Dear Family of the Heart &
Friends:
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Rashid Mughal |
Our mutual friend Javed
Chaudry has taken great pains
to review Sam Harris's book, THE
END OF FAITH, which I introduced to this discussion in post
#355.
Highlights from his excessively
detailed and at times digressive imputation (see his last post
#395) show him going out of his way to defend the honour and
glory of Islam through its past into the present day. That may be a
noble thing for a Muslim to do but it is a rather reckless way of
denying the truth that the book demonstrates to Christian and Muslim
alike: that the days of organized religion, by whatever name, are
numbered. That, as the title suggests, is the main point of
Harris's book, in which both Christianity and Islam have shown what
happens when Religion turns Butcher.
To my mind, THE END OF
FAITH is a book that
lauds the virtues of atheism more than it is a book written solely to
slam Islam. What comes out clearly from reading Harris's mind is the
phoneyness of the Bible (and, by extension, the Koran--which propagates
the same story with a variation here and there), as follows:
"Of course, people of faith regularly
assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering.
But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient
and omnipotent? There is no other way, and it is time for sane human
beings to own up to this. This is the age-old problem of theodicy, of
course, and we should consider it solved. If God exists, either He can
do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care
to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. Pious readers will now
execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by merely human
standards of morality. But, of course, human standards of morality are
precisely what the faithful use to establish God’s goodness in the
first place. And any God who could concern himself with something as
trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in
prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. If He exists, the God of
Abraham is not merely unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is
unworthy even of man. There is another possibility, of course, and it
is both the most reasonable and least odious: the biblical God is a
fiction."
What Harris says about Muslims wishing
to escape abruptly to Paradise from the rat-race of life is what we
Muslims know to be true anyway, but it sounds crass and unpalatable when
an outsider like Harris says it like it is, with simplicity and without
emotion. I sometimes wish we can all truly acknowledge what the mirror
is reflecting back to us--but we lack the grace, I think, to see a thing
for what it is, and we always colour the truth with our own biases.
I don't agree with our mutual friend's
statement, "Decades of unrest in Northern Ireland is often
attributed to sectarian clashes between the Protestants and the
Catholics. But one cannot ignore the fact that the followers of both of
these sects [sic] live
in all parts of Britain, and there is no violence due to religion in
England, Wales or Scotland. The Northern Ireland problem had its basis
in politics rather than religion."
Right now, Britain is seething with
religious and racial hatred for Muslims and others from the
subcontinent, but Javed Chaudry may not be fully aware of the
undercurrents in the apartheids of Britain, Europe, Australia, the
United States of America, and Canada. It is therefore unfair of Chaudry
to condemn Harris's book as "hate literature" and "Zionist propaganda."
Instead, let him comb through certain passages from the Torah, Bible and
Koran to see what is the ultimate hate literature from the mighty pen
of an omnipotent and omniscient tyrant.
Whether in Kashmir,
Pakistan, or
India, the problem is not what he
calls "another example of a trouble with geopolitical roots"
but the fact that Religion is the New Politics. Today,
the world needs Freedom from Religion.
Once we understand that, the rest falls
by the wayside, including everything I have ever said here before.