Category Archives: Religion

FTAC – Another Approach to Islam and the Medieval and Modern Worldviews

08 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion

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Sadiq Khan symbolically stands between the medieval world, specifically a world defined by the possession of political (and social) absolute power as bragged, defended, and exercise by singular leaders using whatever means necessary to place themselves and keep themselves positioned as rulers. Although a dozen European states today remain monarchies, the democratic forces evolved within the “western” character — such things are not so limited, but for the sake of conversation one may use the convention — have over centuries modified and exchanged “absolute power” distributed power with a chief administrator or two (where a president and prime minister may co-exist).

The gulf between between the medieval and modern worldviews is immense and, perhaps as demonstrated by Putin and the related axis defined by Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran tells that the matter is not strictly about religion, including. It is about the human grasp of power and power in the hands of the malign.

With Islam, and this apart from examinations of the content of the Qur’an and related wisdom and exegesis — all of which criticism has been well argued and displayed all over the “strident infidel” web — the mere rejection of the “Islamists” (now that we have that term) and the bent toward caliphate, and that by the proverbial sword as swung by such as Baghdadi and others like him, constitutes reform. Whatever Muhammad may have done that Baghdadi believes he’s emulating, the modern wish not to do over and over and over and over all the way to second comings.

Evolved with piety kept intact, which I think may be D______’s conservative election, or instantly updated per the wishes of the Muslim Reform Movement, Sadiq Khan and others, again of modern bent, have a pretty good palette within which to reside within the House of Islam.

Regarding the role of the Jews (apart from “No Moses — no Muhammad”), the Hebrew’s teleological ejection of unquestioned and unquestionable human authority, the rejection of Pharaoh, has had its revolutionary impact on the world, and the shape of it has been such as to repeatedly meet some of the challenges posed by dictators, but as history has jagged edges, the power of the despotic may shrink across time, but there are many despots and some live out their lives to die peacefully in their beds (at least it’s looking that way for Mugabe).

In short (wouldn’t that be nice?), it’s not the Jews that may stand in judgment of Sadiq Khan but rather those who have come across from the medieval world and left behind — ejected — its manners in the development and exercise of political power.

The gist of the assertion posed as a question: the Jews won’t accept London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s overtures until Islam has been definitively reformed.

Well, bunk.

As noted above, the Ummah’s rejection of the al-Qaeda-type organizations may constitute “reform” — at least Baghdadi, that stickler for authenticity who believes he’s conducting a state in Muhammad’s image, would reject such “reform”.

In the medieval mode, it would be natural to expect that “one true church” would conquer all the others; in the modern, democratic, secular, and tolerant mode, every true church may borrow, evolve, and shift by parts accommodation and parts compassionate discernment and idealism.  The conquest by one of all becomes irrelevant.

As regards criticism and issues swirling around the figure of Muhammad and Islam, the blanket rejection of the same may call to mind Haider Mobarak’s term, “civilizational narcissism” as well as the many online sites devoted to the “anti-Jihad”.

Reference

Anti-Jihad (impossibly short list).  Answering Islam, Clarion Project, Pamela Geller, United West

BackChannels.  “Short and Pointed — The “Declaration of the Muslim Reform Movement.”  December 6, 2015.

Muslim Reform Movement.

Addendum – May 9, 2016

Sadiq Khan is no Muslim extremist. And it is not only his track record voting for gay rights that proves this. Having known him when I was a Muslim extremist, I know that he did not subscribe to my then-theocratic views.

Nawaz, Maajid.  “The Secret Life of Sadiq Khan, London’s First Muslim Mayor.”  The Daily Beast, May 8, 2016.

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FTAC – On the Meaning of Al Aqsa

04 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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I can’t endorse the sentiment, ______, having taken a moderate course, but I hope that more and more Arabs will take note of the abuse of the refugees at the hands of their leaders and the medieval disinformation and manipulation campaigns that have led to The Preoccupation not only with the Jews but their own self-concept and status in the world. Too many fathers like al-Husseini have put them on the worst imaginable track, i.e., the emulation of Hitler and the Nazis. Some who have embraced that most may be due to wake up from the nightmare within them that has long masqueraded as their dream.

BackChannels now has plenty of information as to how the Israelis, the west, the refugees of 1948 and their generations, got to this unpretty pass.  The themes erupting in WWII — that Stalin-Hitler thing — have been sustained in the middle east conflict; the Soviet promotion of anti-Semitism in the middle east and the concomitant terrorism of the PLO and PFLP have been similarly and perhaps exhaustively covered; the formation and presence of what has been referred to here as “Syndicate Red Brown Green”; the self-dissolve of the Soviet on December 26, 1991 also has been remarked in these virtual pages, as have the feudal kleptocracies kept floating along in its place and around it; less has been remarked as regards the post-Cold War Era around the world, but BackChannels believes we’re in that realm as this is being posted.

All in all, and with Khamenei pressing for Israel’s destruction while a smattering of Sunni-majority states brand Hezbollah as a terrorist organization (that move took a while plus some “war by proxy” on Iran’s part), the world, even in one of its most medieval appearances, appears to want to move forward, not backward — and forward would seem toward the classical liberalism of the west.

The comment to which the excerpt responds called for the realization al-Husseini’s manipulative lie: the Jews haven’t any desire to “take over” Al Aqsa Mosque — never did and never will — because while being Jewish involves attending to self defense, it also involves being about and for others, and that includes the Arab brother and sister.

Two of Hillel the Elder’s most famous statements ring down through the ages: “That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another.”  That is an idea predicated on the concept of human self-restraint.  Israel may produce harm when harmed itself, but it does not have to prove its power through making others suffer with impunity.  If met with the force that would do that to people, including its own people, then it may answer in kind.

The second of Hillel’s language-based corrals:  “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am not for others, what am I?  If not now, when?”

Some Palestinians may be surprised to find Israelis for them in peace, but peace is needed as part of a sea change in the character of our humanity.

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Rediscovery, Renewal of Devotion – Bederman’s _Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values_

11 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Books, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Religion

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BTE_Front_Cover_BSP2_120915_jpg_not_reducedBederman, Diane Weber.  Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values.  Canada, Mantua Books, 2015.

The belief in an ethical God makes it possible over time, to move from a society of tribes to a society of many tribes, held together with commonly shared beliefs, stories, and traditions, because this God demands that we care for the other, the stranger, because we know how a stranger feels; we were once strangers in a strange land (see Exodus 23:9) (p. 60).

Canadian author Diane Weber Bederman, a friend of BackChannels’ editor, has put together a brief compelling volume about the origins of compassion, empathy — a pervasive thoughtfulness most of all — in contemporary western thought by way of Biblical language and lore and the interaction of the Judeo-Christian vision of God and man as woven through the western experience.

Although composed as defense and reminder of western values, it may turn out the right book at the right time as regards broadening the channels for the appreciation of a number of aspects of cultural and intercultural survival:

Ethical monotheism is not the enemy.

Belief in the ethical God of the Christians and Jews counterbalances egoism and the idolization of another human being.  I cannot place belief in any man perfecting himself.  The evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary.  I wrote about that earlier, in my chapter “The Snake Tempted Me,” about the Enlightenment and the rise of secularism.  More people have died from wars that embraced secular fundamentalist propaganda than have been killed in wars based on religious differences.  Encyclopedia of Wars authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare.  From their list of 1,763 wars, only 123 are classified as involving a religious cause; these wars account for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare.  It is estimated that more than 160 millions civilians were killed in genocides in the twentieth century alone, with nearly 100 million killed by the Communist states of USSR and China.  Think of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Kim Jong-il, and Adolph Hitler. 

Why do we allow ourselves to give up our free will and instead by swayed by others?  Why do we so easily forget God’s admonition, “Beware of letting your heart be seduced; if you go astray, serve other gods and bow down to them . . . you will quickly perish”? (Deuteronomy 11:16-17) . . . . (p. 101)

Bederman is right and rightly quotable, page after well researched and thoughtfully written page, for her book reminds of basic principles and tenets that form the bulwark of a healthy and productive western society.

The tour begins close to the thought, “Before ethical monotheism and the revelation at Mount Sinai, there was little concept of the intrinsic value of a human being.  There was little concept of the sacredness of human life” (p. 11).

Given the spectacle created by dictator and “eye doctor” Bashar al-Assad in Syria with the help of Putin, Khamenei, and Baghdadi, one cannot discount Bederman’s observation of history and its present corollaries, for conscience, empathy, kindness, human rights, freedom, and love itself may not be givens in human affairs but transmitted through the oral and written traditions in language of a civilization born of suffering beneath the words, whips, and yokes of tyrants.  For that, the Judeo-Christian experience has been (from Pharaoh to Hitler) immense.

Where Bederman quotes Thomas Paine — “Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man” — she precedes the presentation of it with an observation drawn from commentary on the God of the Torah:

There is a commentary in one of the many books about the Bible that imagines God’s response to the happiness of the Israelites after the drowning of the Egyptians.  God hears the angels singing and celebrating His great victory.  But instead of rejoicing weeps and rebukes them.  “Why are you singing?”  He asks.  “Why are you rejoicing?  The Egyptians are My children, too, and they are dead, drowned in the sea.  There is no cause for you to sing.  Their deaths are not to be celebrated” (p. 38).

True, and to BackChannels’ mind memory of a passage in an old Haggadah serves up the same lesson.

We — of the Jews and the “mixed multitudes” that joined the flight from Pharaoh, of “the west”, of the world’s democratic open societies, of the realms of the considerate and lawful (as opposed to those more familiar with capricious justice) — don’t rejoice at death, not even the death of mortal enemies.

As a philosophy of ethics, Bederman takes on abortion, utilitarianism, geneticism, too accepting a multiculturalism, and, of course, moral relativism: “If ethics have no extrinsic or intrinsic substantive base, then ethical decisions will be made by those in power who can impose their beliefs on others” (p. 75).

Again, page after page, Back to the Ethic proves a rich and thoughtful reading, one also at times personal as when Bederman encounters her own passage through hell in the form of a costly medical misdiagnosis and the path she takes in response to it. However, the author does not dwell in the region of her own mortality but rather in the realm of the universal and its reflection in scripture and the defense through time of Judeo-Christian belief in the structuring of the western tradition and today’s compassionate, democratic, open, and most vibrant societies.

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FTAC – On “Why the Jews?”

09 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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. . . it (anti-Semitism) doesn’t go away because the Jews and the mixed multitude that left Egypt with them perpetually represent an affront and rebuke to “absolute power”. God proves greater than Pharaoh, is completely separated from man and moved beyond the solar system to somewhere beyond the universe. It’s a good program, for we see what men do when they confuse themselves with God.

From the tyrant in the family to the one that heads a state, their own messianism and narcissism work them into committing crimes from which they cannot retreat, and from that point, they loath the Jews for the threat presented to their own unbridled impulses. In the medieval mode, the clever whip the crowds for their own affirmation and as prelude to theft and murder on an unheralded scale.

It’s never only the Jews: note what Assad has done to Syria and the Syrians, who have been culturally programmed to hate the Jews and hate the west without understanding that they themselves have been the targets of, again, the absolute power of the dictator.

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FTAC – A Comment on Attitudes and Beliefs and Religion

08 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Psychology, Religion

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I believe in Judaism, but I don’t want to see a religious court developed in place of a secular one.

As an American, I appreciate the symbolism of the Jordan River as depicted or used in the Torah, but my river is the Potomac and my soul altogether American.

_God is Red_ by (Native American) Vine Deloria, Jr. makes an interesting case in regard to the relationship between a land and its people.

Also of basic interest may be Daniel Everett’s _Language: The Cultural Tool_ and _Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes_, both of which tell about our use of language as a tool of survival.

Those “internal variables and functions” operate with and through language over a base of emotional turmoil and valence.

In “Attitude-Behavior Correspondence” studies (at least back in the 1980s), for some, “Attitude = Belief x (Affect x Intensity) / Primacy”. What needs looking at are the arrangements of multiple beliefs. In survey form with the Likert scale, “Do you believe in God?” (1 = Not At All, 5 = As Strongly as Possible” becomes one question and “Do you believe that Muslims can never be friends with Christians and Jews” (1 = Completely Disagree, 5 = Completely Agree).

Add 38 more questions, distribute to 150 students on one campus somewhere, apply regression analysis to the response set, and see how “beliefs” — or statements about beliefs — correlate with one another.

Recapitulate on another campus.

Recapitulate with another age group.

Such studies can go on a while, but I would suggest that through social science and other methods, one will find certain beliefs, like the belief in God, primary, and other beliefs, like that having to do with not being friends, either dismissible (“completely disagree”) or minimized in the mind of the surveyed subject, and, when aggregated (through survey method), also minimized.

“Attitude = Belief x (Affect x Intensity) / Primacy” may be the BackChannel’s author’s own addition to the more customary configuration, “Attitude = Belief x Affect”.  It simply adds in the intensity of good or bad feeling (“affect”) about a belief and it recognizes that some of what we believe about our existence — start with one’s own name, which is fairly “low level” or basic in the programming of our own personalities — may be more dear to us than other aspects of an object, including ourselves as our own possession.

As regards an “American religion” — might there be such a thing? — BackChannels may turn some attention to revisiting early American literature and the classic visitor commentaries.

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Basijed! A Note on Saeid Golkar’s Comprehensive Overview of the Iranian Regime’s Scariest Cultural and Social Machine

23 Saturday Jan 2016

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Dystopian Imagination —

Three authors: William Golding,  Aldous Huxley, George Orwell.

Four books:  Animal Farm, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Nineteen Eighty-Four

In the American high school education of the 1960s, the above were part of the canon taught to all.  Any who missed mention of Golding, Huxley, and Orwell or failed to read Animal Farm (or the Cliff Notes) would have had to have missed school altogether.  Awareness and fear of absolute obedience before a tyrannical authority; of erasure beneath the wheels of an engineered, mechanical, repeating society; of cynical political manipulation and exploitation; and of savagery itself were built into the imaginations of the young.  As our own society could not be the dystopian nightmares observed in reading, we would have to wade back through history or wait for the Islamic Small Wars as they present online to let us know that somewhere our fictions were emblematic of somebody’s political and social reality in situ.

Dystopian Reality — 

Golkar, Saeid.  Captive Society: The Basij Militia and Social Control in Iran.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2015

Training a new generation of youth and inoculating them against the Western cultural invasion constitute another mission of the female Basiji, who should make their “children aware of the problems of threats through explaining outcomes and upshots of the soft war.”  To achieve this goal, the WSBA established the Babies’ Basij to indoctrinate children before they reach school age.  To establish the Babies’ Basij, the WSBO implemented the plan of Quranic kindergarten (mahdha-e mehrab).  Under this plan, a WSBO kindergarten was established at each mosque with a WSBO base.  Children between the ages of three to five years attend these kindergartens.  In addition, the organization designs a curriculum to be used in the home for instructing children who are younger than three years of age.  Female Basiji are encouraged to bring their children to Basij activities, in order to socialize with other children and train them for future posts in the Islamic regime (p. 117)

Columbia University Press provided BackChannels with a review copy a month or two ago, and while reading took place post-haste, reviewing has had to wait for the “what to say” about a book whose author, Saeid Golkar, has covered the subject thoroughly and done so in plain textbook prose that makes the telling of the tale — specifically, coverage of the layout and history of the most pervasive organizational element exploited by the Iranian regime to create, reinforce, and sustain a society obedient to its will  —  on each page all the more chilling.

Although Golkar balances his exploration of the Basij organizations (“Basij is a Persian word meaning “mobilization.”  The complete name of the group, Sazeman-e Basij-e Mostazafan, means “Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed”) with this-or-that modules (.e.g, “The Basij: Nongovernmental Organization, Administered Mass Organization, or Militia?”), there are portions focused on the regime’s impositions throughout the land, and as much comes out in subchapter titling: “Penetration in Society: The Organizational Structure of the Basij”; “Mass Membership and Recruitment Training”; “The Mass Indoctrination of Basij Members”; “The Basij and Propaganda”; “The Basij and Moral Control”; “The Basij and Surveillance”; “The Basij and Political Repression”; “The Basij and the Controlling of Families . . . Schools . . . Universities . . . the Economy.”  By the time one reaches “Islamic Warriors or Religious Thugs?” the drift in concern has been made abundantly clear.

Golkar, however, generously covers the contrary view: the Basij are part of the regime’s patronage system, and those who wish to earn some money and make way on their careers may join for the familiar and practical causes known well to western chambers of commerce and numberless academic and civic organizations.

Just don’t forget who’s boss!

Here’s the last paragraph before the appendix:

“With the expansion of the Basij’s involvement in Iran’s social, political, and economic life, the opportunity for the country’s peaceful transition to democracy will decrease dramatically.  Because many Basij commanders and members have been co-opted by the IRI, it is not implausible to think that they will resist any serious attempts at government reform that would jeopardize their positions” (p. 196).

Related Online

Parchizadeh, Reza.  “Iran Now Vets Academics for Ideological Commitment.”  The Algemeiner, November 9, 2016.

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FTAC – Ethnolinguistic Cultural and Religious Survival – The Greatest Conversation

06 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Religion

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Reminder: our species’ inventory of living languages stands at about 7,000; our inventory of most subscribed religions stands at about 16 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_religious_groups — and then one may get into counting sects and cults in any number. Each package –language and religion + language or religion — represents some human way of adjusting to a limited (!) ecological or social environment — they ways of a people in its place (a good reference for that thought might be Vine Deloria Jr.’s book _God is Red_).

Add some borrowing, from Moses to Hille, perhaps, from Hillel to Jesus, Paul, and Constantine, from Constantine’s example on to Muhammad. The thought about our intellectual history may not be magical or romantic but it makes sense of time, thought, and adjustment to changing wants and changed boundaries.

The popular and scholarly discussion of religion is not something that can be or should be forbidden as each human mind wrestles not only with immediate environmental and social survival — this, using language as a cultural tool — but with a sense known to most of humanity (atheists comprise but seven percent of the lot) of a greater metaphysical existence from the genius loci to the Master of the Universe.

That’s life.

Life with time changes some things.

Life with space preserves some things.

central –> marginal –> mixed <– marginal <– central may give us one way of thinking about ethnolinguistic cultural (and religious) survival (and co-evolution). I don’t want to live in an all English, all secular world. Who would? No matter: nature, by demonstration, prefers experiment and variety.

Let the years of violent cultural annihilation and conquest subside. We are capable of observing ourselves, speaking across immense cultural and physical space . . . the conversation cannot be avoided but can be had with much, much less grief.

Verbose, definitely.

Underappreciated, maybe.

🙂

Every day’s conversation and news transmitted around the world changes the world a little bit because it reaches into so many minds.  In some social circles, one may talk of a New Global Intelligentsia, and while so many state leaders and generals may be “too busy and too important” to be in it themselves, have no doubt that they are looking it over in some compressed fashion and with varied ambitions and concerns.

The prompt had to do with questioning and discussing religion, which in the west is what the west does without inhibition.  We annul and validate with our choice in subscription, some of which may be powerfully driven by the accident of birth and legacy, and in some other part the experience of discomfort leading to the development of choices — options — and the conscious and adult election to lend or withhold our energies from one set of beliefs or practices or another.

There should be no compulsion.

Where violence is needed to enforce obeyance, bold and earnest conversation may condemn, degrade, and diminish the medieval and uglier methods of political and religious control.

We talk.

The freedom to listen with compassion, empathy, and empirical and intuitive knowledge; the freedom to reason about, reflect on, and weigh ideas; and the freedom to speak responsibly about anything — about all things — is freedom.

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