Jivani on Wokeness

 

My quibble is that Jivani himself resorts to racism to defend his position by characterising wokeness as "American." As though this is a rap against it.

The Crime of Cultural Appropriation

If  "cultural appropriation" is really going to be taken seriously, one of the first casualties will have to be Emily Carr (aka 'Klee Wyck'). It was her whole shtick.

The National Post has just run a truly demented piece lamenting cultural appropriation.

The piece’s hero, Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, is approvingly quoted as saying that “the Canadian cultural industry” has been “stealing … native stories as surely as the missionaries stole our religion and the politicians stole our land and the residential schools stole our language.”

The unspoken premise here, apparently taken to be self-evident, is that learning something new is a matter of losing something.

The solution to her concerns is obvious. Education is bad. Knowledge is bad. Why waste money on it? Stop educating aboriginals. And stop them relentlessly appropriating a foreign culture: ours. Canadian culture, which she has proudly identified herself as not a part of.

And we definitely should not buy and read any stories written by aboriginal writers. It is all a dark plot, evidently, to deprive us of our culture.

Note too the dishonest identification of the opposition as “the Canadian cultural industry.” The usual imaginary fat capitalists with diamond rings on every finger and in silk hats. The reality, of course, is that the targets here are Canadian writers and artists, generally not a terribly solvent lot. People who put up with a great deal of material self-sacrifice, on the whole, in the hopes of enriching the lives of the rest of us.

This is an attack on culture itself.

Peter Kulchyski, a doubtless poverty-stricken professor at the University of Manitoba, adds:

“By simply saying, ‘Oh we love your culture. We’ll have you dance during our Olympic ceremony. We’ll have you say a prayer before our meetings, but we haven’t actually substantively changed the fact that the economy is based on extraction from your lands, and we’re going to continue doing that,’ basically it becomes, at best, a hollow gesture and, at worst … your culture becomes something for sale.”

Right. No problem. No public money then should go to supporting aboriginal cultures. We wouldn’t want to convey the message that it was for sale. Government money should be only for supporting Canadian culture, and if aboriginal culture has declared itself not a part of it, it cannot and should not represent Canada.

Emily Carr, "War Canoes"

Problem solved. Everybody happy?

But note too the illegitimate claim here to others’ property. Kulchyski is not talking about mineral extraction on Indian lands, for which the reserve government is always well-compensated. They are even currently compensated, for no good or legal reason, for mining anywhere within hundreds of kilometers of a reserve. Kulchyski is suggesting that this is not enough: all Canadian land still belongs to Indian bands, despite the fact that they sold it long ago. And despite the fact that the bands are merely legal entities, corporations, their current membership bearing only arbitrary relation to the people who once held rights in those lands.

This may not be cultural appropriation, but it is certainly illegitimate appropriation of what belongs to others.

As to culture not being a thing for sale, excellent. From now on all books written by self-identified “aboriginal” authors, and all painting or sculpture by aboriginal artists, is free for the taking. It goes without saying, I guess, that no aboriginal person cares about money. 

Emily Carr, "Kitwancool"

No problem.

So what’s the beef about “cultural appropriation,” then? If anyone paid for it, that would be an insult, after all.

Keeshig-Tobias’s final word is “Your imagination comes right up to my nose, and if it goes any further, then I push back.”

An interesting use of the legal adage, ““Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.”

And telling here. Nobody’s imagination can possibly connect, after all, with Keeshig-Tobias’s nose. Unless you reject the entire point of the legal principle, she is in the wrong.

Rex Murphy, thankfully, has weighed in against this attempt at cultural larceny. Unfortunately, his defense is marred by an unfortunate ignorance of the culture he defends. This, by the way, from a Rhodes Scholar who studied at Oxford. It illustrates how badly we have neglected it.

He points out, rightly, that empirical science is a European invention, so that any aboriginal who avails himself of its benefits while complaining about appropriation of his own culture is a perfect hypocrite. But he confuses it by supposing everyone is Italian (and not bothering to check, either):

“Were this not so, the Italians, whose illuminati Galileo, Copernicus, Tyco Brahe, Kepler did so much to beget modern science, would have a case against every PBS special on the Cosmos for appropriating their science.”

There is only one Italian on that list.

Then he seems to think that Dante is not Christian:

“Virgil fed on Homer, Dante on Homer and Virgil. Milton, saturated with a knowledge of all three, with Paradise Lost re-imagined the epic in a Christian context.”

Ouch. Such an idea would not be possible to anyone who had the slightest knowledge of Dante--even as much as the titles of his major works. 

Dante's Inferno

We need better cultural education in this nation. We need more cultural appropriation on all sides. Obviously.

My own final word: who here is guilty of an illegitimate “cultural appropriation”? Only, and dramatically, those “aboriginal” artists who have the gall and the avarice to try to appropriate to themselves an entire culture they had nothing to do with: all the works and inventions of aboriginal artists and thinkers of the past.

Any honourable person must stand up and resist. It is, truly, a crime against humanity.

Again with Atttawapiskat

Traditional Ojibwe and Dakota homes.

Tristin Hopper writes an op-ed in the National Post to explain to us ignorant white folks why it is that Cree might not want to leave the blight of Attawapiskat. We cannot understand, because we are descended from immigrants, who of course did move for a better life.

Yeah. Unlike the Cree Indians, our ancestors had to give up our land. So we owe them something because theirs didn't?

Speaking of Europeans, she explains, “The gospel of 'just pick up and leave' is extremely foreign to your typical European.--be they Serbian, French, or Irish.”

Odd—if we are “white,” weren't our ancestors European? How did all those Europeans, 400 million or so at last count, get over here to North America, with nobody actually leaving Europe? How did we get to be descended from immigrants,, if there were none? One of life's little mysteries.

Famine Memorial, Dublin

My own ancestors are mostly Irish. Ask the Irish, if you will, about “just pick up and leave.” Within a space of ten years in the middle of the 19th century, about one third of the Irish population was obliged to do just that. Most of the rest just died in place. Anyone here heard of the Great Hunger? And the emigrant flow from Ireland to elsewhere has been thick and fast before and since.

But Hopper needn't ask the Irish. She could ask the Cree.

Hopper laments on behalf of the Attawapiskat Cree that they “share a country with some of the most fanatically nomadic people in human history.”

Right. And the Cree were not nomadic? Reporting to their French superiors in the early days of New France, Jesuit chroniclers noted that Cree villages were dismantled and moved at least every six weeks. I think the Cree once knew something about moving.

Drew Taylor, Indian playwright, is quoted as saying, “Cree communities are not RV parks, ready to uproot at a moment's notice.”

That's exactly how traditional Cree communities always worked.

Stewart Phillip, Indian political leader, is quoted as saying “We're not bison. We shouldn't be herded around on the whims of a racist nation.”

That's exactly what traditional Plains Cree communities did—moved with the bison. (And, of course, Canada is probably one of the least racist countries on earth.)

Joseph Boyden, Indian author, is quoted as saying “this idea of forcing people off the place where they've lived for thousands of years is not the way to move forward.”

Which place would that be? In the hundred years or so after the Hudson's Bay Company set up its first trading posts at James Bay, ancestors of the Cree spread from the area of Attawapiskat all the way to Peace River.

This is all an example of an eternal truth: when people commit to lie habitually, they tend to end up saying the exact opposite of the truth. This is because the truth becomes a danger to them. Always staying as far from it as possible feels like safety.

A guilty conscience also makes them tend to contradict themselves. As if subconsciously they wanted to be found out.

Letting in Christian Refugees

Yazidi refugee children in Iraqi Kurdistan, 2014.

This National Post piece to the contrary, of course Stephen Harper is right to give priority to Christian and Yazidi refugees from the Middle East. How can this possibly be controversial? Yet according to the piece, the Danish Refugee Council and Caritas, the Catholic charity, are refusing to help us with this.

First, as has been noted here before, there is no human right to be a Canadian citizen. Canadians have every right to pick and choose whom to let in.

We already do this, as does everyone. We give preference to those who are fluent in English or French. This ensures that they will find it easier to fit in. By the same token, we ought to give preference to Christians. Like it or not, Canada is a Christian country. We date our years from the birth of Christ. We take Sundays and not Fridays off. Christmas and Easter are national holidays. We put crosses on our mountaintops, and call our towns St. John’s. We have a lot of churches, many with excess capacity, and rather few mosques. All of these things make life more difficult and alienating for Muslim as compared to Christian immigrants. At the same time, members of non-Christian minority faiths should have relatively little problem adjusting, as their status in Canada will not be much different from that at home: Yazidis, Farsis, and Jews, for example. They too will probably find things easier here.

Of course, there is also that little matter of an ongoing genocide against non-Muslims in ISIS-controlled areas. The author of the NP piece makes much of the fact that the refugees are currently in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon, and therefore cannot for the moment be killed by ISIS. Of course they are; they are refugees. But they cannot stay there forever, and they are there precisely because ISIS is seeking to kill them. To refuse them priority is like refusing to let in Jews during the Nazi holocaust, on the grounds that, after all, someone else could take them just as well. One should not hear such arguments in this epoch.

I am doubly nonplussed by the attitude here of Caritas. Apparently, they do not want to help, because they do not want to be seen as encouraging Christians to leave their traditional lands in the Middle East. Yes, it is sad, in an abstract way, but isn’t a human life worth more than a plot of earth?

Harper’s move is also judicious for the obvious reason that, if we limit ourselves to Christians, Yazidis, and other non-Muslim minorities, we are guaranteeing that we will not be inadvertently letting in ISIS terrorists. This should be a consideration. No doubt, most Muslims are not ISIS sympathizers, although at the same time there seems to be little or no local constituency in Syria for an armed fight for liberal democracy. But all ISIS sympathizers are Muslims. And there is simply no other way to be sure.

For God’s sake, let them in.

Boys Don't Matter

Barbara Kay explains.

The Irish Canadian Hall of Fame

Joe Malone of Les Canadiens: scored the first goal in the NHL.

Writing in the National Post today, Terence Corcoran proposes that Canada should have an Irish-Canadian Hall of Fame, with Jim Flaherty as its inaugural inductee.

I think this is a fabulous idea. The Irish contribution to Canada, I believe, is under-appreciated—one hears far more about the French, the English, and the Scots. But more than this: a celebration of Irishness would encourage Canadian unity, since Irishmen have been prominent on both sides of the French-English language divide. Both Tom Mulcair and Peter Lougheed, for example, are ethnically Irish. The Irish could be an ethnic glue to keep Canada together.

I have a further suggestion: that the Irish Canadian Hall of Fame ought to be located in Gananoque, Ontario. Gananoque is a tourist town; it could use the attraction. It is a historically Irish area. And it is roughly equidistant from the three large historical Irish settlements (and major population centres) of Montreal, Toronto, and the Ottawa Valley.

To emphasise how important the Irish have been in the history of Canada, here is my own list of potential inductees. If you don't know who some of them are, consult my Irish-Canadian historical map for more information.

Joe Beef (Charles McKeirnan)

Irish Canadian Hall of Fame:

Thomas D'Arcy McGee
Jim Flaherty
Brian Mulroney
King Clancy
Red Kelly
Timothy Eaton
Mary Travers (La Bolduc)
Joe Beef
Gratton O'Leary
Fr. Bernard Lonergan
Stompin' Tom Connors
Edward Blake
Marshall McLuhan
Sam McLaughlin
Kate & Anna McGarrigle
The Leahys
Catherine and Mary Margaret O'Hara
Francis Collins
Robert Baldwin
Emily Murphy
Lorena McKennitt
Patrick Burns
Sir Guy Carleton
St. Brendan the Navigator
Edmund O'Callaghan
James Ready
Mother Barnes
John McLaughlin
Sir John Thompson
William Henry Drummond
Brian Moore
WP Kinsella
Alden Nowlan
Mack Sennett
Ruby Keeler
Mary Pickford
Thomas Ahearn
Charles Fenerty
Tommy Ryan
Aimee Semple McPherson
Joe Malone
Don Cherry
Bobby Orr
Ambrose O'Brien
William McMaster
Conn Smythe
Peter Lougheed
James Boyle Uniacke
Charles Allison
James Austin
John Bassett
Thomas E. Kenny
Paul Kane
Tim Horton
Emile Nelligan
Patrick Roy
Bishop Michael Power
Mac Beattie

Is that a Frying Pan, Or Are You Just Unhappy to See Me?

Slowly, the big lie about “wife abuse” is coming out. Barbara Kay wrote a column in the National Post last week pointing out something that has been clear for many years: studies consistently show wives are just as likely to abuse husbands as husbands are to abuse wives. (Kay also quoted the founder of the first women’s shelter in Britain as saying that for men, “Canada is the scariest country on the planet.”) The earlier studies that did not show this, and were trumpeted for years by feminists, were flawed in a simple, obvious, way: they interviewed women only. They never asked men.

The fact that there are hundreds of government-financed “shelters for battered women,” and none for men, is the most blatant example of sex discrimination imaginable. And the bias against men among social workers and in the courts on this score amounted and amounts to the state itself aiding, abetting, and matching blow by blow the abuse of men by any woman so inclined.

In response to Kay’s column, reader Amelia Elstub falls back on the last-line defense of the feminists (Letters, Feb. 28): the claim that, even if men and women are equally violent, women suffer more, because men are physically stronger.

Odd that this makes no difference, according to the same feminists, when hiring for the military, the police, paramedics, or the fire department. Yet we are properly to count it against men in court? The same act is worse when done by a man, because he is physically stronger? Would it also extend to two men—that the physically stronger is always the guilty party? Is that equal protection before the law? By the same logic, shouldn’t blacks get more severe sentences in such cases—as they tend to be more athletic than whites? It seems to follow.

In any case, ever since old homo erectus figured out a little gimmick called the tool, raw physical strength has been rather unimportant in violent altercations such as wars generally—albeit I suppose this probably was not in all the papers, and so might have been missed.

And indeed, in the typical, traditional home, who is more likely to know the exact locations at any given time of readily available heft-enhancers? Things like, say, rolling pins, mops, brooms, breakable glass bottles or porcelain vases, kitchen knives? Even power tools--who, after all, is home all day?

Those dwindling few of us old enough to remember the days before feminism, yet not too old to remember anything whatsoever, ought to be aware of the big lie. Did you, like I, grow up reading Sunday comics like Bringing Up Father? In that strip, you may recall, rolling pins and porcelain vases were regularly bouncing off Jiggs’s head, while Maggie shouted “Insect!” A popular toy based on the series was a Maggie doll complete with rolling pin.

Or Blondie? Wasn’t Blondie regularly dousing Dagwood with buckets of water to get him off the couch on his day off? Or Li’l Abner, whose Pappy Yokum often had a black eye and bandaged face from the firm discipline of Mammy? Or Barney Google’s rolling-pin-wielding Luweezy homing in on Snuffy Smith? Can you picture any strip showing the reverse, an armed man chasing a woman, or actually administering blows? Can you even imagine it?

The fact that it was comic does not mean it was common. But it does mean it was socially okay. Funny, even. But if a man injures a woman, it is a scandal. Showing a husband doing these things to a wife in a comic strip, then as now, would be unthinkable.

This may perhaps be proper; this may perhaps be best. There may even be valid reasons for extending to women now even more special privileges than they have historically had. Just as probably (or improbably) as that there may be valid reasons for a class system, or for favouring one race, creed, or colour over another.

But let’s not add dishonesty to discrimination, and insult to injury, by pretending it has any relation to “sexual equality” or (hideously illiterate phrase) “gender equity.”

It Must be My Fault

The December 26 posting on this site, “Saudi Apartheid,” which argued that women in Saudi Arabia are not really the victims of apartheid in the same sense as South African blacks, appeared also, in slightly amended version, in the letter columns of the National Post.

This prompted a response in the December 29 edition of that paper. The correspondent argued that no less august a body than Amnesty International had declared that Saudi women are oppressed.

An appeal to authority never a legitimate argument. But for my opinion of that particular authority, the reader might like to review the entry on this site titled “The Life Cycle of an Idealistic Organization,” and posted August 28, 2007.

The respondent also, inevitably, cited the recent case of a Shi’ite woman sentenced to 100 lashes as proof that women in Saudi Arabia are indeed discriminated against. (She does not note that the sentence was ultimately overturned; and does not realize that the men who raped her were not the man she was illicitly visiting.)

But this was not in fact a case of sexual discrimination at all, as I pointed out in the entry on this site titled “Saudi Lashings,” posted November 19, 2007.

The subtext here, I think, is a pervasive, almost unconscious assumption that women should not be held accountable for their own actions—the same attitude, indeed, that deems it proper to declare Saudi women “oppressed” for choosing to wear a hijab. If anything a woman does is somehow offensive to anyone, it must be the fault of the nearest man.

KKKrap from the National Post

The National Post has been running a four-part series by American author Danielle Crittenden on what it is like wearing an abaya. A remarkably trivial matter, to those of us who live in the Gulf—they could have interviewed anyone on the street here for the same material. Perhaps they think it does not count unless it is a “white” woman doing it. No matter. I know many European or North American expatriates who have chosen to wear abayas in these parts.

Worse, Crittenden seems to have no background in the matter. It seems profane to have someone with so little understanding of Islam representing herself in public as a devout Muslim. This week, Crittenden makes the appallingly bigoted comment that

“If I had chosen to walk about Washington in a white hood and sheets, rather than black ones, I doubt I would have encountered such universal politeness. And yet, what the Klan outfit represents to someone of African-American descent is exactly what the burka should represent to every free women.”

Right. And how many women have been lynched so far by men wearing abayas?

Crittenden misses the most fundamental of differences: it is women, not men, who wear the burka--voluntarily. Men are not permitted to wear it. But it was whites, not blacks, who wore the sheets of the KKK. Blacks were not permitted. If the parallel is otherwise apt, it is men, not women, who are oppressed by the abaya.

As indeed, in a sense, they are. The point is to avoid showing the female form—something most men enjoy. Conversely, members of the KKK could probably not be accused of enjoying the sight of a black. No; they wore the hood to conceal themselves, because this gave them greater power.

Crittenden misses another critical point. In the quoted passage, she is complaining that, in wearing the abaya, people are treating her too politely. But this is exactly why women wear the abaya. It gives them greater dignity. This is just what women, European women, have found here in the Gulf—when you wear an abaya, people treat you with more respect.

It seems unlikely that the point of the KKK, by contrast, was to promote greater respect towards blacks.

No; the difference between the abaya and the hood of a Klansman is the difference between black and white.

Religion and Morality

On May 18, writing in the National Post in defense of atheism, John Moore dismisses the moral argument in favour of religion. “This might be a compelling reason, were atheists any more prone to immoral or criminal behaviour than the general population,” he notes, “but that is not the case.”

But it is. It is very much the case, and so we indeed have a compelling reason, in his own terms, for religion. The evidence is strong that atheist and anti-clerical governments, at least, behave a lot less morally than those claiming some affinity with the universalist religions.

Similarly, the observantly religious fairly statistically have a higher level of personal morality than the general population. Many studies show this: one national US study found that frequent worship attendance corresponded closely with lower scores on a dishonesty scale that assessed, for example, self-serving lies, tax cheating, and failing to report damaging a parked car. A metastudy at the University of Pennsylvania suggested--duh!--that juvenile delinquent behaviour corresponded with low levels of religious commitment. And does anyone really think that, if you went into the prisons and asked inmates about their religious commitments before incarceration, you’d find a pack of Quakers?

Charities know better. Americans who never attend church give about 1.1% of their income to charity. Those who are weekly church-goers give 2.7%, and account for almost half (48%) of all charitable contributions.

This being so, the religious deserve some respect, if not support, from the rest of the population. Indeed, everyone else, regardless of their own beliefs, has a direct personal interest in encouraging others to be religious.

This being so, it counts heavily as well against Moore’s second point. Moore rejects the observation—made here recently—that atheists seem too angry, too actively hostile toward religion, not to suspect some ulterior motive beyond the mere quest for truth. “The larger issue,” Moore counters, “seems to be that many believers perceive the mere questioning of faith as inherently hostile.” But this is a man of straw, and an obvious one. Writers like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are not merely questioning religious faith. They are calling it a “delusion,” and saying it “poisons everything,” in the biggest print available.

This would be considered beyond the pale if one religious group suggested it in print of another. Atheists ought to be held to the same standards.

And it really does suggest that Dawkins and Hitchens are not content to merely explain their own position. They would rather like everyone else to believe likewise. As this is against the best interests not only of society as a whole, but even of themselves, we have a right to wonder why.

After all, if God does not exist, as Pascal pointed out, the consequences of believing or not believing are trivial. It is not as if anyone’s immortal soul were at stake.

No; their real point seems not to be that God does not exist, and he is a very bad fellow. Perhaps he is bad for allowing evil into the world. Perhaps. As often, he is a very bad fellow for expecting them to do things they do not really want to do. I cannot avoid the obvious observation that the current general ill-repute of religion follows in lockstep with the current general decline in personal sexual morality. The problem with God, really, is that he insists we cannot have sex with whomever we want, and then, if worst comes to worst, simply abort the child.

Which is to say, for expecting us to act morally at all times.

Aye, there’s the rub. Better to stick our fingers in our ears and loudly hum our little atheist songs.



Moore also rejects the argument that the lives of atheists are empty: “Of course this is untrue. You don’t need God to revel in Mozart, the company of family and friends, the enormity of the universe or the Earth around us.”

Of course? I am reminded of a short story by H.G. Wells, “In the Country of the Blind.” A mountaineer falls into a hidden valley in which all the inhabitants are stark stone blind. Remembering the proverb, “in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” he expects to be greeted as a king, even a god, for sharing with them his amazing knowledge.

Instead, they declare him insane.

So might it be for atheists trying to understand the religious.

Interestingly, those who find faith use just such terms: “I once was blind, but now I see.” “I saw the light.” “Enlightenment.” “Emerging from the cave.” “No longer through a glass, darkly.” And so on. Of course, atheists who were previously at least nominally religious can and do make the same claim at times. But at best, Moore cannot tell who has it right.

Even when I did not believe, I could see plainly something special in the faces of many who did: a certain radiance. I’m afraid I’ve never seen the same in the face of an atheist. It was obvious enough for me to wish I could myself believe, even when I did not. I find it hard to believe that Moore has never seen this himself.

But that, I suppose, is between John Moore and his non-existent maker.

"Hitchens is Not Great"--God

I wish I had more time to follow and comment on the continuing controversies in the National Post regarding atheism and religion. Work is too pressing—and too much fun. Not to mention a new addition to the family.

Christopher Hitchens’ new book, God is Not Great, was excerpted in serial two weeks ago, and it was an enjoyable read. Hitchens writes well. But his points seemed mostly predictable, familiar to anyone deeply interested in religions. Village atheist stuff, their thinness covered often by bombast. Or does he, methinks, like so many atheists, protest too much?

But in any case, it is the duty of this column to make some comment. So the editorially plural we will.

Let’s take “Abusing God’s Children” (National Post, 12 May, 2007)—Hitchens’ most direct attack, and grand finale. Hitchens begins by citing a Hasidic practice of sucking off a baby’s foreskin. He claims this has led in the case of one mohel to the spread of herpes and even to the deaths of two babies. He intones that “no New Yorker would permit atrocities against infants if not for … the foul practice being holy and sanctified.”

But in fact, fairly obviously, they would. There is an exact parallel here: the vaccinating of babies. This too has, in a similar small minority of cases, caused the spread of disease and even the death of some children. Yet this practice does not attract Hitchen’s censure.

Why? Because Hitchens believes in medical science; he does not believe in Hasidism. The risk, for him, is far outweighed by the potential gains, as understood by modern medicine.

Yet the Hasidic parents could and would say exactly the same thing. They believe in Hasidism, and the potential gains of undergoing this particular procedure—heaven itself—far outweigh the risks.

Hitchens’s point holds, in other words, only if you assume Hasidism is false. His reasoning is tautological.

In seeking to prohibit the one practice, however—circumcision for religious reasons--and not the other—vaccination; or, indeed, circumcision for medical reasons--Hitchens is showing religious intolerance—showing the sort of fanaticism in favour of one’s own world view for which he unfairly blames religions.

Hitchens goes on, even less logically, to blame religion for female genital circumcision. Here he misses the most vital point: female circumcision is not mandated by any major religion. It is a social custom, or indeed a local medical practice. This makes doubly ironic his claim that “No society would tolerate such an insult to its womanhood… if the practice were not holy and sanctified.” The same is true of Hitchens’ condemnation of “Hindu” child brides. Hitchens seizes on the fact that they are Hindu for a post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument: they must then be child brides because they are Hindus.

Leaving aside the question whether marrying young is objectively immoral, or merely a question of cultural prejudice on Hitchens’ part, does being Hindu and marrying young automatically mean Hinduism is the reason one is marrying young? Of course it does not. The practice is not called for by the Hindu religion. It is a matter of custom, economics, and practicality.

Going even further astray from the logically defensible, he then finishes by accuses the Catholic Church of child molestation. This is an even further stretch: the Catholic Church is vocally opposed to child molestation, and always has been. If a Catholic, or even a Catholic priest, is nevertheless guilty of the sin, does that make Catholicism responsible? By the same logic, if an American commits a crime, America and the American government is responsible. This is the sort of corporate guilt that other religious fanatics once used against the Jews.

Hitchens’ other excerpts are even weaker. On May 11, the featured chapter was “Joseph Smith’s Long Con,” in which Hitchens repeats the familiar claims of fraud against the founder of the Mormons.

There is no news here; all the information Hitchens presents was well known in the 1940s. He is wasting our time. Let’s assume, in order to cut to the chase, that all Hitchens says against Joseph Smith is true. That makes Smith rather precisely the religious counterpart to the nineteenth century’s many traveling snake-oil salesmen and medicinal mountebanks. All that distinguishes him, indeed, is his appeal to religious, rather than scientific, authority.

But if one patent medicine does not do what it claimed to do, and was marketed dishonestly, does that prove that medical science is a fraud? Of course not. And it is a double standard to judge religion differently. Hitchens merely believes, a priori, in science, and disbelieves, a priori, in religion.

On May 10, Hitchens argued that the prohibition against eating pork in Judaism and Islam is due to an attempt to prevent cannibalism rather than, as is commonly suggested in scientistic (not scientific) circles, to prevent trichinosis. This at least is a relatively novel theory; I think so too, and have advanced this possibility myself in the past.

But, in terms of Hitchens’ main point, so what? What bearing does it have on whether the practice is or is not divinely sanctioned? God is actually quite likely to be opposed to cannibalism, after all.

In the attempt, however, Hitchens reveals again his general ignorance of his subject. He is unaware, in the first place, that the cannibalism theory is not original with him, as he claims. He seems unaware that the Talmud does not prohibit the eating of pigs per se—a point he surely needs to address. It bans instead the eating of a very broad range of animals, which, apparently arbitrarily, includes pigs—along with most other animals. If the issue were pigs, per se, then why the broader restriction? Hitchens also tosses out as comparison “the now-lapsed Catholic injunction to eat fish on Fridays.” Again, Hitchens does not seem to have done the necessary research. There is no Catholic injunction to eat fish, and never was. The injunction is not to eat meat.

And it has not lapsed.

Hitchens also oddly supposes that a prohibition against eating them shows a hatred of pigs, while freely devouring them slathered with mustard expresses affection.

He must be fun on a date.

Hitchens ends with three conclusions: “religion and the churches are manufactured; ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it; …[and] religion is—because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs—not just amoral but immoral.”

Conclusion one he is not entitled to; he can have no idea in principle, for it requires proving a negative. But indeed, even if he could, so what? Some religions, like Buddhism, are quite happy to assert that they are man-made. Others are quite happy to assert that most or all others, saving themselves, are man-made. Hitchens seems simply or willfully unaware of this.

Conclusion two, any good Catholic would happily agree with. Hitchens again does not seem to be aware of this: religion holds that morality is objective, binding on all, and can be demonstrated by reason. It is, surely, the atheists and relativists who sometimes assert otherwise.

However, I am not clear what Hitchens means by saying morality “cannot be derived from” faith. This seems self-evidently false: it need not, but surely it can be, and demonstrably often is. Acknowledging we are all children of the one God goes a long way towards promoting an appreciation for the golden rule, to treat all other people as equal in worth to ourselves. Hitchens again seems to be drawing unwarranted conclusions, missing the distinct difference in meaning between “must” and “can.”

Leaving conclusion three: is demanding a divine exemption for one’s own practices and beliefs immoral? I think not. In social terms, this is merely the doctrine of human rights: the right to choose for oneself what to believe and the right to act on one’s conscience. And in individual terms, it is morality itself: standing on one’s beliefs and the practices they require.

No, it is refusing to do this, and refusing others the right to do this, that is immoral.

This is what Hitchens, ultimately, seems to want. He is, in the end, a fanatic.

There always seem to be proportionately far more fanatics among atheists than among the religious.