Ongoing mosque considerations... my prediction that opponents would struggle to find a convincing voice because of an unwillingness to throw a critical light on religion in general has proved accurate... regardless of that an overwhelming majority of Americans still oppose, although for reasons which troll from disingenuous to ignorant... but that probably because the average American feels the wrongness of it more clearly than they can conceptualize it... and that probably increases likelihood of incident catalyzing larger political complications... I'm still kind of shocked that I've read no one questioning the meaning or true intent of the granting of 'freedom of religion', the instinctive interpretation seems to be that espousal of this freedom was of course a testament to the greatness of religion... when you consider the enlightenment philosophical milieu that hatched much of the thinking of the founding fathers, plus their deist beliefs, I find this anodyne view of their thinking on religion to be absurd... I'm especially shocked that democrats are making the most foolish arguments in this regard, touting freedom of religion as the crowning glory of the American way... which, in many ways, it is, but not for the reasons they cite or laud... I mean, if there are true secularists in America a great many of them must be from the left wing and so why democrats are acting as if religious association is an unimpeachable good is striking, especially when they are the first to express outrage when republicans hug their bibles close come election time... I'm also shocked how many want to talk in absolutes here, for example talking as if all religions are basically the same and that to be truly tolerant we have to see the faithful as one glorious whole... crazy talk... there may be a commonality to religious experience and faith, but just as a matter of history, forget ideology and doctrine, just as historical fact Christianity is very much different from Islam and it's insane to pretend otherwise... it cheered me though to read one critic quote one of my favorite writers, Karl Popper, on the practical, conditional nature of true tolerance, that if it attempts to foster an illusion of a complete acceptance of all and everything it will be rendered incapable of defending itself and thus be left vulnerable to threats from the fervently intolerant absolutism of an enemy, from without or within... there seems to be a failure to understand that tolerance is in essence a rejection of the imposition of unreasonable absolutes on the freedoms of the individual and that therefore tolerance itself loses meaning if it comes to see itself in absolute terms... in other words, what America is really about is the coming to the fore of a practical, pragmatic view of the imperfect nature of the individual citizen, as the West had come to understand such a creature after two thousand or so years of social evolution, and his relationship to his fellow citizens within a state and to the idea of the state as a whole... it is, oddly enough, given at least the current context, a very secular view, in fact represented what seemed the final victory of secularism over religion when it came to an individual's right to say what they are and are not in both in private and the public forum ... which, given the perverse and needy nature of the species, given the shock of seeming sudden isolation in the universe possibly explains why America feels compelled to love its God so much... and why they appear to have such a problem understanding what it is exactly about the 'ground zero Mosque' that offends them so...
Two things [among others] that trouble me about this... liberals should be the ones making the pragmatic, secular argument against the mosque, or rather, in favor of subjecting the idea of the mosque to a cold and reasonable skepticism... but instead they prattle on idealistically about the inviolable principles of 'freedom' and 'tolerance' as if the two only truly existed as pure, Platonic forms which the abjectly ignorant citizenry can only experience as flashes of light and shadow thrown obscurely on a dark cave wall... the classical liberalism of a Hume would make the secular argument and make it convincingly but these people are mere ideologues vainly promoting a naive communitarian, post nation state, anti-American agenda that buries the practicalities of real world concerns under clouds of academic dust.
The other problem one sees stirring here is that the religious right in America will be empowered, that a legitimate or what should be legitimate argument over the troubling political nature of Islam will devolve into a mere phobia which the Christian right will exploit for the purposes of making it seem that they are in the mainstream, that they speak for the real America...
So, again, to summarize... liberals should be making the skeptical secularist contra mosque argument but instead have wandered off into a rarefied wasteland of theory, like befuddled idealists dropped into a party made for empiricists, jabbering on about absolutes and conceptually perfect renderings of eternal truths... if the Cordoba initiative has done nothing else it has certainly revealed what a besotted troupe of ideologues the new left is... as for the republicans, well... they're somewhat disqualified on account of their Christ infatuated base... the libertarian element of the republican party can have this argument but the right in general?.... not really... they get caught in an irrational loop of equivocations... they in truth want to express an anti-Islamic point of view but to do that without calling one's own faith into question you'd have to do it from a skeptical secularist point of view and obviously that's not something they can do... and so they flounder about trying to fit the square peg of "Islam is a beautiful religion etc etc that has rights etc etc" into the round hole of "but just don't build your fucking mosque there!"... it's absurd... and the sad irony is this is exactly what the founding fathers feared when it came to religion and politics and why they had hoped that by enshrining a broad freedom of religion in the constitution all such nonsense would be put to rest...
Andrew McCarthy over at National Review - who the left would consider a poster boy for Islamaphobia - makes the proper argument, my argument when he says that fundamental to the Western tradition is the separation of church and state because it represents the victory of secularism and its belief in individual freedom and rights over the homogenizing tyranny of religious doctrine and the absolutism of faith based claims to power by regents - but that the true practice of Islam is entirely dependent on the controlling apparatus of Shariah law which is [according to its own dictates and proclamations] completely at odds with secularism and therefore is not compatible with Western norms. As he points out, of course there are moderate Muslims just as there are moderate Catholics who practice birth control and don't take confession etc etc but still consider themselves good catholics - but, because of shariah, there's no such thing as a moderate Muslim, at least in terms of Western values and traditions, when it comes to doctrine - and central to that doctrine is the exercise of Shariah law which is both a judicial system and political utility entirely at odds with the norms of the West - which means that questioning the purpose of and motives governing the mosque is not to be a bigot flailing away in the throes of an irrational Islamabobia but rather suggests one is a pragmatic skeptic asking the entirely reasonable and very American question: what the fuck do ya think you're doin'?
Again - do I really want the mosque banned and Islam repudiated? I suppose not... maybe... in a sense... but more than that I think is I want the argument, the public debate to reflect the Western tradition and therefore espouse a healthy skepticism concerning these questions - that ultimately is what we're about and what it seems Islam is not - and what troubles me the most I think is that liberals should be making this secularist argument but instead are running away from it as fast as they can, trying to cover their tracks with highly speculative academy friendly circumlocutions about 'freedom of religion' and ignoring entirely the secularism that lies at the heart of that principle, a secularism which Islam, according to its own doctrines and dictates, is not compatible with - and what that says to me is that the new left, which Obama is a product of, is enslaved to an ideology that is in complete denial of the harsh realities that govern the world and America's place in it - bad things will flow from this disconnect, we're already seeing it in Obama's presidency which has been as far as I'm concerned an abject failure to this point - but, as relates particularly to mosque question, the left's failure, led by Obama, to take up the secularist argument and defend the Western tradition and thereby deeply offend and agitate with unease the broad middle of the country, means they leave the argument for right to make, which means the argument is vulnerable to being hijacked by the religious right - and no sane person wants to see that - I was convinced long before most that a president Obama would prove to be a bad thing - but a president Palin? a president Huckabee? a president Thune? - that does not inspire confidence.
