Much head-scratching has been occasioned by the Pew Forum's latest report from its U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, which found, among other things, that 21% of atheists claim to believe in some sort of god. I've linked to a press release from the Secular Coalition for America on this finding, and I'd like to add some comments of my own.

To explain this, one could make a sarcastic quip that 21% of atheists either didn't hear the pollster correctly or else need to consult a dictionary for the correct meaning of "atheist". Less frivolously, we could also postulate that some self-described atheists are actually still theists, but are choosing to identify themselves this way to cast a vote of protest against organized religion. It's also possible that these people hold a non-standard definition of "God", such as the human potential to do good or Spinoza's sum total of the laws of physics, that permits them to give an affirmative answer to this question even though they still consider themselves atheist. The real answer is probably some combination of all of these.

There are other findings from this study I also want to discuss, however. Judging by its results, it's not just atheists who hold views divergent from the commonly accepted definition:

For example, 70 percent of Americans affiliated with a religion or denomination said they agreed that "many religions can lead to eternal life," including majorities among Protestants and Catholics. Among evangelical Christians, 57 percent agreed with the statement, and among Catholics, 79 percent did.

Catch that? A majority of Christians said that religions other than Christianity can lead to salvation. Even a majority of Christian evangelicals said this, even though, as Steven Waldman of Beliefnet observed, "one of the most important teachings of evangelical Christianity is that salvation comes ONLY through Christ".

What this shows, and this is very good news for religious liberty, is that in America, religious tolerance is still the norm. Although the intolerant, exclusivist religious right is overrepresented in the media, they do not speak for a majority of Americans or even a majority of believing Americans. Their attempts to weld all American Christians together into a homogeneous, controllable voting bloc have been a failure.

It's not just the Pew Forum that's found this. A similar study by Barna Research found that only half of Christian pastors (!) held a "biblical worldview", which Barna essentially defines as agreement with their own, fundamentalist version of the faith. Among the population in general, only 9% of all born-again Christians held such a worldview.

The truth is that religious diversity is, and always has been, rampant among humanity. The idea of a fortress-like community of believers, all of whom are of like mind, has never existed and will never exist. Conformity can be maintained for a brief time in the hothouse environment of a small, isolated sect, but when a religion begins to expand into society in general, its teachings will inevitably begin to be reinterpreted and loosened. Rather than being a brick church, with every component identical and indistinguishable, American theism is more like a diverse jungle, with huge numbers of varying individuals that are grouped as the same religious "species" only by convention.

Again, because of the outsized influence of highly placed and influential agents of intolerance, many people say they conform, to fit in and to escape social censure. But scratch the surface, and you'll see just how many things they believe differently from each other.

This riotous diversity arises, in part, because religious beliefs are based on faith rather than evidence. When theists come up with their own varying interpretations, there is no way for anyone else to prove them wrong. Is God an anthromorphic being who demands worship and dispenses miracles? Is God an impersonal, overarching cosmic force? Is God an utterly transcendent Other about which nothing can be said? Is God the sum total of the laws of physics? Is God the capacity of human beings to do good for each other? All these beliefs have been and still are held by large numbers of people. With no facts to decide among them, religious diversity will persist, and we can hope this will stand as an obstacle to any one sect seeking to impose its will on society.

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician, an elected member of that country's Parliament, infamous for his right-wing views on immigration and social policy. In 2008, he released a short film, Fitna, which criticizes Islamic radicalism by interspersing video footage of terrorist attacks with quotes from the Quran and from prominent Islamic religious authorities praising the use of violence. The film can be viewed here - caution, contains some graphic images.

Now there's some news that's incredible in its audacity: a prosecutor in the kingdom of Jordan has charged Wilders with blasphemy and demanded that he be extradited to Jordan to stand trial.

Let's be perfectly clear about this: Geert Wilders is a citizen of the Netherlands. He is not a citizen of Jordan; as far as I know, he has never set foot in Jordan. Everything he has said was spoken in the Netherlands, where the right of free speech is recognized and protected. Yet because his speech was heard in Islamic nations, and because it offended them, those nations demanded that he be extradited from his home country and sent to one of their countries, to stand trial under their primitive and repressive laws.

Whatever you may think of Wilders' personal or political views, this development ought to lay to rest any remaining doubts regarding the goals of those groups he has criticized. By far the majority of states where Islam has become dominant have become theocracies, and like all theocracies through history, they do not want intellectual diversity, freedom of thought, or open debate on a level playing field. They want enforced silence and obedience, and they do not want to meet their critics on the battlefield of ideas, but to harm and punish them regardless of the merit of their arguments.

Of course, Wilders is in little danger from this ridiculous demand. Dutch prosecutors declined to charge him with anything, understandably so as he had broken no laws. But the 56-member-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference strongly condemned that decision and said it was "deeply annoyed" by it. (The next time someone says that Islam is for the most part a moderate and peaceful religion, ask them if they can produce quotes from a 56-nation Islamic conference defending the right of free speech.)

This affair is, however, an excellent illustration of the chilling danger posed by laws which seek to ban "hate speech". Even if passed with the best intentions in the world, they are swiftly made use of by tyrants and theocrats who recognize quite well that any means of persuading the state to censor ideas can easily be used against their critics. Make no mistake - if Wilders was extradited and imprisoned, he would not be the last. Swiftly on the heels of that demand would come the next one, and the next, each one arrogantly presuming the right to punish anyone anywhere who says anything uncomplimentary about Islam. The OIC, in fact, referred to the "thin line" separating freedom of speech from what they want to be illegal. In other words, they're saying it's very easy to cross the line between what they view as permissible and impermissible criticism, which means the zone of permissible criticism must be a very small one indeed.

The OIC also says that Fitna "instigates feelings of hatred, animosity and antipathy towards Muslims". And that may well be true. But the film, from what I've seen of it, does not invent imaginary crimes or fictitious outrages to attribute to Muslims. (This in contrast to Muslim theocracies which still teach the "blood libel" idea to their children.) To the contrary, Wilders' film replays and exposes things which Muslims have actually done and actually said. If Muslim leaders feel that they're shown in a bad light by these things, then they should go after the Muslims who've advocated or committed acts of appalling bloodshed in the name of that religion. Those should be the people they seek to extradite and bring to trial. To instead attack people who point out these evils gives the impression that they do not care about the savagery and brutality committed in the name of Islam, but rather, that they want to silence the people who bring it to public attention.

Today's post on morality takes up the topic of forgiveness for wrongdoing. In superstitious times, forgiveness was obtained through magical rituals. Most of these assumed that guilt could in some fashion be transferred to an animal or other being, which was then killed or driven off to provide a symbolic expiation. Leviticus 4 explains:

Say to the people of Israel, If any one sins unwittingly in any of the things which the Lord has commanded not to be done, and does any one of them, if it is the anointed priest who sins, thus bringing guilt on the people, then let him offer for the sin which he has committed a young bull without blemish to the Lord for a sin offering. He shall bring the bull to the door of the tent of meeting before the Lord, and lay his hand on the head of the bull, and kill the bull before the Lord. And the anointed priest shall take some of the blood of the bull and bring it to the tent of meeting; and the priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle part of the blood seven times before the Lord in front of the veil of the sanctuary.

Ironically, although Judaism no longer practices animal sacrifice, its primitive scapegoat theology has been adopted by its theological successor, Christianity. The Christian theologians did add the clever twist that Jesus' divine blood, shed once and for all, makes a more perfect sacrifice than an animal's and does not need to be repeated. Still, at the heart of Christianity lies the same ancient superstition: that one person's guilt can be transferred to another and then absolved by punishing that other.

All these beliefs commit the fallacy of reification, treating moral responsibility as if it were a substance that has an independent existence and can be moved from person to person. In reality, an act and the responsibility for that act are necessarily linked; the person who commits the act bears the responsibility. By definition, one cannot be divorced from the other.

If a person has done wrong, what good does it do to punish someone else? It does not deter the offender from repeating the harmful act, nor does it make them understand why what they did was wrong. If anything, it sends the exact wrong message: that you can do as you wish, and someone else will bear the weight of your transgressions.

This is the problem I have with the Christian belief in grace: it emphasizes undeserved forgiveness. To dispense forgiveness indiscriminately, with no regard to whether it is deserved and no need for the offender to make restitution, threatens to make forgiveness a meaningless concept. The same holds true for any religion which teaches that absolution can be obtained by performing some empty ritual - chanting a prayer, performing ablutions, confessing to a clergy member, making a pilgrimage - that has nothing to do with understanding why the act was wrong or making up the injury to the one who was harmed.

In the secular morality of universal utilitarianism, forgiveness has a place, but a different place than the magic rituals of organized religion. UU teaches that human happiness is paramount, and refraining from causing others to suffer is our highest duty. When we violate that duty, we incur reponsibility - the responsibility of undoing that hurt if possible and restoring the lost happiness; and the responsibility of reforming ourselves so we don't perform similar wrong acts in the future.

If an offender meets this burden, then forgiveness should be given, but it must be deserved. To deserve forgiveness, a person who does wrong must recognize and acknowledge the wrong they have done; must express contrition and a sincere desire not to repeat that act; and must express willingness to make restitution as far as it is possible. If any of these conditions are not met, then forgiveness is not merited.

When an act, such as murder, is of such a magnitude that no true restitution is possible, then it's up to the people who were made to suffer whether they wish to grant forgiveness. If the offender is sincere in his contrition and is willing to make restitution as far as possible, then the people who are wronged may choose to accept that. But - an important corollary which I want to make note of - in this view, there can be no deathbed conversions.

A person who finds remorse only at the very end of life, when there's no further chance of repairing the harm they caused, has come to their senses too late to find forgiveness. Words alone, without action, do little or nothing to alleviate suffering. This is a major break with religious traditions, most of which believe that a last-minute repentance can make up for a lifetime of evil. That view has always struck me as outrageous, and any worthwhile secular morality would do right to discard it.

Other posts in this series:

• On the Morality Of...

The number of different religions on this planet is vast, and all their associated arguments and apologetics form a library that's vaster still. No matter how well-read or well-traveled any atheist is, they're bound to run into claims every so often that they've never heard before. It happens to me at least once a month, on average. And I have to admit, when I first hear a religious apologetic or miracle claim that's new to me, often my initial response is to feel a little tremor, as I wonder, "Could that really be true?"

You would think I'd know better by now. Invariably, in the cases I've looked into, the fact being claimed is either false, unverifiable, or doesn't prove what the claimant thinks it does. And even if one such fact were to bear out, it would have to overcome a considerable weight of contrary evidence. Still, I'm glad of that momentary tremor of doubt. To my thinking, it's a reliable sign of open-mindedness.

Not everyone shares this trait. On more than one occasion, I've run into theists who are so arrogantly certain their beliefs are supported by the facts that they feel they don't even need to check what the facts actually are. When these smug and ignorant assertions are in conflict with reality, the results are always hilarious. Culled from the responses I've received on this blog and other sites, here are some of my favorite examples of arrogant apologists who don't let their ignorance get in the way of a good talking point:

Was Tyre destroyed and left barren as the Bible predicts? A commenter at Greta Christina's by the name of Rev. Cawley asserted, in contradiction to my essay "The Theist's Guide to Converting Atheists", that the Bible contains many miraculously fulfilled prophecies. Here was one of his examples regarding the ancient city of Tyre:

Of Tyre, God said through the prophet Ezekiel in Ezekiel 26: 4, 5, "And they shall destroy the walls of Tyrus, and break down her towers: I will also scrape her dust from her, and make her like the top of a rock. It shall be a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea: for I have spoken it, saith the Lord God: and it shall become a spoil to the nations." Today, fisherman mend their nets on the barren rock where Tyre once stood. God also said in Ezekiel 26:14, "And I will make thee like the top of a rock: thou shalt be a place to spread nets upon; thou shalt be built no more: for I the Lord have spoken it, saith the Lord God." The site of ancient Tyre is quite suitable for habitation, but the prophecy has stood fulfilled now for over 2, 000 years, and Tyre has never been rebuilt.

In response to Mr. Cawley's claim that Tyre has never been rebuilt, I posted satellite photos of the city today. No doubt, the 115,000 or so inhabitants of Tyre would be quite surprised to learn that they're living in a city that has never been rebuilt.

In reality, although Tyre was fought over and conquered many times in antiquity, it has been inhabited almost continuously since 1300 BCE, and was an important commercial site and trading post for much of that time. Evidently, Mr. Cawley could not be bothered to check whether the city actually existed before asserting that it no longer does, because the Bible says so. His blithe willingness to erase whole cities from history in the name of an apologetic talking point is a superb example of invincible ignorance.

Did PBS put words in the mouths of creationists to make them look bad? Another of my favorite examples from Greta Christina's: a post where she discussed "Judgment Day," the PBS special about the Dover, Pennsylvania intelligent-design trial in which the IDers were decisively defeated.

In her post, she quoted an exchange from the show in which plaintiffs' lawyer Robert Muise got the ID proponent Scott Minnich to admit he had never bothered to do any of the experiments that would have tested his ideas about ID. An offended creationist commenter named "blilley" huffily asserted that an exchange which paints ID in such a poor light couldn't possibly have been real, and must have been made up by PBS to make proponents of ID look bad:

I guess in instances where PBS doesn't have any real evidence to back up certain propoganda objectives they can always resort to using imaginary, made-up evidence confident that people like you will call it "overwhelming".

In fact, the reenactments in "Judgment Day" were taken directly from trial transcripts, and this "imaginary, made-up" exchange between Muise and Minnich actually happened in the courtroom. Clearly, blilley thought that Minnich came away from the cross-examination looking foolish. In the future, I suggested to him, he should consider why that is, rather than leaping to accuse scientists of inventing arguments to attribute to creationists that make them look bad.

Were the original twelve apostles "Earth shakers"? In my post from last year "How Did the Apostles Die?", I pointed out the curious fact that there are no contemporary historical records of the twelve apostles, neither of their lives, nor of their deeds, nor of their deaths. They vanish into obscurity almost immediately after being named in the Bible - a fact which fits with the conclusion that Christianity began with a belief in mythical figures that only gradually transmuted into belief about real people in history. A commenter took issue with this conclusion:

What you are forgetting here is that these 11 men, who were previously fishermen, carpenters and tax collectors, suddenly became Earth shakers. This group of nobodies were somehow able to convince thousands upon thousands that there is one true God and that his son Jesus came so that we may know the one who created this Earth and everything on it, in it, above and below it, on a personal level.

If the apostles were indeed "Earth shakers", then one would think that it would be trivial to list some of their mighty, earth-shaking deeds. Was this commenter up to the challenge? Manifestly not, because when challenged, he vanished without ever elaborating on this comment. Apparently, he felt no compunction in grandiosely claiming that the apostles were men of tremendous influence even though he didn't know of a single specific thing that any of them said or did. His blustery assertion only served to confirm the point that there are no contemporary historical records of how the apostles lived or died.

Did interracial marriage ever need to be affirmed by court order? This last howler comes from the apologetics website CrossExamined, whose author Frank Turek set up a post about same-sex marriage and the danger it poses to our society. It seems this danger is that allowing gay marriage will cause everyone to turn gay and cease reproducing, thus spelling the doom of civilization - clearly the conclusion Turek was putting forward, even if he didn't explicitly spell it out. But this isn't the howler I was referring to. In the comments, I and several others pointed out the similarity between arguments of anti-gay-marriage advocates now and anti-interracial-marriage arguments a generation earlier, and asked if this reasoning could also be used to prove that anti-miscegenation laws should have been allowed to stand. A commenter named "Plumb Bob" seemed bewildered by this point:

In response to:
"For Pete's sake, if we left all civil-rights decisions up to "the people" interracial marriage would probably still be illegal. This is one of the reasons the Supreme Court and the Judicial Branch in general exists in the first place."

This is simply and completely false. I don't know of a single instance where a high court ruling was required in order to allow interracial marriage.

This is slightly less ignorant than trying to erase the city of Tyre from history, but not by much. For someone who cares so deeply about marriage, Plumb Bob evidently had never heard of the landmark 1967 civil rights case Loving v. Virginia, in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down all state laws against interracial marriage.

Obviously, a person is not required to have a comprehensive knowledge of American history before being allowed to argue against gay marriage. But one would think, at the very least, that a person lacking such knowledge would have the humility to approach the topic with caution - rather than pronouncing, as in this case, that assertions made by more knowledgeable people are "simply and completely false". Like many of the invincibly ignorant, he never even considered that the facts might not line up with what he preferred to be true, nor that others with whom he disagreed might know more than he himself.

I leave you with this gem of a classic - a creationist using one of the most hilariously inept variations of the second-law-of-thermodynamics argument against evolution ever seen:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

This passage has been widely reproduced on the internet under the title "Creationist Almost Discovers the Sun".

Thanks to Daylight Atheism commenter Robert Madewell for the photo in this post.

The other day while browsing in the library, I found out that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, authors of the Left Behind series, have also written a trilogy of prequels. (As long as Christians continue to purchase these awful books, it seems, they intend to keep churning them out.) The final installment of this trilogy is called The Rapture, and it's about just that, written from the point of view of the faithful Christians who are miraculously transported to Heaven.

Much of the book is taken up by a long roll call in which the raptured "saints" and saved dead are called before God's white throne and praised for the good works they did. This litany is very revealing, because essentially the only thing they have in common is that they in some way contributed to the spread of Christianity. Famous evangelists, missionaries, translators of the Bible, and historical preachers are all listed for their great "achievement". In LaHaye's conception, the only deed that merits honor or remembrance is converting others to Christianity. In fact, the saved are made to pass through a fire that "burns away" everything else that they did in their lives.

This is religion in its most purely viral form, its only purpose consisting of self-propagation. As Slacktivist says, their version of Christianity is the "contentless gospel": "The good news is that now you can tell others the good news."

This cold and sterile heaven doesn't seem like any kind of paradise I'd want to live in. Why would I want to share eternity with these boring, repetitive, dogmatic preachers, those whose greatest achievement in life was the unvarying repetition of words written by others? It's as if people were selected specifically for their lack of independent thought or creativity. What a tiresome, monotonous place that heaven would be!

Even worse, the book makes it clear that access to this heaven is limited to those mindless believers who mouthed the proper words of submission to the creed of one particular small and narrow sect. Everyone else, in this conception of Christianity, no matter what else they achieved or what good they did, is condemned to the torment of eternal immolation. Again - this is a heaven we should want to go to? To spend eternity praising a cruel tyrant in the company of his fellow slaves, and to miss out on the company of the bright and lively minds of history's most famous nonbelievers?

Just think of who'd be missing from the rapture-fanatics' heaven. Or, if you prefer, consider an alternative: a humanist heaven in which people were rewarded not for their allegiance to dogma, but for their contributions to humanity's intellectual and cultural history, and for the good they did in the lives of those who came after them. Imagine who would be there, and imagine what a joy it would be to dwell among them!

Imagine a salon where you could discuss politics and statecraft with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Paine, as well as their precursors of the Enlightenment such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham. From feminists and reformers such as Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman and Vashti McCollum, these early giants could learn how their work had laid the ground for later flowerings of liberty. Or, if you preferred to talk about science and the glories of the natural world, there'd be symposia attended by Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Galileo Galilei, Pierre and Marie Curie, and many more besides.

In airier realms of thought, most of history's great philosophers would be there: Lucretius and Epicurus from ancient Greece, Giordano Bruno, David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, Bertrand Russell, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. One could pass many pleasurable hours lying in the shade and listening to these great thinkers holding forth on the beautiful abstractions of the mind.

The music, too, would be magnificent. One could enjoy the symphonies of Giuseppe Verdi, Ludwig von Beethoven, Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss - or, for a more modern bent, the stylings of Irving Berlin, John Lennon, Cole Porter, and Yip Harburg. For oratory, poetry and literature, it would boast Robert Ingersoll, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Omar Khayyam, Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, H.G. Wells, Robert Frost - and that's just for starters. And this imaginary humanist heaven would not lack for laughter. You can hear the roaring of the crowds being entertained by Mark Twain, by Voltaire, by H.L. Mencken, by Douglas Adams, by George Carlin (alas), and by many more proud subversives who've used the weapon of humor to expose the absurdities of earthly society.

The roll call of famous names that would be present in a humanist's heaven shows, by comparison, just how empty and impoverished the dogmatist's heaven would be. All the illustrious thinkers and critics I listed above would be missing from any afterlife that sorts admission based solely on adherence to an orthodox creed. Such a place would hardly be paradise at all, but merely an echo chamber resounding through eternity with the monotonous chants of fossilized minds. How could Heaven be Heaven if it did not pay tribute to the fullest and grandest flowerings of the human creative spirit?

The dogmatist's nightmarish hallucination of heaven, fortunately for us, does not exist. Like a nightmare that dissipates in the dawn, it fades away in the light of reason. Alas, the humanist's heaven is also a dream, albeit a more pleasant one. I'd give almost anything to be witness to such a meeting of the minds, but there's no rational reason to believe it will ever happen. Those who have passed on have left the world to us, and though ripples of their influence live on in the books they wrote and the lives they changed, the essence of the individual is gone and cannot be reclaimed. We mourn them, we honor them, but ultimately we must move on. The responsibility of guiding the future now lies with we who live - so rather than spend our time dreaming of another life, let's turn our attention fully to this one. Our predecessors have left us an abundance of good lessons; let's keep them in mind, so that we may write the next chapter for the good of those who, in turn, will succeed us.

(For a fuller listing of the names in this essay as well as others, see FFRF's Freethought of the Day list.)

I have two short announcements to bring to your attention:

• Daylight Atheism commenter Eshu has started his own blog, Bridging Schisms. If the first few posts are any indication, it ought to be a fine addition to the ranks of the atheist blogosphere. Go check it out and tell him I sent you!

• John Loftus of Debunking Christianity will soon be releasing a book, Why I Became an Atheist. I haven't read it yet, but he's collected some superb endorsements. It definitely ought to be worth looking into.

Today's installment of "Do You Really Believe That?" will leave behind Judaic and Christian mythologies to examine a doctrine specific to Islam, the doctrine of abrogation. This belief holds that Allah originally revealed certain practices and rules to Mohammed, only to later issue new revelations which canceled the earlier ones and instituted different practices in their place. In Arabic, this is usually called al-Nasikh wal-Mansoukh ("the Abrogator and the Abrogated").

It should be said that this is a somewhat controversial topic in Islam. Some Muslim sites denounce the idea as a blasphemous falsehood. Many more, however, teach it explicitly and go to some length explaining why the perfect, unchangeable Allah would do such a thing. And their position does seem better supported textually:

"Nothing of our revelation do we abrogate or cause to be forgotten, but we bring (in place) one better or the like thereof. Knowest thou not that Allah is able to do all things?"

—2:106

Although the other Abrahamic religions believe in similar doctrines, the idea of abrogation seems more problematic in Islam, since Muslims hold a far more exalted view of the Quran than Jews or Christians do of their own holy books. To Muslims, the Quran is not simply a set of teachings or rules given by God as needed to address varying historical circumstances; rather, it is a word-for-word, letter-for-letter copy of a perfect, Platonic text that exists in the divine realm. Most Muslim theologians believe that the text of the Quran is unchanging, eternal and uncreated. Why, then, would it contain abrogation at all? If all the text is eternal, then some verses have been abrogated from eternity past by other verses. In a book of divine perfection, why would one verse simultaneously have been spoken along with another one that undoes it?

The usual reply given by Muslim apologists is that Quranic abrogation is a form of progressive revelation, where human societies that were unprepared for stricter rules were gradually accustomed to them through the initial introduction of less strict rules. This doesn't explain why, in some cases, less strict commandments abrogated stricter ones (Quran 3:50; see also this page regarding the Tahajjud prayer).

However, there's a larger problem which most Islamic sites I've checked don't address. The question is this: Does the Quran abrogate the Old and New Testaments?

The obvious answer is yes, and Muslims agree. To them, Islam is God's last and most perfect revelation, superseding the earlier, partial revelations given in the Torah and the Gospels:

One of the fundamentals of faith in Islam is what Allah's Book (the Qur'an) is the last Book that was revealed by the Cherisher of the Worlds. It abrogated all the Books revealed by Allah before it, such as the Torah, the Psalms, and the Bible, and as such no other Book has been left by which Allah can be worshipped except the Qur'an.

...It is our belief that both the Torah and the Bible were abrogated by the Qur'an, and that they were changed by means of additions or deletions by their followers.

Also:

Allaah, The Almighty, revealed the Quran to be His last, all-embracing Scripture containing the final manifestation of the Divine Law. This necessitates that it has to be safeguarded from the mischievous hands of men and from all corruption. This protection has been a reality from the time the Quran was revealed until today and will remain so forever.

...As for the previous Scriptures, they were for a limited duration of time. Allaah gave human beings the responsibility of preserving them, and they lost them through corruption, alteration, and concealment.

None of these sites address the obvious followup question: Given that Allah did not protect earlier revelations from corruption, why has he now changed his mind and decided to do so? If his goal was to issue a perfect and unimpeachable revelation, why not do that from the very beginning, rather than spend thousands of years with imperfect revelations which he always planned to supersede anyway?

A similar question can be asked of Christianity: Why did God spend millennia setting up a religion called Judaism which he never intended to be the ultimate path to salvation? Why not start with Jesus and the crucifixion if that was what he always intended? But the problem is even more acute for Islam, given its strong belief in Quranic infallibility. The more they claim this, the more they make it seem that Allah was just wasting people's time, spending millennia slowly dribbling out inferior revelations when he had a better one up his sleeve all along. Such a belief system makes an allegedly perfect god appear incompetent or illogical, which is why I ask: do you really believe that?

Other posts in this series:

• Do You Really Believe That?

Summary: Brilliant, brave, inspiring. Read this book.

In 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in the street by a Muslim fanatic, Mohammed Bouyeri, who was enraged by van Gogh's production of a film titled Submission which criticizes the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies. Van Gogh's murderer shot him eight times, cut his throat, and left a letter pinned to his body with a butcher knife.

The letter was addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It said, in essence, "You're next."

If you're an atheist and you've never heard of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, you need to read this book. Infidel, her autobiography, retraces the incredible journey of her life: from a childhood in Somalia and Saudi Arabia, where Islam was the law of the land and women were slaves, to freedom and enlightenment in the West, where she became an atheist, rose to fame as a member of the Dutch Parliament, enraged Muslims and leftists alike with her unsparing criticisms of Islam, and ultimately played a role in the toppling of a Dutch government. Submission was her film, produced on her behalf by Theo van Gogh. This book is the story behind that film, and gives insight into a personal enlightenment and a life that spans millennia of human cultural development.

Infidel begins with Hirsi Ali's childhood in Somalia, daughter of a family of nomadic desert herders. As it opens, her grandmother, a fierce, spare woman, is teaching her to recite the names of her ancestors going back three hundred years. In Somalian society, one's ancestry and clan are everything, determining social status and the course of one's life. Ayaan and her siblings, her brother Mahad and sister Haweya, grew up following the same tribal rhythms that have dictated human existence for millions of years: moving around with their animals, following the rains, all their possessions stacked on their backs. When she was five, in accordance with custom, she was mutilated by men of the tribe, her clitoris cut off so that she would remain "pure" for her future husband.

However, she was not entirely disconnected from the larger world. Her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was a powerful man in Somalian society and one of the leaders of a rebel movement working against the dictator Siad Barré. It was this involvement that led to Hirsi Ali's family fleeing Somalia while she was still young, traveling to Saudi Arabia and later to Kenya. Growing up in Saudi Arabia, a cruel and violent theocracy where women were oppressed and enslaved, left a vivid impression on her, and even while young she wondered why the law of God dictated that she had to be forever inferior to men.

Hirsi Ali spent her adolescence in Kenya, which was more open and free of a society than Saudi Arabia, but only relatively so. A rigid, fundamentalist strain of Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, was sending Saudi-backed preachers into Kenya and throughout Africa. On one occasion, a Quran tutor beat her so severely for disobedience that he fractured her skull, necessitating emergency surgery to save her life. Still, the schools of Kenya were her introduction to English and to Western authors - classics like the Bronte sisters, but also pulp romance novelists like Danielle Steele, all of which gave her a glimpse into a different world where women could decide their own destiny. She also, for a brief time, had her first boyfriend - a Kenyan boy named Kennedy, who shocked her by telling her he was an atheist.

The defining moment in Hirsi Ali's life came at the age of 23, when her father announced that he had given her away in marriage to a man she had never met. Deciding she could not spend her life in servitude to a stranger, she traveled to Europe under the pretense of meeting her husband there. Instead, she escaped to the Netherlands and was granted asylum. On arrival, she was amazed by the peace, freedom and prosperity available to all citizens, and decided she wanted to study political science to learn why some societies thrive while others are failures. She worked as a translator to support herself, was eventually granted citizenship, and worked her way up to a position at a think tank. Her doubts about the rigid, restrictive dogmas of Islam steadily loosened, and the defining moment came after 9/11, when she realized that Osama bin Laden was accurately obeying the teachings of the Quran and that she could no longer in good conscience remain a member of such a religion:

...I looked in the mirror and said out loud, "I don't believe in God." I said it slowly, enunciating it carefully, in Somali. And I felt relief.

It felt right. There was no pain, but a real clarity. The long process of seeing the flaws in my belief structure and carefully tiptoeing around the frayed edges as parts of it were torn out, piece by piece - that was all over... From now on I could step firmly on the ground that was under my feet and navigate based on my own reason and self-respect. My moral compass was within myself, not in the pages of a sacred book.

When she began giving speeches and interviews criticizing the repressive teachings of Islam, Hirsi Ali became notorious. Eventually, she joined the Netherlands' opposition Liberal Party as a candidate for office, and was elected to Parliament in 2003. While in office, she successfully implemented reforms such as requiring the Dutch police to count honor killings as a separate category of murders. It was also at this time that she collaborated with Theo van Gogh. The book tells of the chaotic time after his murder, when she went into hiding under the protection of Dutch security services.

In a coda, we learn of the scandal that erupted when it was discovered Hirsi Ali had lied on her application for asylum (since escaping an arranged marriage was not considered to be a proper justification for refugee status at that time), although she had been freely admitting this on national media for years. Ultimately, she stepped down from Parliament, but when the Dutch immigration minister, Rita Verdonk, tried to strip her of her citizenship, such a furor erupted that Verdonk was forced to resign and her party's coalition government collapsed. In the end, Hirsi Ali retained her Dutch citizenship and is now employed by an American think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. She still receives threats on a regular basis, but she has continued to speak out against Islam and to bring a message of freedom to women in Muslim societies throughout the world.

In a review this brief, I can't possibly do justice to the breadth of Hirsi Ali's journey or the dangers she's faced down. She's literally retraced the history of human progress in the span of a single lifetime, traveling from a nomadic Stone Age existence to an elected leadership position in a modern, industrialized democracy. Along the way, she's overcome obstacles most of us can scarcely conceive, and shown more courage than I hope any of us will ever be called upon to display.

We who are born in the First World, who are taught ideas of individual liberty and human rights from childhood, can take these concepts for granted, but Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in a world where they are nonexistent. To escape the suffocating bonds of repression, she had to face down family, clan, culture, religion - the entire universe of her society aligned against her, all teaching in unison that a woman's role in life is to be a pious, unprotesting slave, to be handed off like property from father to husband, and to be silent and submissive in the face of abuse and degradation. She did not live through the Enlightenment, when the landscape of ideas changed around her. Rather, she had to reinvent and rediscover them all for herself, forging a new identity from scratch, and then finding the courage to act on those newfound ideals to flee her home for a society she had never known. That she not only did so, but excelled and thrived there, is a testament to her courage and her passion for justice and equality.

Hirsi Ali speaks with eloquence and passion, not just with her words but with her life, when it comes to the dangers of excessive tolerance. European governments' fear of ever again being perceived as racist, though well-founded and understandable, has led them to commit the opposite error: tolerating all cultures, even those that oppress women, enshrine ignorance, and violate the rights of individuals. Some cultural practices need to be criticized and changed, no matter whether they are of ancient vintage or based in religious beliefs. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has done humanity a true service by shining a light on these evils and calling them what they are, and standing fearlessly against the violent fanatics who would kill in the name of dogma. In every sense, her story is unique and compelling.

I really do feel that this book spoke to me in a way that no other atheist author ever has. Books about human rights and ethics in the abstract are one thing, but Ayaan Hirsi Ali has lived that battle, not just contemplated it. Her deeply personal and candid recounting shows unmistakably why these things matter, why they were fought for and why we are still fighting for them. With her, we can say that no, all cultures and all beliefs are not equal. For the sake of humankind, and especially for the sake of womankind, the ones that are wrong need to be fought and defeated.

This week's carnivals:

• The 89th Skeptics' Circle at Ionian Enchantment

• The 71st Philosophers' Carnival at The Ends of Thought

• The 94th Carnival of the Godless at Earthman's Notebook

• The 67th Carnival of the Liberals at Situation Awareness

• The 21st Humanist Symposium at Greta Christina's Blog (Be sure to stop by and congratulate her on her recent wedding!)

For my northern hemisphere readers, the full flush of summer has arrived. In honor of the season, I've picked an appropriate poem for this installment of Poetry Sunday: the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas' idyllic, evocative hymn to nature and childhood, "Fern Hill", from his 1946 collection Deaths and Entrances.

Born in 1914, Dylan Thomas was named in honor of his uncle, a Unitarian minister. He moved to London in 1934 and that same year published his first volume of poetry, 18 Poems, which was highly acclaimed. A sought-after speaker, he frequently gave readings of his work both in person and on the radio: both his poetry and also scripts and plays such as Under Milk Wood. He was excused from military service in World War II on account of chronic pulmonary illness, but witnessed the Blitz firsthand while living in London. He recounted the experience in a poignant poem, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London", which reveals the author's freethought sympathies: "After the first death, there is no other." As Ian Lancashire puts it in his analysis of the poem, "Without relying on religious belief in personal salvation or an afterlife, Thomas represents death consolingly as part of life" (source).

Thomas' poems are luminous, dense with imagery, rich with brilliant detail and metaphor. During his life and after, he was internationally acclaimed. His deservedly most famous work, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", was written for his father, who was dying of cancer. Like "Refusal", it does not appeal to an afterlife for consolation, but rather calls upon us to face death with dignity and defiance in this world. Thomas died in 1953 at the age of 39; his death was generally supposed to be the consequence of alcoholism, but evidence surfaced in 2004 indicating it may have been a result of complications from pneumonia.

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
          Time let me play and be
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
          And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
          And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
          Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
          The sky gathered again
     And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
     Out of the whinnying green stable
          On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
     In the sun born over and over,
          I ran my heedless ways,
     My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
     Before the children green and golden
          Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
          Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Other posts in this series:

• Poetry Sunday