UN to censor critics of Islam

February 14, 2009 at 4:30 pm (ethics, social justice)
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Too often, Islam presents a disturbing (violent, repressive) face to the world. Islam’s vehement opposition to free speech is one of the symptoms that causes me concern:  for example, the absurd over-reaction to the Danish cartoons.

(To be clear, I didn’t approve of the cartoons, which gratuitously mocked Mohammed and stereotyped Islam. Nonetheless, it’s absurd to respond violently to a cartoon. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but cartoons will never hurt me.)

Muslim countries, by virtue of their aggressive campaign against any opposition to Islam, have cowed international institutions like the United Nations. Hence the grossly distorted condemnations of Israel at Durban.

Johann Hari alerts us to the latest development:  the UN’s Rapporteur on Human Rights has been mandated to seek out and condemn the “defamation of religions and prophets”.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated 60 years ago that “a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief is the highest aspiration of the common people”. It was a Magna Carta for mankind — and loathed by every human rights abuser on earth. […]

Starting in 1999, a coalition of Islamist tyrants, led by Saudi Arabia, demanded the rules be rewritten. The demand for everyone to be able to think and speak freely failed to “respect” the “unique sensitivities” of the religious, they decided — so they issued an alternative Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. It insisted that you can only speak within “the limits set by the shariah [law]. It is not permitted to spread falsehood or disseminate that which involves encouraging abomination or forsaking the Islamic community”.

In other words, you can say anything you like, as long as it precisely [matches? — Hari has left a word out of the sentence] what the reactionary mullahs tell you to say. The declaration makes it clear there is no equality for women, gays, non-Muslims, or apostates. It has been backed by the Vatican and a bevy of Christian fundamentalists.

Incredibly, they are succeeding. The UN’s Rapporteur on Human Rights has always been tasked with exposing and shaming those who prevent free speech — including the religious. But the Pakistani delegate recently demanded that his job description be changed so he can seek out and condemn “abuses of free expression” including “defamation of religions and prophets”. The council agreed — so the job has been turned on its head. Instead of condemning the people who wanted to murder Salman Rushdie, they will be condemning Salman Rushdie himself.

Anything which can be deemed “religious” is no longer allowed to be a subject of discussion at the UN — and almost everything is deemed religious. Roy Brown of the International Humanist and Ethical Union has tried to raise topics like the stoning of women accused of adultery or child marriage. The Egyptian delegate stood up to announce discussion of shariah “will not happen” and “Islam will not be crucified in this council” — and Brown was ordered to be silent. Of course, the first victims of locking down free speech about Islam with the imprimatur of the UN are ordinary Muslims. […]

As the secular campaigner Austin Darcy puts it:  “The ultimate aim of this effort is not to protect the feelings of Muslims, but to protect illiberal Islamic states from charges of human rights abuse, and to silence the voices of internal dissidents calling for more secular government and freedom.”

I’m disappointed by the statement, “It has been backed by the Vatican and a bevy of Christian fundamentalists.” Christians should not support a crackdown on freedom of speech.

I’m with Francis Shaeffer, who said that Christians (and people of other faiths) must learn to compete in the “free marketplace of ideas”. In other words, let everyone say their piece. Let everyone muster their most persuasive arguments.

The public can separate truth from falsehood, and distinguish words that build up from words that tear down.

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Success redefined

December 29, 2008 at 2:14 pm (ethics, inspiration, synoptic Gospels)

The Globe and Mail has chosen Canada’s 2008 nation builder:  Jean Vanier.

Jean VanierM. Vanier was instrumental in changing the way that mentally handicapped people are cared for. In L’Arche communities, founded by M. Vanier, volunteers live round the clock with the mentally handicapped people they serve.

M. Vanier is a devout Roman Catholic. It seems to me that L’Arche (= “the ark”) follows a monastic model of ministry:  devoting one’s entire life to carrying out God’s work in a community set apart from the way people ordinarily live.

The L’Arche model is certainly rooted in the Gospels:  specifically, in Jesus’ admonition to serve “the least of these, my brethren“. Vanier tells the Globe and Mail that he wants to announce a message:

That people who are weak have something to bring us, that they are important people and it’s important to listen to them. In some mysterious way, they change us. Being in a world of the strong and powerful, you collect attitudes of power and hardness and invulnerability. [… But] it is vulnerability that brings us together.”

Vanier maintains that we need to redefine success:

Recently, a couple came to him with their one-and-a-half-year-old son, who had an undiagnosed disorder and screamed incessantly. Mr. Vanier asked the mother how she was, and she muttered, “Okay.” He asked the father, a military man, the same question. “Sometimes,” the father said, “I want to throw him out the window.”

Mr. Vanier leans forward in his chair. “And I said to him, ‘I understand. I’ve lived the same thing.’”

He is referring to Lucien, a severely handicapped man who used to live with him and whose endless shrieking began with his mother’s death and rarely stopped. Mr. Vanier often returns to Lucien in his writing: Suffering through that noise helped him understand not only his own limitations but what the families of disabled people must go through, isolated as they often are.

“It obviously penetrated through all my protective systems and awoke anguish, and I could see violence within me,” he says. “If I hadn’t been in a community, I don’t know what I would have done.”

Lucien died a few years ago; his screaming never ceased entirely. It is easy, when hearing this story, to understand why L’Arche is always facing a shortage of volunteers. Most people would find such a life too taxing to endure.

What Mr. Vanier finds surprising is that very often it’s the volunteers’ parents who don’t want them to work at L’Arche.

“Parents will say, ‘We gave you education, university, and now you want to live with these people?’” […]

This leads to one of the cornerstones of Mr. Vanier’s philosophy, which is essentially that we’ve lost track of the different ways to measure a successful life. [… Vanier muses,] “How to find a world where the essential thing is to work for peace, to work to build something together?” […]

One of those who came and stayed was Cariosa Kilcommons. Disillusioned with her pre-med studies, Ms. Kilcommons dropped out of St. Francis Xavier University more than 20 years ago to live at the L’Arche home in Cape Breton. Four years later, she came to stay in Trosly; now, she returns to her family home in Pincher Creek, Alta., only for the occasional holiday.

“It was pretty radical,” she says of her decision to make L’Arche her life. “But I was filled with inner certitude. It’s true that a lot is asked of us here, but we get a lot back. The hours are long, but the experience is so rich.”

Certain public figures maintain that the world would be a better place without religion. And it’s true that religion does a lot of harm in the world. Some of the most prominent religious leaders stand for intolerance, division, and violence (whether overt or covert).

Maybe those religious leaders have absorbed the wrong definition of success. They pursue publicity, glory, money, deference, and access to the corridors of power. Perhaps they also mobilize people for ministry. But it’s difficult to keep one’s motives pure when those things begin to blend together.

How many of those leaders would show the same dedication to ministry if God called them to toil anonymously in a L’Arche community?

Jean Vanier hasn’t sought the public spotlight. Nor has he developed a personal fiefdom, where he can reign as a little pope. Instead, he has poured out his life in service to people who might otherwise be forgotten by the world.
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Slavery in the first century Roman empire

November 22, 2008 at 8:34 pm (ethics, social justice)

What follows is some of the raw data I’ve unearthed on the issue of slavery in the first century Roman empire, with a minimum of interpretative commentary.

An entrenched institution:

Slavery in the Greco-Roman world was a judicially protected institution. It has been estimated that slaves comprised roughly one-third of the entire population of the empire, with slaves being anywhere from three to five times more numerous than Roman citizens, and slaves and former slaves (“freedmen”) together constituting the majority of the population.

Seneca tells us that legislation to compel slaves to wear a particular type of clothing to distinguish them from free men was defeated in the Roman senate because it was feared that slaves would then recognize how large and powerful a group they were, and might revolt (De Clementia 1.24.1). …

Slavery was a recognized part of the Greco-Roman economy, and was increasing rather than declining during the first century A.D. The lives of the middle and upper classes could hardly have gone on without it, so ingrained was it in the fabric of society. Slave trading was an accepted profession, and slave revolts were seldom successful in the prevailing climate of opinion.1

Sources of Slaves:

  1. Roman military conquests:
    Slave traders followed the armies to capture and enslave displaced individuals. This source of slaves declined around the New Testament period as Rome’s wars of conquest ended.
     
  2. Natural reproduction:
    Children born of slaves were also slaves. Sometimes slaves were deliberately bred by their owners.
     
  3. Rescue from Exposure (intended infanticide)
     
  4. International trade
     
  5. Piracy (kidnapping):

    At the beginning of Rome’s central period the pirates of Citicia were already notorious for the scale on which they conducted kidnapping and trafficking activities:  the island of Delos, where they dumped their victims because they knew Roman merchants were waiting there to receive them, is said to have turned over tens of thousands of slaves daily in the early second century BC. …

    Augustine [wrote] of the formidable presence along the coasts of North Africa, and especially at Hippo Regius, of itinerant slavedealers, Galatians in particular, who were buying up as slaves freeborn people captured by independent marauders who made it their business to undertake forays from the coast into remote rural villages in order to hunt down and kidnap as many victims as possible.2a

    (I presume this is the practice condemned in 1Ti. 1:10 (“enslavers”, ESV = “kidnappers”, NKJV).

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Sex offender registry facilitates murders

November 8, 2008 at 8:49 pm (ethics)

Canadian Stephen Marshall took justice into his own hands by murdering two sex offenders in Maine in April 2006. He rang the front doorbell of his first target and shot him when he came to the door. Then he drove to the home of his second target, 40 kms away, and repeated the process.

Marshall later shot himself on a bus, when police officers got onto the bus to question him.

The two murders were premeditated. Marshall used the internet to obtain names, addresses, and photographs from Maine’s sex offender registry, which is available to the public.

A new detail subsequently emerged:  Marshall went to the homes of four other sex offenders but, presumably, they didn’t answer their doors. Marshall had used the registry to gather information on a total of 34 people.

Canada also has sex offender registries, but they are not available to the general public. This case would appear to show the wisdom of the Canadian policy.

The Maine State legislature set out to conduct hearings, presumably to see whether changes are in order. But some folks immediately stepped forward to defend the public registry as a useful tool.

With other crimes, the offender can return to a more or less normal life once his sentence has been served. “You do the crime, you do the time”:  and then we reckon that you have “paid your debt to society”. We give offenders an opportunity to show that they have learned from their mistakes; that they are prepared to make a constructive contribution to society.

But in this case, we’re talking about crimes against children. One of the murdered men had been convicted of having sex with an underaged girl. The other had committed a sexual assault on a child younger than 14. The recidivism rate is exceptionally high when the offence is a sex crime against a child.

I don’t know how we can strike a balance between protecting the public and respecting the rights of a convict who has served his sentence. But whatever the solution might be, making a sex offender registry public is just asking for trouble.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Originally posted April 2006

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Willing oneself to forgive

November 4, 2008 at 8:14 pm (ethics, grace)

Forgiveness is a virtue. Everyone knows that. But sometimes, it’s an extraordinarily difficult virtue to practise.

Once in a while, I read the story of someone who forgives when I would have assumed forgiveness to be humanly impossible. And maybe it is humanly impossible:  maybe it takes a special act of grace (divine assistance) to reach that place.

Here are two excerpts from an article, “Portraits of forgiveness”, recently published in the Ottawa Citizen.

In the first excerpt, Everett Worthington tells the story of his extraordinary act of forgiveness.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1995, when burglars killed Everett Worthington’s elderly mother in her home.

“Two young guys broke into the house thinking the house was deserted by people away at a New Year’s Eve party,” recalls the psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“My mom was asleep. There was no indication anyone was home.

“Of course when she discovered them, the guy had a crowbar he had used to break the window, and apparently just bludgeoned her to death there in the home.”

The suspected killer, arrested four days later, was a boy aged 15 or 16.

The horrific loss forced the psychologist to examine whether he was capable of doing what he spends his academic life telling others to do.

In an academic way, Everett Worthington had known for several years that forgiving others, or being forgiven for wrongs we ourselves have committed, is not just a nice thing in an abstract way. It’s good, measurably, for body and mind alike. Forgiveness leads to benefits, mostly stress-related, that include:

  • Less depression.
  • Lower blood pressure.
  • Less cardiovascular disease.
  • Lower levels of a hormone called cortisol, which is a sign of a body under physical attack by long-term stress.
  • Stronger immune system.
  • Less back pain.

But the Virginia professor found that putting his knowledge of forgiveness into practice was one of the toughest things he had ever attempted. The big problem was that he didn’t want to forgive.

“That was one of the most difficult things I have had to deal with in my life. It put the theory to the test, because here I had developed an intervention to help people forgive. We had looked at it in four or five different studies. We knew that it worked. And I had applied it for kind of minor forgiveness issues.”

But this was far greater. And to make it worse, even though the alleged killer confessed, the police fumbled the procedure for collecting and preserving the evidence. A grand jury refused to indict him and he was released.

“I just wanted to bash his head in,” the psychologist recalls. He remembers staring at a baseball bat, wishing for a chance. That’s when he knew he had to force himself through the conscious decision to turn away from anger.

“I was able to practise the method we teach people. I was able to forgive the person who had done this (although we didn’t have total proof who it was).”

In the second excerpt, a university chaplain argues that we are becoming less forgiving as a society.

(A post Christian society … a less forgiving society. How surprising is that?!)

Are we as forgiving as we should be? Definitely not, says Brian Yealland, chaplain at Queen’s University in Kingston.
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