13 Years Ago Today: All in or All out

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 9, 2007.]

I have talked approvingly of what I understood to be Søren Kierkegaard’s view, on the question of belief in God, that it was nobler (as well as more accurate) to hang with one hand from one ledge of the narrow chasm of religious belief and with the other hand from the opposite ledge than to transfer either hand to join the other on the same ledge. Hanging precariously from both ledges symbolized doubt. Kierkegaard thought doubt nobler because it consigned the doubter to the perpetual angst of his uncertainty whether to believe or not to believe, since, as a matter of accuracy, the person could not be objectively sure which belief was right.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Saint Ayaan

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.
    In hushed silence this afternoon, I finished reading her 2007 memoir, Infidel. Reading it was a gut-wrenching experience. On the basis of reading only my several excerpts from the book, an old friend allowed that "I'm not sure my stomach is strong enough to read further." That's modest for a man who spends a few weeks most years sharing the wilds of North America, unarmed, with grizzly bears and other creatures that might dispute their relative position on the food chain.
    Nevertheless, I offer the concluding paragraphs of this moving book:

In March 2005, Time magazine informed me that I would be named one of its one hundred "most influential people in the world today." I went straight out to buy a copy of the magazine, of course, but I was weeks early; that issue wouldn't come out until mid-April. So the magazine I bought wasn't about me, it was about poverty in Africa. The woman on the cover was young and thin, with three small children. She was wrapped in the same kind of cloth my grandmother used to wear, and the look in her eyes was hopeless.
    It threw me back to Somalia, to Kenya, to poverty and disease and fear. I thought about the woman in that photograph, and about the millions of women who must live as she does. Time had just named me to their category, "Leaders and Revolutionaries." What do you do with a responsibility like that?
    ...
    Sister Aziza used to warn us of the decadence of the West: the corrupt, licentious, perverted, idolatrous, money-grubbing, soulless countries of Europe. But to me, there is far worse moral corruption in Islamic countries. In those societies, cruelty is implacable and inequality is the law of the land. Dissidents are tortured. Women are policed both by the state and by their families to whom the state gives the power to rule their lives.
    In the past fifty years the Muslim world has been catapulted into modernity. From my grandmother to me is a journey of just two generations, but the reality of that voyage is millennial. Even today you can take a truck across the border into Somalia and find you have gone back thousands of years in time.
    People adapt. People who never sat on chairs before can learn to drive cars and operate complex machinery; they master these skills very quickly. Similarly, Muslims don't have to take six hundred years to go through a reformation in the way they think about equality and individual rights.
    When I approached Theo [the Dutch film-maker who was murdered for his involvement in the production of the short film exposing the treatment of Muslim women] to help me make Submission, I had three messages to get across. First, men, and even women, may look up and speak to Allah: it is possible for believers to have a dialogue with God and look closely at Him. Second, the rigid interpretation of the Quran in Islam today causes intolerable misery for women. Through globalization, more and more people who hold these ideas have traveled to Europe with the women they own and brutalize, and it is no longer possible for Europeans and other Westerners to pretend that severe violations of human rights occur only far away. The third message is the film's final phrase: "I may no longer submit." It is possible to free oneself—to adapt one's faith, to examine it critically, and to think about the degree to which that faith is itself at the root of oppression.
    I am told that Submission is too aggressive a film. Its criticism of Islam is apparently too painful for Muslims to bear. Tell me, how much more painful is it to be these women, trapped in that cage? [pp. 349-350]

And I, not nearly so strong as this valiant young woman (about my daughter's age), feel that I need to read something light (maybe a John D. MacDonald "Travis McGee") for a respite before I read her sequel, this year's Nomad, which we are warned by one reviewer might read less "as a coming-to-America emotional journey" than "as an anti-Islamic screed."
    I assume the reviewer means "screed" is the sense of a diatribe, "a bitter, sharply abusive denunciation, attack, or criticism." Well, Saint Ayaan seems to have had abundant experience to justify an attack on Islam, however bitter, sharp, and abusive a critique it might be.

Cultural quandary

Yesterday a former Secret Service agent of my acquaintance recounted a conversation he had with some aged Japanese at a United Nations event that would be attended by the Emperor of Japan. The aged Japanese had grown up during a time when it was expressly forbidden to look at the Emperor. If the Emperor's train was passing you must kneel and keep your head down. If you raised it to get a glimpse, you could be beaten.
    "These men were having some difficulty putting their minds around the fact that they would soon be shaking their new Emperor's hand."

Reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali is opening my own eyes to the difficulty that people from authoritarian cultures can have seeing beyond those cultures. Ms. Ali has fled to Holland to evade an arranged marriage. In Chapter 11 of Infidel ("A Trial by the Elders"), she recounts a conversation with a couple of Dutch friends:

Ellen and I started talking about love, courtship, and virginity. To me, as a Somali, being a virgin meant being excised, physically sewn shut. I had already figured out that Dutch people didn't do that [!], so I asked, "How will your husband find out whether you're a virgin or not? Isn't there a test?"
    Ellen replied, "Of course not. He'll know I'm a virgin because I say I am." My question seemed weird to her, so she asked, "You have a test?" I told her: we are cut, and sewn shut, so the skin is closed, and when a man penetrates you there is blood. There can be no pretending.
    Ellen and Hanneke were disgusted, appalled. They asked, "And this happened to you?" Yasmin and I both said yes, and Yasmin, who was a snob, added, "If you're not cut, you're not pure, are you?" Very innocently, with her big blue eyes wide, Ellen asked, "Pure from what?"
    Pure from what. Pure from what, exactly? I thought about it for a long time, and realized I had no answer. It wasn't completely because of Islam that we were cut: not all Muslim women are excised. But in Somalia and the other Muslim countries, it was clear that the Islamic culture of virginity encouraged it. I knew of no fatwa denouncing female genital mutilation; on the contrary, suppressing the sexuality of women was a big theme with imams. Boqol Sawm and the other ma'alims [Qur'an teachers] had always preached endlessly about how women should become aware of their sexual powers; they must cover themselves and stay indoors. They went into minute detail about this, yet somehow they never got around to saying that it is wrong to cut girls and sew them up.
    What were we being kept pure from? Somebody owned us. What was between my legs was not mine to give. I was branded.
    I found I had no answer for Ellen. I just gaped at her and said, "It's our tradition." And because Ellen truly was a believer [a Christian], she said, "But you believe God created you, don't you?" I said yes, of course. Ellen said, "So the way God made us is the way God wants us to be. Why shouldn't we stay like that? Why does your culture feel we should improve on God's work? Isn't that blasphemy?" I stared at her. There really seemed to be something to what Ellen was saying.
    Ellen said Dutch women were never circumcised, and neither were Dutch men. Yasmin curled up her face in disgust at that. The minute we left, Yasmin started rubbing her skin; when she got home she washed for hours. "I sat in their house and ate off their plates, and they are not purified!" Yasmin said. "She is filthy. This whole community is filthy."
    I thought about it. Ellen wasn't filthy, and neither was Holland. In fact, it was a lot cleaner than Somalia or anywhere else I had lived. I couldn't understand how Yasmin could perceive Holland as evil, even though all around us were Dutch people treating us with kindness and hospitality. I was beginning to see that the Dutch value system was more consistent, more honest, and gave people more happiness than the one with which we had been brought up. Unfortunately, many of these Dutch ideas seemed not to be congruent with Islam.
    I replied, "Yasmin, you know what? You'd better get used to it. Because your teacher in school is not circumcised, the person cooking your lunch is not circumcised. If you want to remain completely pure here you will have to lock yourself away and never have any contact with a white person."
    But Yasmin said, "There is a difference, and that is why the Quran tells us never to make unbelievers our friends." [pp. 216-217]

The retired Secret Service agent and I wondered together whether America's own secular, democratic culture makes it difficult for Americans not to be foolishly optimistic that we can walk into places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and do anything constructive, even in the short run. He opined that, five years from now, it would be about the same in Afghanistan as it is today.
    Tragic that a single day more should go by on which young American service people are sacrificed in Afghanistan (or in any other tribal, patriarchal society) to our own cultural assumption that those societies can be successfully wooed to our wondrous Western ways, even if we don't collaterally kill or mindfully murder their people.

Jawahir's wedding night

Aayaan Hirsi Ali had been circumcised at age about five. (See the first excerpt from her 2007 book, Infidel.)
    When she was eighteen (and living in Kenya in exile from her native Somalia), she had her

first contact with Somali girls from Somalia. One of these girls was Jawahir, who was quick, pretty, rather excitable. She was about twenty-five and had come to Nairobi to marry one of Farah Gouré's truck drivers. She was waiting at Farah Gouré's place for her husband-to-be to return to Nairobi from a five-month trip through southern Africa. Ali was a dependable employee, and Fadumo [Farah Gouré's wife] needed Jawahir to feel happy in Nairobi; if Jawahir were miserable she might persuade Ali to return to Somalia with her. So Fadumo asked me to show Jawahir around town and keep her company.
    ...Jawahir didn't read books—she was illiterate—but she was really amusing.
    A whole group of us met for long, giggly girls' conversations in the afternoons, while the older people napped with the children. The talk centered on Jawahir's impending marriage and the various prospects for other people's marriages. And of course we talked about circumcision. All these girls knew they would be married soon; it was inevitable that we talk about our excisions. This was what we had been sewn up for. [emphasis mine]
    The talk was mostly boasting. All the girls said how tightly closed they were; this made them even more pure, doubly virginal. Jawahir was particularly proud of her circumcision. She used to say, "See the palm of your hand? I am like that. Flat. Closed."
    One afternoon, gossiping about another girl, Jawahir said, "If you're walking past the toilet when she's in there, you can hear that she isn't a virgin. She doesn't drip. She pees loudly, like a man."
    We discussed our periods, too, the essence of what made us filthy and unworthy of prayer. When we were menstruating, we weren't allowed even to pray or to touch the Quran. All the girls felt guilty for bleeding every month. It was proof that we were less worthy than men.
    We never actually talked about sex itself, the act that would take place on the marriage night, the reason why we had been sewn.
    ...On other afternoons Jawahir used to ask me to read to her out loud from the books I carried everywhere...all of them had sex scenes. I would read them to her, and she would sniff and say, "It's not like that for Muslims. We are pure."
   
Jawahir's wedding took place at Farah Gouré's house....
    ...For a week after the wedding Ma wouldn't let me go to see Jawahir: she said it wouldn't be proper. So it wasn't until the next weekend that I visited her. Jawahir sat on the sofa, gingerly shifting her weight from one side of her bottom to the other. Finally I asked her what it had been like, having sex.
    She evaded the question. I was holding one of Halwa's Harlequin paperbacks and she grabbed it and asked, "What is this filthy book you're reading?" I said, "Come on, you know all about it now, tell me what it's like." Jawahir said, "Not until you read this book to me."
    It was a mild enough book, about a man, a woman, a doomed romance, one or two sexy bits. But when the man and woman kissed, he put his hand on the woman's breast, and he then put his mouth to her nipple. Jawahir was horrified. "These Christians are filthy!" she squeaked. "This is forbidden! For Muslims it's not like that at all!"
    Now Jawahir really had to tell me what sex was like. She said it was awful. After the wedding ceremony, they went into the bedroom of the flat that Ali had rented for them. Ali turned off the lights. Jawahir lay down on the bed, fully dressed. He groped under her dress, opened her legs, took off her underpants, and tried to push his penis inside her. He didn't cut her with a knife, just with his penis. It took a long time, and hurt. This resembled the stories that Sahra had told me. [Sahra had had to be taken to a hospital to be prepared for her own husband, who had been unable to rend her scar tissue.]
    Every night it was almost as painful, and always the same: Ali would push inside, move up and down inside her, and then ejaculate. That was it. Then he would stand up and take a shower to purify himself; she would get up and shower, also to purify herself, and apply Dettol to the parts that were bleeding. That was Jawahir's sex life.
    ...
    I already knew what Sister Aziza [Ayaan's Qur'an teacher] would say about sex and marriage. She counseled many young married couples. Women often told her how horrible it was for them to have sex. Sister Aziza used to respond that they were complaining only because they had read licentious, un-Islamic descriptions of sexual experiences in Western books. We Muslim women were not to copy the behavior of unbelievers. We shouldn't dress like them, or make love like them, or behave like them in any way. We should not read their books, for they would lead us off the straight, true path of Allah.
    A woman couldn't break a marriage because it was awful or boring: that was utterly forbidden, and the way of Satan. "If your husband hurts you," Sister Aziza would tell these women, "you must tell him that, and ask him to do it differently. If you cooperate it will always be less painful. And if he's not hurting you, then count yourself among the lucky ones." [pp. 111-113]

Sam Harris's critique of Islam pales

Beside Ayaan Hirsi Ali's view of Islam from the inside (I'm reading her 2007 memoir, Infidel), Sam Harris's 2004 attack on Islam, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, was a mild affair. His frontal attack was scholarly, researched; Ayaan Hirsi Ali doesn't so much attack Islam as open the closet door to show it plainly in its primitive ignorance and superstitious brutality. Excerpts from Infidel:

• The man, who was probably an itinerant traditional circumciser from the blacksmith clan, picked up a pair of scissors. With the other hand, he caught hold of the place between my legs and started tweaking it, like Grandma milking a goat. "There it is, the kintir," one of the women said. Then the scissors went down between my legs and the man cut off my inner labia and clitoris. I heard it, like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs, indescribable, and I howled. Then came the sewing: the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia, my loud and anguished protests, Grandma's words of comfort and encouragement. "It's just this once in your life, Ayaan. Be brave, it's almost finished." When the sewing was finished, he cut the thread off with his teeth.
• This was Saudi Arabia, where Islam originated, governed strictly according to the scriptures and example of the Prophet Muhammad. And by law, all women in Saudi Arabia must be in the care of a man. My mother argued loudly with the Saudi immigration official, but he merely repeated in an ever louder voice that she could not leave the airport without a man in charge.
• We had already learned part of the Quran by heart in Mogadishu, although of course we had never understood more than a word or two of it, because it was in Arabic. But the teacher in Mecca said we recited it disrespectfully: we raced it, to show off. So now we had to learn it all by heart again, but this time with reverent pauses. We still didn't understand more than the bare gist of it. Apparently, understanding wasn't the point.
• In Saudi Arabia, everything bad was the fault of the Jews. When the air conditioner broke or suddenly the tap stopped running, the Saudi women next door used to say the Jews did it. The children next door were taught to pray for the health of their parents and the destruction of the Jews. Later, when we went to school, our teachers lamented at length all the evil things Jews had done and planned to do against Muslims. When they were gossiping, the women next door used to say, "She's ugly, she's disobedient, she's a whore—she's sleeping with a Jew." Jews were like djinns, I decided. I had never met a Jew. (Neither had these Saudis.)

I found these excerpts on the web and quote them for convenience. I've read passages far more revealing (especially of Arab Muslims, and Saudi Arabians in particular). (Look at a map to see how close her native Somalia is to Saudia Arabia.)

The opening of a review of Infidel:

Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1969 [the same year as my daughter], Ayaan Hirsi Ali gained international recognition as the controversial member of Dutch Parliament who wrote a short film attacking Islam, called Submission Part 1 (can be seen on YouTube).

In the film, images of bare women’s limbs are scrawled with verses of the Qu'ran which—Ali has said—denigrate and subordinate women. As a result of the film, its director, Theo van Gogh was killed in cold blood on the streets of Amsterdam, a note jabbed into his chest threatening Ms. Ali (and the United States to boot) with a fate like van Gogh’s. Van Gogh’s last words were, “Can’t we talk about this?” After the incident, Ms. Ali spent several months virtually kidnapped by her security team.

Scroll back fifty-seven years....

Project Reason recently sponsored a video contest to promote critical thinking. The winning entry was "The Values We All Stand For."
    Among other things, it asks,

What if, when our Pledge of Allegiance was revised in 1953, "one nation" had become, not "one nation, under God," but "one straight nation" or "one white nation"?

But "Just a Book," the third-place winner, with its theatrical emphasis, is my personal favorite. I suspect that it placed third partly because of the theatricality, which might have struck the voters as somewhat antithetical to critical thinking.
    Pause if necessary to check out the titles of the books people stand up to read to drown out the Bible zealot.

Synchronicity?

Yesterday I published an entry on intellectual property. This morning I read yesterday's newspaper and discovered that Ian McEwan has published a new novel, Solar, a portion of which I had read (and commented on back in December). A couple of sentences from Hephzibah Anderson's review (on Bloomberg News):

The story pivots on a freak accident that catapults a tubby physicist, Michael Beard, to the forefront of the race to find a sustainable energy source. Pursuing this worthy goal in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change, the balding British boffin will clock thousands of miles and resort to intellectual property theft and worse. [my emphasis]

Isn't this just a coincidence? Or is it a Jungian synchronicity? A synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner.
    Or some emblem of divinity saying something like "God is watching over you"? In my manic excitement during Youie summer, I took all of the innumerable coincidences I was noticing as just such emblems. (There didn't seem to be anything of any more precise significance that they could possibly mean.) Coincidences have provided many a man and woman an assurance that life is not a matter simply of chance.

How could it be a coincidence [they ask themselves] that I could publish "Intellectual property" the very day that the personally most interesting book review in the local newspaper should use that phrase, and not just casually but by way of characterizing the pivot of the book! This cries out with significance!

Uh, yeah, but what significance? Remember that Carl Jung espoused the procedures of I Ching [The Book of Changes], a "system of divination" in which the adept meditates on potential meanings of chance juxtapositions.

Any juxtaposition can be used creatively to find hidden significance. We can, for example, open a book (any book, a dictionary, say, though a Christian might favor the Bible or a Muslim the Qur'an) and place our finger down at random on a verse. If we then read the verse (or the definition) with the expectation that something of personal import will be suggested, then it is highly probable that something will indeed come to mind.
    Note, though, that this works for almost any occasion. But we don't do it on just any occasion: it takes something like a striking coincidence to push us in that direction.
    Nevertheless, what might I make of this "intellectual property" coincidence? Do I have a valuable intellectual property in Moristotle that I am giving away free on Blogspot? Or should I focus on Michael Beard's theft, mentioned in the book review? Beware, Moristotle, quit including overlong quotations in your blog from the intellectual property of others!

Some people are even funnier

In my post, "People are funny" (November 23), I described two features of Islam, fundamentalist Christianity, and Fox News [sic] devotion that makes their respective people more pliable than others.
    Thomas L. Friedman, in today's piece, "America vs. The Narrative," in The New York Times, discusses some further problems with what he calls "The Narrative" of Muslims (Arab Muslims in particular):

Many Arab Muslims know that what ails their societies is more than the West, and that The Narrative is just an escape from looking honestly at themselves. But none of their leaders dare or care [sic] to open that discussion. In his Cairo speech last June, President Obama effectively built a connection with the Muslim mainstream. Maybe he could spark the debate by asking that same audience this question:

Whenever something like Fort Hood happens you say, "This is not Islam." I believe that. But you keep telling us what Islam isn't. You need to tell us what it is and show us how its positive interpretations are being promoted in your schools and mosques. If this is not Islam, then why is it that a million Muslims will pour into the streets to protest Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, but not one will take to the streets to protest Muslim suicide bombers who blow up other Muslims, real people, created in the image of God? You need to explain that to us—and to yourselves.

I am grateful that Mr. Friedman mentions the Danish cartoons in the statement he offers President Obama. But a more pointed contrast to a million Muslims protesting the cartoons would be some Muslims protesting the behavior the cartoons caricatured.
    Oh, right, Friedman refers to one of those behaviors.

People are funny

In a conversation at work this morning, someone uttered the truism that "People are funny," then added:

They're even funnier than we are!

We all laughed, I appreciated the reminder that we, too, are "funny."
    In various ways and to one degree or another, we, too, are "pliable"; my wife, for example, can readily twist me around her proverbial little finger. So what about Muslims, whom I referred to on Saturday? Why single them out for their allegedly greater pliability?
    The self-questioning is prompted by a friend whose intellectual acuity I admire (and ignore to my loss of gain). He commented on Saturday's post that "The...relative pliability of Muslims [is something] we could discuss further, but probably without benefit," by which I took him to mean that I might be merely stating my prejudice and have no data (especially scientific) to prove my statement.
    I admit that he's right. If there are any data to support the contention, I haven't seen them. My observation derived entirely from news and articles and books about the world scene over the past few years, especially after September 11, 2001.
    Note that I added two other groups to keep the Muslims company. Even though my friend ignored the fundamentalist Christians and the devotees of Fox News [sic], I'd like to give a couple of reasons for singling these three groups out, not, of course, that every individual in them is equally pliable. These reasons aren't data in any numerical sense, but maybe they can raise the level of discussion a little higher than just my personal prejudice.
    All three groups are heavily invested in their "scriptures." We know what those are for the Muslims and the Christians. For the Fox devotees it's the words that are spewed out of the mouths of people like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. For their devoted followers, whatever these rousers say is "fair and balanced" in the same way that the Qu'ran and the Bible are the "word of God"—because they say they are.
    The status of these scriptures with the respective group members makes the members particularly vulnerable to being manipulated. The Muslim activists had but to quote the pertinent passages from the Qur'an about what to do to blasphemers to get the masses to sharpen their beheading tools and take to the street looking for infidels¹.
    The preacher cites Leviticus 18:22² in urging his parishioners to oppose gays and gay marriage (or even civil union). They show up at the polls like a phalanx to vote that one issue, everything else be damned.
    Sean and Glenn say to get out to the town meetings and protest those wicked socialist ideas about health care and, voilà, out come the tea-baggers, some of them even wearing handguns.
    Another armament for manipulating members of these groups is the subtle, even subliminal power of Islam, literal-Bible Christianity, and fair-and-balanced Fox propaganda to induce trance states. I believe that the aura these cast over adherents derives from their focused exclusivity.
    Followers of Islam tend to over-invest in its teachings, which doesn't surprise us, given that its text demands adherents' complete subservience; nothing else matters.
    Similarly for Bible-believing Christians. Christ taught followers to forsake the world entirely; gain the world, lose your soul.
    People who get all of their "news" from Fox tend to discount everything else. To be that oblivious to objective information, you have to be in a hypnotic state.
    Engage the appropriate lever and you have near-complete control over the entranced Muslim, fundamentalist Christian, or Fox devotee.

My acute friend also challenged my statement that "the cartoons did no such thing as 'set off violent protests'; they'd have gone unnoticed but for some Muslim activists' picking them up and rubbing then in the faces of their impressionable brethren."
    He wrote:

My recollection is that the cartoons did indeed set off violent protests.

    I've spent some time googling to try to find the article that I read (or think that I read) a year or two ago that described events after the original publication of the Danish cartoons, how the "activist Muslims" I referred to had even added a couple of additional cartoons to the mix before proceeding to rouse the rabble. Alas, I so far haven't found such an article. Which of course makes me feel a bit uneasy. So, if you can find it, please do let me know.

My friend also questioned whether the story about Muslim nations seeking a blasphemy ban "has any legs":

At this point, I'm more interested in the reporting than the story itself. The reporting seems to have originated with the Associated Press. Few other news sources have picked it up. It's not on the NY Times site, the CBS site, or the CNN site. I'm wondering if interest in the ban is only in Algeria and Pakistan, thereby minimally supporting the claim that Muslim nations (plural) are behind it. And within those nations, are we talking about government leaders or leaders of large groups? Best to wait and see if this story has any legs.

See what I mean by my friend's acuity? It didn't occur to me to see who else might be reporting "the ban." But I subsequently googled on it and indeed every one of the six or eight sites I found had either picked up the Associated Press piece wholesale or worked excerpts verbatim into their own report. Even The New York Times just ran the AP piece as-is (on November 19).
    Indeed, the story doesn't seem to have any legs yet. It may never have any. The AP reporter (Frank Jordans) may have been doing about the same thing I was, using Pakistan and Algeria's latest anti-blasphemy action as yet another occasion of many to show Muslims in a bad light. I'm now wondering what other sorts of things he has written about Muslims or Islam. Just the way my friend might.
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1. Sura 10—Yunus (MAKKA): Verse 70

   A little enjoyment in this world! and then to Us will be their return. Then shall We make them taste the severest Penalty for their blasphemies.

   Sura 9—Al-Tawba (MADINA): Verse 74

   They swear by Allah that they said nothing (evil), but indeed they uttered blasphemy...Allah will punish them with a grievous penalty in this life and in the Hereafter: they shall have none on earth to protect or help them.

2. "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination."

Worshipping terrorist

According to an Associated Press release reported in a local newspaper this morning, "Official: Investigators Know Identities of at Least Three,"¹ by Tom Hays and Devlin Barrett, one of the terror suspects, arrested in connection with a bombing plot that seems to have targeted mass transit in the New York area, is "an Afghan immigrant with ties to Pakistan" who "had once worshipped" at a mosque in Queens.
    Now, prompted by Steven Weinberg's observation that "with or without religion good people will behave well and bad people will do evil things, but for good people to do evil things, that takes religion," I have two questions:

Is this a good man who was [allegedly] involved in an evil deed because of the influence of the Muslim religion?

Or is he a bad man who would have been involved even if he hadn't perhaps read in the Qur'an:

God's curse be upon the infidels. [2:89]
They have incurred God's most inexorable wrath. An ignominious punishment awaits [them]. [2:90]
God is the enemy of the unbelievers. [2:98]
Theirs shall be a woeful punishment. [2:175]
Slay them wherever you find them. [2:190]
Let the believers not make friends with infidels in preference to the faithful. [3:28]
Believers, do not make friends with any but your own people. [3:118]²

Actually, a third question comes to mind:

Was it merely a coincidence that the 9/11 hijackers seem to have been Muslims or come from an Islamic culture (that of Saudi Arabia)?

Similarly,

Were they good men involved in those evil deeds because of the pernicious influence of their religion?

Or were they bad men who would have been involved even if they hadn't perhaps studied their "holy book"?

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1. Published in The Herald-Sun, Durham, North Carolina
2. Thanks to Sam Harris for the five-page list of such quotations provided in his 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.

Animating spirit, first cause

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.
    Should I be reluctant to try to think about these concepts logically? For Ralph also said, commenting on my reading of John Allen Paulos's Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up, "God is beyond argument. We can't get our minds or our logic around God." Perhaps I should be reluctant, but here goes anyway.
    What evidence is there that the universe has an "animating spirit"? The only "animated spirits" that we have any experience of are ourselves and other natural organisms. I see animated spirit everyday in the birds and butterflies and rabbits and fuzzy worms that visit (or live in) our yard. I saw yesterday the toad that jumped out of my mower's way, and I was happy that the little fellow managed it, for I hadn't seen him. But I'm learning from my layman's study of evolutionary biology and neurology that our natural, earthly spirits evolved from the physical materials that lay on our planet's¹ surface and floated in its atmosphere. The jump to an overriding spirit for the universe is a very big jump indeed. My mind balks at the concept. I'm more comfortable in my empathy and sympathy for the fragile spirits around me.

First cause? I was surprised to hear that phrase from Ralph, the "argument from first cause" has been so soundly disposed of by philosophers—and mathematicians, for it happens to be the first of the arguments for God that Paulos discusses in his little book.

If everything has a cause, then God does, too, and there is no first cause. And if something doesn't have a cause, it may as well be the physical world as God or a tortoise. [p. 4]

    And yet, Ralph is sure about the universe's having been caused by an animating spirit. As I put it in the first of my "New Ten Commandments":

Imagine that "God" exists if doing so somehow comforts or inspires you....

I am glad for Ralph that he finds something like comfort or inspiration in his notion of a universal animating spirit (however far beyond his mind and logic).

That first new commandment of mine has a concluding clause, which is actually relevant to the second thing that Ralph said that gave me pause. Ralph says that the Muslim concept of God is superior to the Christian, by virtue of its being less anthropomorphic. He lauds the "peasant women of the Near East" for surrendering themselves to such a God. The very terms Islam and Muslim indicate that surrender. The concluding clause of my new first commandment expresses my contempt for this:

Imagine that "God" exists if doing so somehow comforts or inspires you, but don't fall down and worship it.

I don't think that "Allah" is any more palatable than Yahweh or God the Father. On p. 1 of Thomas Cleary's New Translation of the Qur'an, I find:

[Certain persons] try to deceive God and those who believe, but they only deceive themselves, without being aware. In their hearts is sickness, and God has made them sicker; and in store for them is painful torture, because they have been lying...God mocks them...God took their light and left them in darkness, unseeing; deaf, dumb, and blind, and not returning....

Allah is as personal to Muslims as God the Father is to Christians. And, in my view, Allah, too, is absent.
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1. I don't mean by "our planet" any proprietary ownership, for, as my daughter's Chief Seattle bumper sticker says, "The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth." (I inherited the bumper sticker with the car.)

It is time

Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) opens with A Note to the Reader:

Since the publication of my first book, The End of Faith, thousands of people have written to tell me that I am wrong not to believe in God. The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians generally imagine that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own....

The first time I read Harris's Letter, I don't think I read it in a single day, but I did today, its argument was so much more impelling than I remembered. I found so much I might have highlighted or underlined if I hadn't borrowed the book from a library. For example:

The conflict between science and religion is reducible to a simple fact of human cognition and discourse: either a person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not. If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe. Everyone recognizes that to rely upon "faith" to decide specific questions of historical fact is ridiculous—that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the Bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammad's conversation with the archangel Gabriel, or to any other religious dogma. It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail. [pp. 66-67]

The GWB proof of the non-existence of god

George W. Bush's becoming and "serving" as the President of the United States was a catalyst for my coming out of the closet for atheism¹. I may even have discovered yet another proof of god's non-existence in this:

George W. Bush, a self-styled born-again Christian, became President of the United States.   Therefore, there is no god.

The "proof" occurred to me this morning, as I was recalling an interchange with my friend Roger a week ago. He had written:

In the past [your sister] has briefly discussed your lack of faith in God. So out of curiosity, I have always wondered how you came to believe what you do.

And I told him:

How I came to believe what I believe about god (that there isn't one) is actually fairly well documented publicly, insofar as my blog is public. I "declared" for atheism on September 9, 2007, and the post for that day ("All in or All out") gives the proximate reason.
    The main considerations leading up to the declaration are covered over the preceding year or a little longer. Interestingly perhaps, the Bush administration had a little bit to do with it, as I saw what fundamentalist Christians were doing. I guess that made me mad for one thing, sort of set my teeth on edge, motivated me to figure out whether I really did or didn't believe some essential theological things in common with these people.
    The agony of the food chain was perhaps the single most contributing factor: my utter disbelief that a "personal god" could have engineered the mayhem and murder of creatures up the chain devouring creatures down the chain. This is obviously related to the problem of life's injustice. I believe that men are motivated to believe in god and heaven not only because they fear death and want to live forever, but also because they abhor the injustices they see about them and long for a judgment followed by reward for the good and punishment for the wicked. But because that belief is so obviously designed to satisfy men's wishes, it seems obvious to me that it (and god too) were concocted for solace and consolation—created lock, stock, and barrel by the fearful mammal man.
    I was also struck by the fact that the children of Christian parents tend to become Christians, and the children of Muslim parents tend to become Muslims. In other words, the "revelations of god" that they accept (those of the Bible on the one hand, those of the Koran on the other) are simply a matter of where and of whom they were born. So, if a child who is taught to believe the Bible could by accident of birth just as easily have been taught to believe the Koran, then that seemed to undercut any inherent authority of the books themselves. Since there is utterly no evidence whatsoever for the Bible's claim to authenticity, nor for the Koran's, and no evidence for heaven or miracles, etc., and all of the arguments for them can be explained in terms of wishful thinking, the desire of the priestly class to control the rest of mankind, etc., I can only conclude, as a thinking person willing to accept that I will die and not be resuscitated or resurrected, that religion is bunk.
    And the joyful sense of liberation that I feel as a result of concluding so is also a kind of evidence.
    Quod erat demonstrandum.
    In a nutshell, that's how I "came to believe." As you have time or interest, you can, of course, nose around in Moristotle.

Roger replied:

I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts concerning Christianity and GWB. We indeed think very much alike, when it comes to GWB. I too have been very angered by the behavior not only of this self-proclaimed "Born again Christian," but of so many of his supporting fellow Christians. As far as I am concerned, over the last 8 years, Christian hypocrisy has been at an all-time high. I mean, how stupid and ignorant can so many of these people be? To me at almost every turn, Bush and his gang were guilty of behavior that totally contradicts biblical principles, and yet so many of his Christian followers had no apparent problem with this. I despise these people to no end. And one of the unfortunate things about all of this, at least where I am concerned, is that practically all of my friends, and most of my family, fall into this group. You talk about feeling isolated. Some days it can be a bit too much. These days, many of them are so quick to forget about Bush's obvious screw ups. Now they only have time to criticize Obama.

And he sent me a link to a web page describing a documentary by Brian Flemming about "The God Who Wasn't There." I've asked my local librarian to acquire it.
    Hmm, I wonder whether there are librarians, as there are doctors and other health professionals, who will refuse to cooperate in such a request on the ground that their religion forbids it? "I couldn't possibly order—or even utter the name of—that DVD!"
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1. If "coming out of the closet" is what I did. I originally worded this, "catalyst for my becoming an atheist"—in the sense of deciding to be one—but it isn't clear that one can decide to become an atheist (or decide to believe in god); one either is or isn't (or believes or doesn't). In my case, I realized that I didn't really "believe in god," so the question I asked myself was: Do I believe in no-god?
       Not-believing in god is quite different from believing in no-god. One can not-believe in god, but also not-believe in no-god. That's what an agnostic does, because he or she doesn't accept that there's adequate evidence for either.
       I had to think about the question a bit to see what my answer was. My own choice of no-god is based on what I consider an extremely high probability rather than a certainty. It was useful to consult Thomas Paine, Bertrand Russell, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins for assistance. I am grateful to these authors.
       And maybe I did "decide" to become an atheist, after all, because I considered the question carefully, qualitatively sifting and weighing the evidence. Obviously, I'm still trying to sort out the best way to think and talk about it. If I'm concerned about appearing to be obsessed about this, maybe I shouldn't be. It's just a natural process of thinking.

Which is the best god book?

A recent interchange with my friend Ed started me thinking about divergent ways in which people regard truth. He and I were discussing the opposition between scientific knowing and religious faith, and he said:

You know, it's not that I disagree with you, or agree with you...it's that I don't believe anyone, you, me, or the Pope knows the truth of truths. Facts are used to make people believe in a point of view. However, if someone does not believe those facts; then your truth is not theirs. That doesn't mean it's not true, it only means it's true to the ones who believe those facts.

This seemed to me to express an extreme form of relativism, and the following classification occurred to me:

Religious Absolutism ("Only I have the truth")
Extreme Relativism ("Everyone has his own truth")
Scientific Knowing ("He who has objective evidence is more likely to be near the truth")

Note that Extreme Relativism seems to deny that anyone can actually know objective truth. Ed states that "facts are used to make people believe in a point of view," as though "facts" can just be made up to win an argument. (Of course, more than a few have!) Ed seems to deny that there's any objective basis for deciding what is or isn't a fact.
    Happily, I've been musing on something that provides a ready-made illustration of the classifications. The concept of the best god book occurred to me after my friend Kelley asked me what my ideal job would be, and I jokingly answered that it might be replacing copies of the Bible and the Qur'an with copies of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. (Kelley quipped—equally facetiously, she assured me—that her ideal job might be replacing The God Delusion with the Bible or the Qur'an! "Or the Qur'an"; no religious absolutist is Kelley.)

Three books, three picks

The Religious Absolutist believes as a matter of faith that his religion alone is the repository of the truth. For the Christian, of course, it's the Bible; for the Muslim it's the Qur'an. And never the twain shall meet. As my Evangelical Christian friend Ina warned me a couple of years ago, when I told her I was trying to read the Qur'an, "The Qur'an is not the Word of God!"
    And many obedient Muslims (and what is a Muslim if not obedient?) no doubt lump the authors of The End of Faith, God Is Not Great, and The God Delusion in with Salman Rushdie, a call for whose execution was officially decreed by fatwā by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1988.
    Of course, Christians and Muslims adopted their religious affiliations from their parents. If they had been born to each others' parents, the Christians would be swearing by the Qur'an, and the Muslims by the Bible. That their religious faith appears to be a matter of faith more in whatever their parents believed than in god does not pass unnoticed.
    For many years, by the way, I felt that no particular religious view could be trusted (not even my own) because, as God said unto Moses, "I am that I am"; He didn't specify (to Moses on that occasion) what "that" was. Of course, the [rather horrifying] nature of the Old Testament god is abundantly clear from other Biblical passages, as Thomas Paine, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins, to name a few, have pointed out. It seems obvious to me now that my focusing on the "I am that I am" passage and ignoring all the rest was an unconscious effort on my part to try to preserve a version of my mother's belief in god.

The Extreme Relativist says that the three books are equally true. The Bible is true for Christians, the Qur'an is true for Muslims, and The God Delusion (and the other atheist books mentioned above) are true for people who don't believe in god. "True" here seems to be even more subjective than it is for the absolutists, who at least believe that there's a standard for their truth, namely "God" or "Allah." (Nevermind that they're supposed to be the same god. Muslims at least have the grace to allow that Jesus, too, was a prophet of god.)
    In "picking all," the Extreme Relativist essentially picks none. Earlier in our exchange, Ed had said:

I was referring to your belief in science as the truth [rather, as the way to get at the truth], while church-goers believe just as strongly that the Bible is [reveals] the truth. It was people of science who first said the earth was flat, and it was people of science who said it was round. What science proves today can be disproved by science tomorrow.

There doesn't seem to be much to distinguish Extreme Relativism from Radical Skepticism.

The Scientific Knower (at least not one who holds that Science and Religion have their own, non-overlapping "magisterial domains," but who believes that they coexist in the same domain) much prefers a book like The God Delusion, which by means of objective evidence and cogent argument establishes the extreme improbability of god's existence.
    While the Religious Absolutist's opinion is based on blind faith that his own, parochial book reveals the truth, the Scientific opinion is based on objective fact. If the Scientific Knower's parents influenced him, they most likely encouraged him to think for himself.
    Dawkins is my man.

All in or All out

I have talked approvingly of what I understood to be Kierkegaard's view, on the question of belief in God, that it was nobler (as well as truer) to hang with one hand from one ledge of the narrow chasm of religious belief and with the other hand from the opposite ledge than to transfer either hand to join the other on the same ledge. Hanging precariously from both ledges symbolized doubt. Kierkegaard thought doubt nobler because it consigned the doubter to the perpetual angst of his uncertainty whether to believe or not to believe, since, as a matter of truth, the person could not be objectively sure which belief was right.

But I've now given up nobility. I've shifted the hand that was clinging to belief over to the other ledge and am now hanging with both hands from un- or non- or disbelief, and I feel ever so much better. And those who have done just the opposite—and cling to belief with both hands—feel better too, I assume.

I suppose that being either all in or all out of anything is more comfortable. A juror who just can't make up her mind whether the man accused of murder is guilty or not will be in agony over it. If deliberations go overnight, she might not be able to sleep. I used to agonize over whether or not to approve of the death penalty. I feel better now that I've come down unshakably against it. In general, humans find relief and feel better after they stop roiling and make up their minds!

On "the religious question" (which is essentially whether God exists and can be approached through some form of worship or prayer), believers who cling to their belief with both hands usually try to fortify their position by applying to a particular "holy scripture" which they accept as containing "the revealed Word of God." This could be The Torah, The New Testament, The Qur'an, The Book of Mormon, or whatever. A belief in a particular divine revelation, it seems to me, works this way in "fortifying" their fundamental belief: if the scripture in question is true, then of course God is...this or that, for The Book says so. But note the "if" regarding the scripture. No one can know objectively whether it's the "Word of God" or not. A noble doubter will cling to the two opposed ledges on that question.

I said that believers in God "try to fortify" their belief through application to a holy scripture. "Try" because of course such application is no real help at all. They still have to face Kierkegaard's question. The leap of faith has to be taken on the question whether there really was a revelation or not...

...just as the disbeliever takes his leap of faith that religion is false, that God (in the personal sense) does not exist, that Jesus was not the Son of God, that Muhammad was not a Messenger of God, that Joseph Smith's golden plates were an elaborate hoax motivated by greed and venality, that the various similarities of religious belief and practice around the world show, not that God has revealed Himself to peoples everywhere, but that evolved man tends to project the same gods everywhere, that most of those beliefs and practices flatter neither the assumed gods nor the actual men, and so on.

And, to be honest (which I hope I always am), I admit that I make an application myself to try to fortify my nonbelief. My application is to rationality, or common sense. Thomas Paine, Bertrand Russell, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens seem to me to make a very great deal more sense (in their books The Age of Reason, Why I Am Not a Christian, The End of Faith, and God Is Not Great, respectively) than the "holy books" I'm familiar with. It seems ever so much more reasonable to me that religion is a childish fantasy than that it is a serious adult vision. But some of the things said in scripture are nevertheless apt:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. [The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, 13:11]

I do have at least one remaining question. It has to do with the distinction between religion and spirituality. As a noble doubter, I felt that I could "be spiritual" even though I found it ridiculous to try to "be religious." The question is: Now that I've opted for being all out when it comes to religion, is spirituality still an option for me, and what does that mean?