Religion and Respect

I have been following with a lot of interest the protests and responses to the cartoons (you can see them here) of the prophet Muhammed that ran a few months ago in a Danish newspaper, the best places for information for me so far have been Andrew Sullivan's blog (especially see posts here, here, here, and here), and The Guardian newspaper out of Britain.

Part of the biggest travesty has been the conflation of a free press in Denmark with the Danish government, with Iran cutting trade ties with Denmark, the Danish embassy being torched in Lebanon, and Denmark's government having to go on the defense on behalf of a newspaper over which it has little control.

As well, Andrew Sullivan notes on his blog that the most incidiary of the cartoons never appeared in the West--it's a cartoon of Muhammed with the face of a pig that originated somewhere in the Middle East and has sparked the most outrage and anger.

A lot has also been made about what seems to be the hypocrisy inherent in the position of Muslims--newspapers in the Middle East, railing against the Danish cartoons, have, in general, had a history of depicting Jews in a not-so-favorable light...as foils for suicide-bomber appologists, as blood-stained nazis, as monkeys, etc.

Of course, the main point of contention with the cartoons of Muhammed is that his visage is considered sacred to Muslims and should not be rendered, let alone in caricature. The visages of Jewish people aren't so scared.

I do think that this divide indicates the greatest paradox of our time--the close proximities of populations (both culturally and economically) with vast chasms between their ideologies. As Ibn Warraq pointed out in a Der Spiegel essay, the moment presents a chance to make a stand against Islamic fascism in the West:

The cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten raise the most important question of our times: freedom of expression. Are we in the west going to cave into pressure from societies with a medieval mindset, or are we going to defend our most precious freedom -- freedom of expression, a freedom for which thousands of people sacrificed their lives?

A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth.

Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize.

As far as cartoons that sum up the situation, I think Steve Bell's does it best (from The Guardian today)...

My feelings to this whole mess as well as to religion in general can be summed up in this essay by the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn. He takes up the slippery notion of "respect" to show just how malleable the word is for those who demand it:

‘Respect’, of course is a tricky term. I may respect your gardening by just letting you get on with it. Or, I may respect it by admiring it and regarding it as a superior way to garden. The word seems to span a spectrum from simply not interfering, passing by on the other side, through admiration, right up to reverence and deference. This makes it uniquely well-placed for ideological purposes. People may start out by insisting on respect in the minimal sense, and in a generally liberal world they may not find it too difficult to obtain it. But then what we might call respect creep sets in, where the request for minimal toleration turns into a demand for more substantial respect, such as fellow-feeling, or esteem, and finally deference and reverence. In the limit, unless you let me take over your mind and your life, you are not showing proper respect for my religious or ideological convictions.

We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them. But once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational, we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it—not on account of their holding it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not that one. We would prefer them to change their minds. Or, if it is to our advantage that they have false beliefs, as in a game of poker, and we are poised to profit from them, we may be wickedly pleased that they are taken in. But that is not a symptom of special substantial respect, but quite the reverse. It is one up to us, and one down to them.

But equally perhaps ‘God exists’ functions largely as a license to demand respect creep. It turns up an amplifier, and what it amplifies is often the meanest and most miserable side of human nature. I want your land, and it enables me to throw bigger and better tantrums, ones that you just have to listen to, if I find myself saying that God wants me to want your land. A tribe wants to enforce the chastity of its women, and the words of the supernatural work to terrify them into compliance. We don’t like our neighbours, and it works if we say that they are infidels or heretics. This is religion used to ventilate and to amplify emotions of fear, self-righteousness, vengefulness, bitterness, hatred and self-hatred. If this is how the religious language functions, we on the sidelines should not want people to be using it, and we should not use it ourselves.

Blackburn goes on to differentiate between the various forms an expressive religion takes--belief, emotion, attitude.

I have said that holding a false belief does not give anyone a title to respect. Insofar as I cannot share your belief, I have no reason to respect you for holding it--quite the reverse in fact. But the same is not true of emotions. If I happen upon the funeral of a stranger, I cannot feel the same grief as the close relatives and mourners. But I don't think they are making any kind of mistake, or displaying any kind of fault or flaw or vice. On the contrary, we admire them for giving public expression to their grief, and if they did not show this kind of feeling they would be alien to us, and objects of suspicion...Peoples' emotions are important, and whether or now we can empathize with them, we do accord them time and space and a kind of shelter.

So why not then accord Muslims the respect their emotional response to secular, satirical depictions of a religious icon so dear to them that their religion imposes taboos on his representation? Because for blackburn,

Unfortunately it is a gross simplification to bring the essence of religion down to emotion. The stances involved are far more often ones of attitude. And it is a fraud to take the space and shelter we rightly offer to emotional difference, and use it to demand respect for any old divergence of attitude. The relevant attitudes are often ones where difference implies disagreement, and then, like belief, we cannot combine any kind of disagreement with substantial respect. Attitudes are public.

Suppose, for example, the journey up the mountain brought back the words that a woman is worth only a fraction of a man, as is held in Islam. This is not directly an expression of an emotion. It is the expression of a practical stance or attitude, that may come out in all sorts of ways. It is not an attitude that commends itself in the egalitarian West. So should we 'respect' it? Not at all. The case is the same as that of [the suicides in California that coincided with] the Hale-Bopp comet. I think it is a dreadful attitude and it is a blot on the face of humanity that there are people who hold it and laws and customs that express it.

As an atheist, I don't have a problem with a religious belief that a prophet should not be drawn or visually represented, as long as that belief is kept within the particular sect. As long as people in that sect have the freedom to associate or not, to belong or leave the sect, it is within its bounds to impose such a taboo. But as a non-member, I don't have to 'respect' it...I don't have to find it rational or worthy of my deference, and I do not have to respect it in practice (or non-practice), either. If I believe your belief in [intelligent design, sanctity of male-female marriage, no drawings of the Prophet) is determental to humanity as a whole, or irrational, or silly, I will say so. And I will transgress your taboo because it isn't mine.

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Posted by jason at February 7, 2006 11:09 AM