[whiteperil] Sean: Thought experiment

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Posted by Sean:
Thought experiment
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1193824427.shtml


   I've never understood why more people don't seem to do [1]this kind of
   thought experiment:

     Imagine a woman â letâs call her Beth â who has been an unthinking
     atheist all her life, just because her family and her friends are
     too. One day, she decides to convert to Islam. As soon as she dons
     the hijab, her neighbours start to swear and spit at her in the
     street. A brick is thrown through her window; while she is
     sleeping, her car is torched. When she speaks out publicly, the
     death threats come. She is a âwhoreâ who will be âraped to deathâ.
     All the other converts to Islam are receiving the same threats.
     Some have been beaten. Some are on the run. When they approach the
     police, they are wary-to-hostile. The officers ask suspiciously:
     what have you been doing to anger these Muslim-bashers?
     If this was happening this way, it would â rightly â be a national
     scandal. There would be Panorama specials, front page fury and
     government inquiries into Islamophobia. But it is happening â only
     in the reverse direction.
     ...
     Women like Mina expose a hole in the stale logic of
     multiculturalism. She shows that secularism is not a 'Western'
     value: she thought of it all by herself, in a rural village in
     Iran. Yet the attitudes that lead to the persecution of apostates
     are widespread even within British Islam, because we patronisingly
     assume it is 'their culture' and do not challenge it.

   I don't agree with everything in Johann Hari's piece. His "basic
   atheist truth," that because holy books are in fact nothing more than
   the productions of flawed humans, they can be interpreted however
   believers please, overstates the case. Even taking into account the
   difficulties of understanding ancient languages and determining which
   passages "belong" in a sacred text, the resulting book says some
   things and does not say others. As civilization evolves and expands
   our understanding of the way life works, believers do stop taking some
   passages literally and repurpose them as metaphor or what have you.
   But that doesn't mean there isn't genuine, concrete wisdom in holy
   books that can't be waved away as "superstition" that is infinitely
   "elastic."
   I'm also, I must say, less hopeful than he that the "secular humanist"
   alternative will be alluring to many Muslims who are questioning their
   faith. I happen to think that belief in God is dodging unpleasant
   reality and that the wonder of life does not need to be legitimized by
   a transcendent, immanent personalityâbut that is not, to put it
   mildly, the way most people think, even those with a healthy level of
   intellectual skepticism. Judeo-Christianity at this point has a mature
   tradition of disinterested scientific inquiry, the separation of
   church and state, and tolerance of others' beliefs that make it
   possible for citizens to debate our differences without knives being
   drawn. Islam as a political force hasn't. In Western countries,
   conversion to Christianity is probably the obvious alternative for
   most Muslims who are alienated from the faith in which they were
   reared but don't want to dump their belief in an Amharic-ish God
   altogether. Those who think Islam can be reformed from within are not
   helped by condescending dismissals of barbarous behavior as a defining
   feature of their culture that needs husbanding.
   It could be argued that Hari is wrong about the racism bit, too. There
   are white Muslims in the Balkans and elsewhere, after all. But I
   suspect that he's far more right than wrong, given the prevalence of
   thinking like [2]this (via [3]Erin O'Connor):

     The [University of Delaware]'s views are forced on students through
     a comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment,
     from mandatory training sessions to "sustainability" door
     decorations. Students living in the university's eight housing
     complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings,
     and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The
     RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive
     training from the university, including a "diversity facilitation
     training" session at which RAs were taught, among other things,
     that "[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on
     the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term
     applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent)
     living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion,
     culture or sexuality."

   The issue here is with a university in the United States, not with
   European social-democratic functionaries. Even so, the animating
   principle is the same: non-white people are underprivileged in some a
   priori way and should get a pass. If you question that, you're the one
   with the funny ideas.

References

   1. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077651/goofs
   2. http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/8555.html
   3. http://www.erinoconnor.org/archives/2007/10/incompetence.html