize that there is no heaven and your body isn't going to be restored to its young sexiness?

Question 2:

DEAR REV. GRAHAM: My friend (who doesn't believe in God or religion) tells me that if I really believe the Bible, then why don't I follow all the laws in the Old Testament? I do believe the Bible is God's Word, but am I doing something wrong by not following these laws?

No, dear, and neither would the ancient Israelites have been wrong to ignore them, except that the religious elders would have banished them from the community.

Question 3:

DEAR REV. GRAHAM: If God is real, then why are there so many religions in the world? They can't all be right, can they?

They sure can't all be right, now, can they? Lots of people (who still want to believe in heaven) think that it almost doesn't matter what you believe. In Charles M. Blow's December 27 op-ed piece in The New York Times ("Heaven for the Godless?"), he reports on the June publication of

the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life['s] controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life.
    This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: "I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." But the survey suggested that Americans just weren't buying that....
    And they didn't stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven—dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt—and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.

I hope that puts my sister's mind at ease.