Islamophobia: Sometimes Fear Is A Rational Response

I like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.  I like to believe that John Boehner is kind to animals and Donald Trump has moments of self-doubt and George Bush sometimes is sleepless with regret.  I want to think that most priests like the gospel better than little boys and most cops want to serve and protect more than they want to gut-shoot you for questioning their authority.  I want to imagine that most churches get more pleasure from Sunday fish-fries and collecting canned beans for homeless shelters than picketing gay funerals and promising eternal immolation for insufficient faith.  And I want to accept that the vast majority of Muslims are more concerned with feeding their children and loving their spouses than achieving martyrdom and exterminating godless infidels.

But these guys aren’t making it easy.  Just as inner city blacks are doing nothing to diminish racial profiling and police brutality by randomly assassinating cops, Islamic fundamentalists aren’t helping their cause by blowing away journalists with AK-47’s.  How does one even begin to comprehend the senseless brutality of the attack on the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hedbo, resulting in the deaths of a dozen reporters, editors, and cartoonists?  How is it even remotely possible to make any sort of apologies for a religion that takes itself so seriously that it believes the only response to heretics and blasphemers is violent death?  Christians mostly gave up on this level of insanity back in the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials, with rare exceptions like the murder of Dr. George Tiller.  But the soldiers of Islam make a habit of this sort of behavior.  The events of 9/11 are certainly the prime example, but let’s not overlook the smaller but just as significant instances, like the fatwa on author Salman Rushdie.  The very fact that Islam has a word, “fatwa”, specifically defined as a death warrant on an individual insulting the prophet, tells you most of what you need to know.

Ok, look, I know that the perpetrators of these abominations are the lunatic fringe, that they don’t truly represent the other billion or so practitioners of Islam, and that it’s wrong to condemn an entire religion, ethnic group, philosophy, or belief system based on the acts of the outliers, but as I said above, they’re not making it easy.  So when Bill Maher describes Islam as “the motherlode of bad ideas”, I’ve come to the point where my only response is, “I wish I’d said that first”.  I just can’t be like the ignorant hordes of Americans who refuse to go to the polls because “all politicians are alike”.  They aren’t.  Republicans are assholes and stand on the wrong side of virtually every important issue I can think of.  Democrats are assholes who have at least a few policies that actually benefit regular Americans.  And so it is with Islam.  One religion or another has been at the root of most of the wars and a huge chunk of the violent deaths and tortures and rapes and outrages over the last five thousand years or so.  But some religions have more blood on their hands than others.

So it is with Islam in the 21st century.  Add another dozen bodies on the stack after today’s bloodbath in France.  I’m not advocating, nor would I ever advocate, any sort of vengeance, and I would continue to advocate tolerance of everyone’s beliefs, no matter how idiotic or onerous…just so long as those beliefs don’t interfere with vital functions…like someone’s heartbeat.  But at the same time, every fear is not baseless.  Fear of heights or tight spaces or airplanes or pit bulls have a sound foundation in reality, and even serve an evolutionary purpose.  Staying away from thousand foot cliffs probably increases your chances for survival and reproduction.  Islamophobia is ugly, but it is, at least today, not irrational.

BW

The War On Christmas: Calling A Truce

I wasn’t sure just how to frame this piece, and believe it or not, sometimes I am concerned about who I might or might not offend.  I’m pretty sure that I’ve lost at least one Kibbitz Corner follower because he simply couldn’t tolerate my periodic colorful expletives, which are not fucking deleted. I shake my head and grind my teeth every time I see f!*& or s@#% in some article, essay, or correspondence.  If you have the temerity to think it, you might as well have the courage to say it out loud or type it with all the filthy letters intact.  So you know where I set the bar: My journalistic integrity (in honor of my hero, Hunter S. Thompson) won’t permit me to cease usage of the “universal adjective” anytime soon.  Likewise, back when I was still ranting on Left, Right, and Centered on a daily basis, I had one reader in particular, a very intelligent guy who often wrote incisive comments, who sent me one of those “I’m canceling my subscription to your newspaper/magazine because…” letters.  He refused to tolerate my persistent rude and unwavering criticism of Christianity any longer.

Guilty as charged, your honor.  I’m no fan of any organized religion, and if I had to name the two most intrusive and obnoxious ones, in my humble opinion, they would be Islam and Christianity.  One of them preaches that if you don’t believe as we do, we’re justified in killing you, and the other one threatens that if you don’t believe as we do, you’ll suffer a gazillion years of a fate worse than death.  Not fun people.  But I don’t let my own heritage, Judaism, off the hook either.  We are, after all, the learned theologians who came up with the death penalty for things like planting different seeds in the same field, cutting your hair at the sides, or having sex with a woman during her period, along with 73 other capital offenses.

I guess that if I had to name one organized religion that I’m at least neutral about, if not mildly supportive of, it would be Buddhism.  It’s hard to argue with a philosophy which basically states that doing nice things for other people not only improves your karma, but makes you feel better, right here in this world without any promises or threats of postmortem rewards or consequences.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and while you’re at it, do unto yourself as you would have others do unto you.  On the other hand, you have the surprising oxymoron of the “angry Buddhist mob”, like the ones who commited acts of violence against Muslim villages in Burma and Sri Lanka.  So even some Buddhists suffer from the “my god is bigger than your god” delusion, which is the core problem anytime you start looking at your belief system as a competitive team with it’s own uniforms and anthems and winners and losers.

So that’s me.  That’s the way I think.  Which means that if there was anyone fighting a “war on Christmas”, it would be me.  And maybe I even did, when I was younger and not quite as evolved and enlightened.  When someone would greet me or bid me adieu with “Merry Christmas!”, likely as not, I’d counter with a “Happy holidays!”  I think it somehow made me feel as if I was scoring a few points for the vastly overmastered progressive/humanist/secularist team.  But listen, Christmas warriors: I’ve surrendered!  Note to Bill O’Reilly: You can stop the weekly Thanksgiving to New Year rants.  The war is over.  You won.

So if “Merry Christmas” makes someone happy, that’s a good thing.  I routinely say it to friends, acquaintances, retail clerks, and anyone else who says it to me.  Quite frequently I’ll even initiate the conversation with a “Merry Christmas”, for those for whom the greeting applies.  It’s that Buddhist philosophy again.  If hearing a couple of words can actually incrementally improve someone’s day, it improves mine just as much to utter them.

I’m sure the Hasselbeck/Limbaugh/Beck crowd will still hold aloft the damning instances of the ACLU or some other group bringing suit to evict nativity scenes from one courthouse lawn or another, but I would argue that it’s just more evidence that the war is over and that you won…courthouse lawns are about the only place where you aren’t confronted with the baby Jesus and a bunch of barnyard animals, usually accompanied by a CD playing one of the roughly ten thousand versions of “Silent Night” by everyone from Bing Crosby to Carrie Underwood.

So enough already with the “war on Christmas”.  Get a grip, take a breath, and have a very Merry Christmas.

(And a happy new year.)

BW

 

Jesus H. Christ: Unbelievable!

So I’m staring at my blank LCD screen, desperately hoping that some topic for today’s blog will magically manifest itself.  I do my usual morning exercise of scanning the CNN page and Huffington Post, clicking on articles of potential interest, reading the appropriate content, and bookmarking sites for possible inclusion in a later essay.  Nothing is piquing my interest and I’m not finding any connections or conclusions that anyone else may have missed.  And then the lightbulb appeared over my head…

I noted a piece about five stories down on the HuffPo page:

Syria Airstrikes Kill 553, Including 32 Civilians, During Monthlong Offensive Against ISIS: Monitor

Pretty much business as usual.  A couple of possible blog themes occur to me.: 1- Just as has been the case for almost a decade and half, we’re at war halfway around the world, and it’s something that barely even enters our daily consciousness.  2-The fact that US and “coalition” bombs incidentally took the lives of 32 civilians, including women and children, is treated as nothing more than an incidental finding, like a little arthritis at the knee in an x-ray of a broken leg.  Those civilians died in a variety of ghastly and painful ways, including dismemberment and disembowelment,  but are just collateral damage.  We’ll save our outrage for the next video of ISIS beheading a hostage.

Then I happened upon this one, referencing a story that’s actually about a week old:

Bill Maher 1, Ben Affleck 0

Affleck got into a heated debate with Maher on his weekly HBO show.  Basically, Maher contends that we need to stop being so politically correct about Islam and recognize it for what it truly is, a religion that encourages and applauds violence, debases women, ignores basic human rights, and whose most basic tenet is the killing of all non-believers.  Affleck, a liberal just like Maher (and me, for that matter) argues that condemning a whole religion for the actions of a relatively small fringe fanatic minority constitutes racism, intolerance and Islamophobia.

While we’re considering that fanatical fringe, let’s look at this:

Video Appears To Show Islamic State Militants Stoning A Woman To Death

If those charming fellows in ISIS and Al Qaeda and the Taliban had their way, stories like this wouldn’t even warrant two paragraphs on page 3. They’d be as common as the half page-chronicles of the DUI arrests that appear as regularly as clockwork every Monday morning after a college weekend in our local newspaper.  We’d have stonings for adultery, stonings for rape (mainly stonings of the victim), executions for homosexuality, even executions for sodomy (that’s right, kids…suck a dick and the next thing you may be sucking is cyanide gas).  That’s the way Sharia law is, and I’d wager that Bill Maher would argue that Sharia law is the rule, rather than the exception in Muslim theology.

Meanwhile, back here in the good old USA:

Conservatives Want America to be a “Christian Nation”

Whether it’s Rick Perry or John McCain or Rick Santorum or one of their talking heads, like Dinesh D’Souza, the GOP is pretty much unanimous in its contention that everything here at home, from education to drugs to wages to immigration, would be just fine if we acknowledged our status as a “Christian Nation”, made our laws based on New Testament gospel, and in general, got ourselves “right with Jesus”.

Then, like a breath of fresh air after being locked in a windowless basement, I just happened upon a little link way at the bottom of a page of something completely unrelated:

No Meek Messiah: Michael Paulkovich 

Paulkovich wrote an extensively researched treatise after reviewing the writings of 126 prominent historians in the first few centuries of the first millennium, and noted that not one of them made even a passing reference to Jesus or Jesus Christ or a messiah of any kind…which would be akin to a modern historian writing a summary of the twentieth century and never mentioning Adolph Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, Neil Armstrong, or JFK.  Paulkovich’s conclusion is that Jesus Christ not only was not the son of god or the messiah, but that he never even existed at all, that he is a complete fiction comprised of whole cloth.  It’s as reasonable a theory as any you’ll hear from the roughly ten trillion words expended on the life and times and significance of JC in the last two thousand years and change.

I have a point here.  In the course of recorded history, there have been untold wars and war crimes and pogroms and inquisitions and tortures and deprivations and burnings at the stake and stonings and rapes and beheadings…all in the name of one god or another…all fought and justified over the seemingly universal contention that “my god is bigger than your god”…and all of it is complete utter undiluted nonsense.  No god has ever written a single word or sentence on a single page.  Every utterance in the Bible and the Koran and every other sacred religious tome is actually no different than any given passage in “50 Shades of Grey”…they were all written by a human being and the highest purpose to which they aspired was to…SELL MORE BOOKS.

As long as human beings keep looking to invisible myths in the sky for guidance, those headlines about bombings and wars and atrocities of all kinds are unlikely to change.  Amen.

BW

I Hope I’m Not Coming Down With Ebola: Worried When I Find Myself Agreeing With Ann Coulter And Donald Trump

It’s been a hell of a week.  I’ve managed to piss off more people than I usually do in a year, and this from a guy who has a god-given talent for being irritating.  Mrs. Left does not refer to me as “Shrek” for no reason (although my ears are similar and I do have an unusual fondness for donkeys).  But perhaps being a pain in the ass has hidden benefits.  I was overjoyed when last Friday’s Celebrities Behaving Badly garnered 68 hits, but yesterday Kibbitz Corner almost broke triple digits with 98 page views…and I didn’t include a single full frontal Kim Kardashian Istagram nude shot, so maybe folks are actually reading me (I like using “folks” ever since Obama admitted out loud that “We’ve tortured some folks“…the whole homey vibe makes waterboarding a lot easier to swallow, don’t you think?)

Before I directly address the topics in the title, let me cover an island of good news in what is otherwise a sea of sorrow: It was revealed today that billionaire author J.K. Rowling did one of the kindest and most selfless things I’ve heard of in a long time.  Rowling sent a hand-written note in purple ink from Albus Dumbledore, a wand, an acceptance to Hogwarts, a list of school supplies and an autographed Harry Potter book to Cassidy Stay, the fifteen year-old girl who survived a home invasion gun attack in Texas that left her entire family dead last month.  In a public appearance in Houston on July 12, Cassidy quoted Dumbledore from his speech at the opening of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”: Happiness can be found even in the darkest times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.  I, for one, found it refreshing to hear the victim of a recent tragedy drawing emotional and spiritual support from a more recent mythical character than the two millenia-old one usually invoked.  Dumbledore has a lot of wisdom to impart, and he doesn’t threaten an eternity of torment from Dementors if you fail to believe in him.

About Ebola: Let me preface my remarks today by noting that I’m not a virologist or a microbiologist.  When I was in med school, there was no course in epidemiology offered, and if they did have any electives in public health, I didn’t take them.  Global epidemics originating out of African jungles, transmitted from primates to fruit bats and on to humans weren’t even a blip on the horizon in 1975, although Michael Crichton’s 1969 “Andromeda Strain” may have been a prescient foretelling of woes to come.  No one had ever seen a case of AIDS, even if some may have gone undetected long before public awareness peaked in the 80’s.  We were so innocent back then that when I was doing a third year med school rotation in the ER at Evanston Hospital and a patient came in with some strange sores on his penis, we had to pull out our textbooks and call in the dermatologist…we’d never before personally witnessed a case of genital herpes.  In 2014 most sophomores at IU could make the diagnosis (sadly).

My point is that I’m no expert, I’m just an old doc with half a glass full of common sense…and I probably should be reassuring everyone about the skill of the CDC and the technological superiority of American medicine and the infinitesimally small statistical chance of any of us personally contracting Ebola.  All of those things are true, and you can probably Google a Youtube video of Sanjay Gupta telling you exactly those things on CNN.  Meanwhile, I also know that the CDC has raised its alert level for Ebola to “level 1 activation”, which, if it were Dubya’s old color code homeland security system, would be somewhere in the red area.

Two individuals I typically detest and revile have made some public statements for which they are receiving massive grief.  Ann Coulter, writing about the missionary medical inclinations of Kent Brantley, questioned why he felt compelled to work with Ebola patients in Africa when he could have done just as much good staying here in the USA:  “If he had provided health care for the uninsured editors, writers, videographers and pundits in Gotham and managed to open one set of eyes, he would have done more good than marinating himself in medieval diseases of the Third World.”  In a similar fashion, Trump tweeted last week:  “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!”  Heartless?  Selfish?  Callous?  Perhaps, but as my good friend Marcey likes to say, “Stop me when I’m lyin’.”

Here’s the truth of the matter.  Kent Brantley and Nancy Writebol probably pose no risk to the general population.  They truly are in the most secure isolation wing of any hospital anywhere on the planet.  The isolation facilities at Emory University Hospital are specifically designed to house scientists who may have been exposed to smallpox or anthrax or Ebola or bugs being researched in the deepest bowels of the CDC that we’ve never heard of.  And both Brantley and Writebol have been treated with the only vials in the world of some magic bullet that might actually have some effect on the deadly virus.  It’s the people we haven’t heard of that should worry us.  The fellow stopped at the airport in NYC ultimately tested negative for Ebola.  But what about the next guy, the one who isn’t even feverish yet, the one whose plane lands in Baltimore or Bangor, and he goes on for the welcome home dinner in Little Rock?  Could that happen?  Yep.

BW

Balls-2, Ovaries-0

It’s going to be a short post, and I’ll get to the meat (think: Rocky Mountain Oysters) of it in a minute.  In the meantime, I’m at my keyboard at my usual table at Barnes and Noble.  By now, they really should have a plaque or something on it.  If I become a famous writer someday, it’ll be on display at the Smithsonian.  Anyway, my frustration is mounting as my browser has basically locked up and forced me to reboot about a dozen times.  That makes blogging more difficult than ditch-digging, and just as much fun.  It’s hard to include hyperlinks when every click on every article results in little more than several minutes of watching the Microsoft blue circle of “I’m thinking about it” glowing on the immovable position of the mouse until I’m relieved by the sweet escape of control-alt-delete.  And yes, all my computer geek friends…I have rebooted the entire system several times with little to show for it except about half an hour of wasted time.

I’ve talked about my difficult relationship with electronic devices before, and how Mrs. Left, in particular, doesn’t believe that it’s due to much of anything but my apparent inability to click correctly.  But part of the reason I’m at Barnes and Noble this morning is because of two books I bought and downloaded which subsequently produced nothing but a blank page when I tapped on them, apparently in a manner with which my tablet found irredeemable fault.  So I took my Nook to the Nook expert at the Barnes and Noble information desk, where her first response was “Hmmm”.  After that, she tried the same thing I’d tried about a dozen times, rebooting the device.  To my great relief, that had no effect.  To my eternal amusement, the Nook did do several things, including briefly visible warning messages and sudden shifts from the chosen page of text back to the desktop, all of which are routine occurrences for me when dealing with anything comprised of chips and LCD’s, but which prompted the young lady helping me to say, “Hmm…I’ve never seen a Nook do that before.”  Yeah, well, welcome to my world, lady.  In the end, she did do her magic, which involved archiving the chosen books back to the cloud and then re-downloading them.  She tried to explain all this arcane technology to me, and I explained to her that as long as she was available, I’d just return with any future problems…which will almost certainly occur.

Meanwhile, let’s briefly revisit the outrage of the week, the heinous Hobby Lobby decision.  It’s probably just a rumor, but I’ve heard there is consideration of changing the motto on the Supreme Court’s west facade from “Equal Justice Under Law” to “What Would Jesus Do?”  Truth in advertising and all that.  Unsurprisingly, the devout old men running Hobby Lobby are not nearly so offended by Viagra and vasectomies as they are by IUD’s and Plan B pills.  It may be because they never got to the chapter in their high school physiology classes that explained that the thing which Viagra facilitates is a necessary prerequisite for that which results in pregnancy…but more likely, they just figure that that’s the woman’s problem.  I wonder if there’s a biblical passage that reports Jesus’ thoughts on erectile dysfunction…”For thou with no iron or stiffness in thine rod are an offense unto the eye of God.”  Probably somewhere in Revelations.

BW

US Apparently Governed By 2000 Year-Old Goat Herders And 5 Guys Who Failed At High School Civics

Let me begin with a quote from Seth Rogen, because if the Supreme Court can base their interpretation of the Constitution on a book of fairy tales, I can base my world view on the wisdom of celebrities: “The people at Hobby Lobby are assholes and those who voted to let them be assholes are also assholes.”  I wish I’d said that, but it’ll have to be good enough just using it.

The Supreme Court’s decision that Hobby Lobby can deny certain types of birth control coverage to their employees based on Hobby Lobby’s deeply held religious convictions is wrong in principle, hurtful in application, and unconstitutional based on any reasonable interpretation of the original intent of the document.  And these are the jurists who are charged with that interpretation on a daily basis.  The fact that the Supreme Court, as it is currently comprised, can routinely get 5-4 majorities in cases like Hobby Lobby and Citizens United is sobering.  But what is terrifying is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote a brilliant dissent to the majority ruling, has stubbornly refused to resign despite her advancing age and two previous bouts of cancer.  Ginsburg’s actuarial chances of surviving another presidential administration are slightly less than my chances of a Pulitzer Prize during the same interval.  (If she survives and I get the award, I’ll happily admit that I was wrong.)  Meanwhile, those same actuarial geeks have predicted a 60% chance that the Senate will go Republican after the 2014 midterm elections…at which point the GOP will control both houses of Congress and Barack Obama will have zero chance of passing any legislative initiative (which is just a tiny shade less than he’s already had to this point) and zero chance of having any nominees approved, Supreme Court justices being high on the list.  There is a very real possibility that by 2016, there will be a 6-3 majority on SCOTUS that has a higher regard for the gospel according to Mark, Matthew, or Luke than the Federalist Papers of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay.

I imagine that will make a certain segment of the population absolutely ecstatic.  They are the folks who keep telling the rest of us that the USA is a Christian nation, and I’m beginning to believe them.  The rest of us, the realists and rationalists, the atheists and agnostics, the Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Wiccans and Buddhists, are basically staying in America’s guest room at the pleasure of our Christian hosts, and if they decide we all have to use one bathroom or the same towels from yesterday, well, it’s their house.  That’s not the way is was supposed to be.  Our Founding Fathers believed not just in freedom of religion, but in freedom from religion.  After centuries of abuse and subjugation at the hands of religious regimes in Europe, our experiment in democracy was supposed to be different.  We would be a nation of laws based on reason.  No particular set of religious beliefs would be granted any sway over any other set of beliefs.  That had already been tried in England and France and Spain and in the Roman Empire…and it was in large part the reason the earliest settlers of North America were refugees from religious tyranny.

What SCOTUS did was contrary to all that.  They said that a corporation’s religious beliefs can be imposed on employees who do not hold the same beliefs.  It’s a return to Victorian England…if you don’t like what your boss is dishing out, you have the freedom to not be employed, and if you end up in the poor house, it was your decision, not the fault of your employer’s unreasonable demands.

If this ruling stands, as it most certainly will for at least years, if not generations, there are a whole host of laws and regulations that could be challenged on religious grounds.  If Hobby Lobby or Chik Fil A is sickened and disgusted by same-sex marriage, they can deny spousal benefits even if the marriage is legal in whatever state the business resides.  Or if the Bible directs them to take concubines or slaves or beat their wives or children (all of which it does), they can make those conditions of employment.  The list is as long as your imagination or your worst nightmares.

I wish I had some kind of happy ending to blunt the indignity and unfairness of all this, but I can’t really find the silver lining in this cloud.  I simply predict storms ahead.

BW

God Help Us (Don’t Hold Your Breath)

Look, I don’t have a lot of time to write today, but in case a few of my loyal kibbitzers are checking in, I wanted to provide at least a little food for thought.  Here’s one article I happened across this morning, before I invested the rest of my day at a real estate broker’s open house (a topic for a future post):

Americans Would Rather Vote For A Philandering, Pot-Smoking President Than An Atheist One

This depresses the hell out of me, although it surprises me not one iota.  Americans would sooner vote for someone who believes in any kind of religious nonsense at all, Catholic, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, whatever, than a candidate who looks around him, evaluates the science and the evidence and the history, and makes the completely rational decision to reject the idea of our fate and our planet being controlled by a magical being in the sky who is omniscient and omnipotent, yet still gives us houseflies, anal carcinoma, and Justin Bieber, not necessarily in that order.  Out of sixteen variables surveyed, the one with the most negative connotation was atheism.  I’m pretty sure Americans would elect a pedophile serial murderer, just so long as he professed his surrender and devotion to his personal lord and savior, sooner than a rocket scientist with additional PhD’s in history and political science who also happened to not believe in god.

Which is how you get guys like Florida State Rep. Charles Van Zant (R), who declared that if Florida adopts Common-Core standards in education,   “unless this is stopped, will promote double-mindedness in state education and will attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can.” You can’t make this shit up.  Van Zant is clearly a moron, but he managed to get elected, and I’d be willing to bet the farm and the pension that he’s in church every Sunday as reliably as the sun rising over the eastern horizon.  God help us all…and good luck with that.

BW