Where do you stand on the Bill Maher/Ben Affleck argument?

Great Debates
482

I’m not saying there’s nothing in it that can be construed as positive, but it wasn’t really groundbreaking. Part of the reason why the sermon is so susceptible to being refashioned today is because it wasn’t really seen as a very pivotal moment.

Unfortunately the question of whether Islam and Muhammad actually improved the situation of women in Arabia is not answerable as far as I know. There simply aren’t enough reliable sources of the pre-Islamic period. Islamic sources focus on female infanticide as a bad pre-Islamic practice but it is not clear whether this was just a practice of certain tribes, or only during certain times, or what position women who grew up actually had, etc. Certainly, in Muhammad’s time we find ample references to respected and outspoken women leaders, poets, and even a Prophetess (she eventually lost) among the Pagan Arabs. Not to mention that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, was already a very successful and independent businesswoman before Islam.

Everyone always focuses on Aisha when they argue about women in Islam, but the stories of the other women around Muhammad are more telling and at times they are very tragic. If you ever want to get super depressed, do some research on ‘those who your right hand possesses.’

I should also clarify that when I said the Ibn Ishaq version was probably the best, I meant the most widely accepted in classical sources. Whether it’s actually reliable or not is hard to say; I think Shia have a different version.

The story of the Catholic Church in Korea is notable because it wasn’t started by foreign missionaries; Christian texts were brought in from China and some people studied them and converted before ever meeting a priest.

The book is Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things.

Here is part of the blurb from the Amazon page:

[QUOTE=Amazon]
Ann Taves shifts the focus from “religious experience,” conceived as a fixed and stable thing, to an examination of the processes by which people attribute meaning to their experiences. She proposes a new approach that unites the study of religion with fields as diverse as neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, and psychology to better understand how these processes are incorporated into the broader cultural formations we think of as religious or spiritual.

…

Religious Experience Reconsidered demonstrates how methods from the sciences can be combined with those from the humanities to advance a naturalistic understanding of the experiences that people deem religious.
[/QUOTE]

[quote=“Contemporary_Logic, post:481, topic:700589”]

Here’s an interesting video I found of Neil deGrasse Tyson on dogma. I don’t agree with his premise about the scientific elite not believing in god; Therefore, you’re wasting time convincing anyone else about it. Science and philosophy are two different fields of study. However, he distinguishes between religious belief and dogma from authority very well.

[/QUOTE]

It’s interesting how Tyson differentiated holding to personal dogma and trying to base policy on dogma. But this does illustrate my point that terms like “dogma” aren’t very helpful when we expand our view. For example, the way the Catholic Encyclopedia defines dogma relies on a spiritual framework that wouldn’t be intuitive to many Hindus, historically.

Thanks for that video, though. Except for wondering why Tyson would think that top scientists would know more about religion than the average person or more obviously a religious studies academic, it was interesting to hear him expand on this.

483

Last night on Bill Maher’s show (I’m still a big fan of his show), he said “Islam wanted to kill Salman Rushdie” (or something very similar). This is the kind of thing he’s wrong about – Islam didn’t want to kill Salman Rushdie. Many Muslims did, but not the entire religion. Many (maybe most) Muslims did not want to kill Salman Rushdie. It’s wrong and bigoted to say things like this – equivalent to “Jews want to control the world”, “Jews want to control all the money”, “Christians want to kill all the Muslims”, “black people want to kill white people”, etc.

484

I don’t think that’s a fair criticism, as Maher clearly doesn’t literally believe that all Muslims wanted to kill Rushdie on behalf of their religion. It’s the kind of oversimplified statement one makes in the heat of debate, and IIRC the debate was really heated at that point because panelist and Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal was rather viciously attacking him at that point. By the same token, I’m sure Maher would agree that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful; his point is simply that, as I alluded to in an earlier post, among the major religions Islam is uniquely prescriptive about barbaric acts of violence and precepts of Sharia law which a non-negligible number of its fundamentalist adherents take seriously.

At the point that Jebreal started attacking him, Maher had just finished what I thought was a masterful commentary on the Berkeley controversy – where a bunch of students decided they wanted to disinvite him from giving their commencement keynote in December because of his position on Islam (video here). His basic theme was that it was a free speech issue, ironic inasmuch as the venue was one of the nation’s most liberal universities celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Berkeley free speech movement – as Maher put it, addressing the students, “my reputation isn’t on the line – yours is.”

Slight digression about Jebreal’s attack on Maher: all I can say about her is that she was a very poor representative for her beliefs (which she claimed to be some sort of “secular Islam”): she was graceless, humorless, relentlessly aggressive, and essentially accused Maher of being a racist bigot equivalent to an anti-Semite. She made arguments completely devoid of logic, like that the students would have no opportunity to refute his “one-sided” commencement address – as if he planned to talk about Islam (he doesn’t; he wants to talk to the students about life) and as if a commencement address was supposed to be some kind of debate. She accused Maher of never allowing conflicting viewpoints on his show (his response was priceless: “you’re here!”). And she just wouldn’t shut up. And when Eva Longoria joined the panel later to talk about exploitation of immigrant workers by American farmers, Jebreal sarcastically asked if the farmers were Muslim. Besides slamming Maher and undercutting his commentary about Berkeley on his own show, that was pretty much her only contribution as a panelist for the entire show.

Sorry for the slight rant, but I was shocked by the amount of vitriol this woman was spewing in defense of Islam, and I was impressed by Maher’s ability to get himself together and gracefully carry on with the rest of the show.

485

You’re probably right, but he says things like this quite frequently, from my memory.

and that he makes all the time, without admitting that it’s false. When challenged on specific statements like this that indict Islam as a whole, he’s responded with things like “but it’s true – these are facts!”… and obviously it’s not a fact that Islam wants to kill Rushdie.

I didn’t particularly like the way she was arguing, but I wouldn’t characterize it as vicious.

The only uniqueness, in my view, is that a higher (but still small) portion of Muslims commit violence or support mass violence than other religions. I don’t think this tell us anything at all about Islam as a whole.

I don’t really think this is a free speech issue – students have the right to protest and tell their university “Bill Maher shouldn’t give this speech”… that’s not shutting down anyone’s free speech. Bill can say what he wants. I hope he speaks there, and I probably wouldn’t protest against it, but I don’t think students who say “I don’t want you giving this speech, Bill” are opposing free speech in any way. If they say “no one should be allowed to say these things in public”, then that’s shutting down free speech, but I don’t think that’s what most of them are saying.

486

Well, when he says things like that – like for instance “Islam will kill you if you try to leave” – I understand it to mean that Islamic scripture prescribes death for infidels, which is in fact true, and that, as I said, some non-negligible number of fundamentalists actually believe it literally. I think that over-analyzing the commentary of someone who is, after all, a comedic political commentator is a bit disingenuous. I’m sure no one parses those comments literally.

I think basically it is. The students are essentially saying that when someone like Maher speaks against Islam, then that person will be shunned, boycotted, disdained, and they will refuse to have anything to do with them in any capacity. Remember that this is supposed to be a commencement speech, not some pontification on Islam. I very much doubt that Islam or any other religion would even be mentioned. The students are declaring that they don’t want someone like Maher to ever be in the same room with them because of things he has said. So the message to others is that they better not say those things or they’ll get the same treatment. And that message is coming from the supposed epicenter of American liberalism. The fact that the university overruled the students seems to indicate that the students made a rather immature misjudgment.

487

True in the same sense that Christian and Jewish scripture proscribes death for heathens, and supports slavery, etc.

I think plenty of people believe such statements literally. When Maher says “these are facts”, I take it to mean that he believes, as a fact, that Islam wants to kill Salman Rushdie.

Some students probably believe this, but I see no evidence that most of the protesters/petitioners support this.

I don’t think so, and unless you have a cite, this just sounds like conjecture.

Many of the students may well have made an immature misjudgement, but I don’t think “we don’t want Maher giving the commencement speech” is necessarily contrary to the principle of liberalism or free speech in general.

488

I don’t buy it. Maher has made similar nonsense claims when he was speaking from his script. He acts as though he believes that bullshit and that he believes it to be fact and he is too lazy or too traumatized by the WTC/Pentagon attacks to even make an effort to see how wrong he is.

It is not even a matter of “some Muslims” wanting to kill Rushdie. The whole Rushdie affair was a political ploy* by Khomeini who used the fact that he (Khomeini) had a number of followers who would take his views as true, in the same way that Murdoch can assume that a number of people in the Fox audience will believe his nonsense, and used that to create a rallying point for his particular rants against the Great Satan and the West. After around ten years “in hiding,” Rushdie has been living openly for around fifteen years with no one trying to kill him. Maher seems to be just trying to emulate Khomeini and Murdoch by telling lies to lead certain people to his side of the argument.

  • The Satanic Verses received reviews ranging from tepidly accepting to firm approbation in the Muslim press (even in Iran) when it was published. It was only months later, after Khomeini encountered a scandalized Indian Imam’s outrage, that he recognized its propaganda value and issued his fatwa.
489

Many people died as a direct result of Khomeini’s fatwa. To downplay that with a foolish comparison to Rupert Murdoch is morally questionable. He has done nothing close to ordering the murder of innocent people. And I question that people would be willing to murder just because Rupert Murdoch ordered it.

490

Murdoch propaganda was instrumental in getting the support GWB needed to invade Iraq and his propaganda continued to support the lie that Hussein had anything to do with the WTC/Pentagon attacks for years, when it was always obvious that those were lies.

I see no reason to cut Murdoch any slack.

491

No, this misreads the situation completely.

First, there are many critics of Islam who do not receive the same treatment, because their criticism is fact-based and civil. When Maher says “women who have dated an Arab man, the results aren’t good,” or says that women can’t vote in most Muslim countries, he is being a lying bigot.

And second, they are not shunning him for all purposes. The leaders of the boycott said it would be fine if he wanted to speak to a student group on campus. What they oppose is honoring him as a commencement speaker. That isn’t problematic as a free speech issue at all.

492

Rula Jebreal was very instructive. She taught me that a woman can be absolutely beautiful and deeply ugly at the same time, not to mention profoundly stupid.

I think she was trying to elevate her brand by becoming part of the Affleck-Harris-Maher debate. Amazingly, Maher let it happen. As did the other panelists. The issue on the table was Maher’s invitation to speak at Berkeley and the fact that some students want him disinvited. Maher’s monologue on this point was excellent. And the beautiful, ugly birches’ response was to mainly try to rehash the debate from week’s before. When pressed some about the actual topic, her reasoning was that the student’s were doing the right thing because they wouldn’t have a chance to argue against Maher’s points about Islam, which shows her deep, deep stupidity.

First, by their very nature, commencement speech’s are monologues, not dialogues. And they’re not debates. Someone with success in life is asked to share some nuggets of wisdom about how or what it means to be successful in life. But if someone’s advice is controversial, students can, in fact, write, blog, etc. about it after the fact.

Second, there is zero indication that Maher’s speech would even remotely touch upon the debate about Islam. Very likely Maher it will be about not being part of the herd, the benefits of bongs over joints, and maybe some general point about atheism and rational thought.

She hijacked the show and Maher looked like he felt like he really couldn’t defend himself. I think he was surprised that she did this and he didn’t want to be rude to her. I wish he would have just slapped her down: "Look, this is my show and I choose the topics. You weren’t on the show when Sam Harris was when what you want to talk about was the topic. Sorry. The topic on the table now is the blaring irony and hypocrisy of students at Berkeley wanting a commencement speaker disinvited because they don’t like his stance on one particular issue—one that will not even be part of the commencement speech instead.

This is one beautiful and ugly woman. She couldn’t smile for the rest of the show. Not even as Maher was signing off, she just sat there steaming. Which I did find both funny and gratifying.

But, I must repeat, Jabreal is one beautiful woman. I’d love to spend a night in the sack with her. but I think I’d wear a Sam Harris mask.
And one note about Wesley Clark. I know this guy has a very impressive resume. I think he even graduated first in his class at West Point, which is no small feat. But I’ve never seen this guy make any point where he didn’t appear to be a soft-headed dolt. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but regardless of the point he is trying to make, he always comes off to me as having an IQ of about 100. Weird.

493

This is becoming a bigger argument than I really wanted to get into on this subject; mostly, I just like Bill Maher and enjoy his style of humor and the intelligent discourse on his show, and I think he’s being a bit unfairly attacked. I think he’s got some valid points about Islam if one interprets them in the proper context, rather than pouncing on a literal interpretation of a joke or a mistaken fact here or there. So with that perspective in mind, herewith a couple of responses.

But as iiandyiiii said, not all students have the same views of where Maher would or would not be acceptable, so it’s not fair to assume they all speak with one voice. And calling Bill Maher a “lying bigot” is completely over the top – which is not to say he might not occasionally get a fact wrong, or engage in intentional comedic hyperbole (many dislike his sarcastic wit – personally I enjoy it – across the board, on all topics!). But to accuse him of being a “lying bigot” requires evidence of a systemic pattern of such behavior, and I haven’t seen it. I’ve never heard him say “women can’t vote in Muslim countries” – that sounds like a misreading of his remarks on Sep 26 when he said “Saudi women can’t vote, or drive, or hold a job, or leave the house without a man. Overwhelming majorities in every Muslim country say a wife is always obliged to obey her husband.”

The basis of my remark that the students – at least those who drafted the petition – simply don’t want Maher around because they don’t like what’s he’s saying is based on things like this directly from the petition:

That sure sounds to me like they don’t want him around, period, because they don’t agree with him. Honestly, to me it’s reminiscent of some of the radical student extremists of the 60s. Their examples of Maher’s supposed “bigotry” sometimes verge on the bizarre, like the one where he simply criticizes religions in general, or the last one where he is quoted as saying that America seems to be evolving values where “…sensitivity is more important than truth, feelings are more important that facts”. One can agree or disagree with that, but how is it “bigotry”? Do these kids even understand what “bigotry” means? And they seem to be practically going out of their way to prove that Maher is right.

That said, we all understand that a commencement is supposed to be a positive experience, not a controversy. So does Maher – he said as much on his show. Do the kids imagine that Maher is going to use the commencement as a platform for some Islamophobic tirade? Do they imagine that he’s that one-dimensional and shallow? The man isn’t stupid, and if he wants a platform he has his own show, for heaven’s sake! So it wouldn’t be at all necessary to say, “hey, Bill, we’re going to keep this positive, right?”, but how hard could it be to say it anyway? Problem solved. But they want to ban the guy as some kind of dangerous bigot. And this is NOT a free speech issue? It’s certainly an issue of intolerance and prejudice against speech.

It’s quite possible that Iran’s ruling clerics tried to politicize the events around Salman Rushdie and Satanic Verses, and I don’t know enough about it to argue otherwise. It’s even possible that the guy who accidentally blew himself up in London allegedly building a bomb to kill Rushdie – taking out two floors of a London hotel in the process – was perhaps targeting someone or something else, although the Lebanese “Mujahidin of Islam” claimed it was against Rushdie, and there is a shrine to the guy in Tehran honoring him as “the first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie”. Regardless, there is little question that many death threats were made against Rushdie and those who had worked with him, bookstores were firebombed, Rushdie’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death in 1991, his Italian translator seriously injured in a stabbing that same year, his publisher in Norway was shot in an assassination attempt in 1993, and his Turkish translator Aziz Nesen subject to such violent protests that it led to the Sivas massacre and the deaths of 37 people. And similar things happened in response to the well-known incident when a cartoon depicting Mohammed was published in a Danish newspaper; both the cartoonist and the newspaper were subject to both actual and planned attacks, western embassies were attacked, and at the height of protests in early 2006, the New York Times reported that violent protests over this issue had resulted in 200 deaths worldwide.

The perennial question that seems to arise is whether Islam is itself a fundamental cause of this, or whether other factors like primitive conditions and backward repressive governments engender those kinds of beliefs and actions – a sort of chicken-and-egg conundrum. Personally I don’t think it’s that simple or that it’s even a useful question. I think it’s clear that the two things reinforce each other in a kind of deadly synergy, and neither is entirely blameless. The events themselves certainly center around religious belief.

494

Fine. But if some minority of students opposes Maher speaking at commencement for the wrong reasons, so what? I’m sure a minority of students opposes every commencement speaker ever for the wrong reasons. This whole hullabaloo is about the organized protest against Maher, and the people speaking on behalf of that campaign took an absolutely free-speech-supportive position, which to reiterate is simply that the university ought not honor Maher by giving him the commencement speech. Choosing to honor or not honor someone because of the political views is simply not a free speech issue. Indeed, the fact that the planned speech would probably have nothing to do with Islam only underscores the point that the commencement protest is not about free speech.

Please note that I said “When Maher says . . . he is being a lying bigot.” That’s quite different from how you’ve interpreted it. The comment about Arab men is pretty much textbook bigotry. And the incorrect information about Muslim women voting is false. I guess it might not be a lie, since we don’t know his intent.

(The comment about women voting was widely reported at the time. I can’t find a video clip, but a google search of “in Arab countries – in 19 of 22, they can’t vote” turns up lots of sources. As you say, he may just have flubbed his facts on that one. But the perception is that his opinion in Muslims takes precedence over his concern for the facts, and this is just one instance.)

495

I like him too. I like his show and I agree with many (possibly even most) of his views. I think some of the attacks might be unfair. But he has said things that are bigoted – “Islam wanted to kill Rushdie” is both incorrect and bigoted. Not the end of the world; and it doesn’t necessarily make him a bigot, but these and other things he’s said are indeed bigoted.

The bigoted things he’s said aren’t restricted to Islam, or even religion in general. When he says that he wishes that Obama would ‘embrace his black side’ and act more ‘gangsta’, that’s pumping up stereotypes (and negative stereotypes!). I’m sure he’d say it’s just a joke, which is fine – but it’s a (mildly) bigoted joke.

And this seems pretty easy to answer – pretty much ever major religion, including Christianity, has gone through significant periods in which a large amount of world violence and brutality was committed by its adherents in the name of their religion. I see no reason to believe that this violence committed by Christians hundreds of years ago is any more or less representative of some “true” version of Christianity than violence committed by Muslims today is of some “true” version of Islam. So Islam is not the fundamental cause of violence. Particular, specific interpretations of Islam, such as Wahabbism, contribute to it, just as the particular brand of Christianity followed by the Inquisition and Crusaders contributed to the violence they committed. But Islam as a whole is not a fundamental cause of violence, just as Christianity as a whole is not (and was not) a fundamental cause of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and various other atrocities committed by Christians in the name of their religion.

496

This gets trotted out a lot, but ignores a very important fact, i.e., that the world has become less ignorant over time. Burning witches was dumb enough in its day, but doing so today is exponentially dumber. One of the benefits of living in todays world is that we benefit from the cumulation of learning that preceded us. Also, we are more aware of other cultures, and they can be sued as a mirror to reexamine our own. The degree to which we might forgive some sort of barbarism of an isolated tribe living in the Amazon, we extend to past cultures who were living in more ignorant times. So, to equate the barbarism of Islam today with similar level of barbarism hundreds, or thousands of years ago leaves out a very important factor.

Do this thought experiment: imagine going back to thousand years and looking at the most barbaric acts in the name of Christendom, and imagine polling the people of that time from other cultures. How “odd”/"“unacceptable” do you think people of that century would find acts like killing all males in the village after conquering it? Stoning an adulterer? Raping women and young girls of the villages you’ve sacked? Turning a conquered people into slaves? Killing someone who has seizures…or making them a priest?

Such comparisons make no sense. At best they say nothing. At worst they tend to excuse horrific behavior.

497

The world overall has, but not necessarily everyone in it.

I don’t think so, especially because it’s not the “barbarism of Islam”, it’s the “barbarism of specific interpretations/schools of thought within Islam”. Among those specific interpretations and schools of thought, I believe the ignorance is just as high as it was hundreds of years ago.

Among the modern proponents of violence and brutality among specific groups within Islam? I think the answers to these questions would comparable for them to the answers from those barbaric Christians of the past.

I think they make perfect sense – modern Wahabbist terrorists are just as ignorant as the Christian Crusaders of the past, in my view. They may know a bit more chemistry, but in knowledge about morality and ethical behavior, they’re as ignorant as any group in history.

498

You fellas seem to be arguing that morality is based on knowledge. Is that so?

499

You’ll note that the portion I quoted which contains the main argument of the petition states that “… [Maher] has no respect for the values UC Berkeley students and administration stand for…” which is manifestly false as most of us would agree that Maher has been onside with Berkeley’s style of liberalism for practically forever, and moreover the administration clearly disagrees and overruled the students’ decision. So the whole thing begins with a false premise, for starters – or at least one that is grossly overstated.

Secondly, you’ll note that the short excerpt I quoted contains the word “dangerous” twice. They don’t seem to be concerned with whether he deserves an “honor”, they seem obsessed with the fact that the guy is “dangerous”. When someone starts talking about speech being “dangerous”, what does that remind you of?

Thirdly, even if it really was an “honor” issue, I disagree with the concept of blacklisting someone just because you don’t like a particular thing he said. That, to me, demonstrates a lack of respect for the principles of free speech and intelligent debate. I don’t think that this means anything goes; I wouldn’t want a mendacious shrew like Ann Coulter giving a commencement address, or indeed on campus at all, since her entire career consists of basically making up vapid lies for the benefit of the feeble-minded, but it’s absurd to suggest that such a judgment should be made against Maher. In the students’ position, I’d have no trouble with a sane articulate conservative like David Frum give a commencement, despite the fact that I disagree with him on almost everything, nor would I have a problem with someone like Reza Aslan who is a strong defender of Islam – because these people have a brain and might have something interesting to say even if I didn’t agree with it. Maher would not only be interesting but would also be funny – a bonus! And, ironically, virtually all his values would be much the same as the students’. Trying to ban him over this one issue is simply the worst kind of petty intolerance exaggerated out of all reason.

500

Maybe I’m the one that’s confused. Is there some indication that whoever drafted that represents the same students who voted to rescind the invitation to Maher? I agree with you that the language of that petition is troubling and suggests that the author has some illiberal ideas about speech and political differences.

I think the argument you’re making here, which I largely agree with, is several steps removed from “free speech” as we normally understand the term.

For starters, it is very clearly not a free speech issue in the ordinary sense–that is, a constitutional right guaranteeing certain protections from government censorship of speech. A public university has no legal obligation to invite or not dis-invite any particular commencement speaker. It can use any basis it wants to do so.

So we’re necessarily talking about some more vague principle, presumably something like a willingness to let opinions you disagree with be aired. But that too doesn’t apply since we all agree that Maher wasn’t going to speak about Islam and he has a huge platform to do so. The attempt here was not about censoring speech criticizing Islam in this forum, much less generally.

So we’re at like third-degree metaphorical free speech when you say it violates the principle to treat someone differently (not honor them) because of their political opinions. But now you’re far enough away from real free speech that you concede that this principle is basically ad hoc–that is, you concede some people should be treated differently because of their political opinions. You mention Coulter, but we could make a very long list indeed that would no doubt receive universal agreement (such as the KKK).

That transforms the issue into merely where you draw the line in considering someone’s offensive speech when determining whether to honor them. I can’t deny that the principle of tolerating diverging opinions plays a role in that assessment, but I cannot agree that the decision not to honor Maher necessarily means that the proponents of that are not in favor of tolerating diverging opinions. They may well draw the line for what is deserving of honor slightly differently from where you draw it, implicating no free speech issues whatsoever.

501

Morality is at least partly based on knowledge, in my view – understanding of history, gender, the nature of various religions, human nature, etc., are necessary for a mature and fully developed system of morality.