In the aftermath of the Woolwich murder of Lee Rigby, it is apparent that all sides of the political spectrum are torn as to where we go from here. The solution, as far as progress is concerned, is very simple: we must defend the freedom of Muslims like anyone else’s, whilst moving society away from religious influence.

There can be no justification for violence of any kind against Muslims; these are people just as deserving of respect as anyone else. People have a right to believe what they wish, and as much as we may disagree, we are morally bound not to attack those with whom we disagree. This is the basics of our modern civilisation and we lose the strongest principles we have if we violate it. Indeed, freedom is something our ancestors (and our modern day soldiers) are trained to fight to their deaths to protect. We do the memory of Lee Rigby, in particular, a great disservice if we ignore freedoms like these.

This does not mean we must like what religions do, or stay quiet about it. As you can see, I certainly don’t. There is absolutely no doubt that Islam and Christianity are outdated concepts from a period of history which science has moved us on from. Bombing abortion clinics, burning witches at the stake and killing in the name of Allah are all acts which can and should all be removed from our societies. But progress toward a more civilised society does not include physically attacking those who hold absurd beliefs; rather we need to foster an environment where reason and evidence hold the foremost role, and where the mythical and magical are, at best, personally held beliefs rather than morally guiding ones. Terrorism does not happen because no one fights back (we have waged entire wars to fight it, remember, with little success), it happens because we accept that magical and untestable beliefs are acceptable ways of forging moral rules.

We must also recognise that the reaction of the political right wing (groups like the English Defence League) are not the only ones in the wrong. The actions of their supporters in condemning people based on race or nationality are absolutely out of place and must be fought against. However the political left are also to blame: from this sphere comes a constant apology on behalf of religious violence, and a rhetoric that those religious people who properly understand it do not turn to terrorism. This is as ignorant and incorrect as any EDL remark, as religion is not a game of correctly grasping facts and attitudes. Religion is about believing things out of ‘faith’, with no evidence, in order to give yourself answers to questions which absolutely can not be answered. A Muslim killing someone in the name of Allah is not ‘misunderstanding’ Islam, as Islam is a religion like any other – it is about ‘faith’ and personal interpretation.

The way to fight against this violent threat in society is not to apologise on its behalf and try to make people see non-existent peaceful ‘facts’ in religions where there are no facts at all. Neither is it a good method to violently attack a large number of people who believe similar religious ideas to those who commit the murders. Rather we must argue against the untestable moral beliefs of religion themselves, whilst educating people on the benefits of rational, evidence-based inquiry and debate. We can remove from religion from society, but we are never justified in ignoring the humanity of religious people.

 

For further reading on the logical problem with untestable ideas, a good start would be the late Sir Karl Popper’s wonderful ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’. To learn more about how religion fails in tests of reasonable evidence, please take a look at Victor Stenger’s ‘God the Failed Hypothesis’. Finally, to see what an entirely rational idea of morality looks like – one not based in spirituality at all – please check out my book ‘Rational Morality: A Science of Right and Wrong’ which is due for release on 14th June.

Unsurprisingly, the reaction to yesterdays violent murder in Woolwich has been vast and quick to emerge. One main discussion has emerged from this: should the event be blamed on immigration or religion? Or, alternatively, are we just looking at another violent attack – the type of which happens several times a year?

Before any analysis takes place, we have to put the emphasis on rationality and evidence. This is not to devalue our strong emotional reactions to the crime, but rather to ensure that we don’t react inappropriately. To react irrationally would be to encourage such crimes happening again – we need solutions and genuine progress, so emotion alone will not do.

We must also admit that we know few of the details as yet. At best our early reactions are guided by general principles, so we must reserve judgement in some areas whilst only reacting in ways which do justice to the victims family and those of potential victims in the future.

 

Which is the problem, immigration or religion?

We should first note that the two are partly connected. Immigration can lead to an influx in new fundamentalist religious principles  Whilst religion and terrorism also connect by virtue of most terrorism being religiously based; despite the words of moderate religious people and MPs everywhere, the holy books of the various religions do justify the killing of innocents outside of the religion. This is true, at least, in Islam and Christianity – the two relevant religions in this story (Christianity being the default British religion, Islam being the supposed religion of the attackers). To ignore this is to play literary games with the meaning of very clear verses in either book.

So does it make sense to blame immigration? Would tightening immigration solve the problem? There’s little evidence to support this assertion. Indeed we know that previous UK based terror plans, and previous religious violence, has occurred from the hands of British born people. This should be no surprise. No civilisation originated in the UK, we are all evolved from African ancestors. So it would be strange that dangerous religious rules would only originate outside the country, given that religion is fairly popular within it and all humans are wired in more or less the same way. There’s little evidence to suggest that building invisible walls around the UK would remove terrorism from our shores.

So why the outcry about immigration? Put simply, we have correlated that people who look a certain way (people of non-white descent) tend to be involved in the terrorist crime we see. As humans we naturally err toward spotting these patterns, regardless of whether they are causally related. The truth, though, is that the race or nationality of people do not cause these terrorist views, religions do. The Bible and The Quran both justify the deaths of innocents, and as raw guides for someone’s sincere beliefs, they undoubtedly cause violent problems around the world. Britain has become largely secular, so we see far less religious extremism from Christians, however Islam still thrives in many non-secular states. As a result, people born in these states are more likely to be engaged in terrorist groups, so we have uncovered the reason why people of non-white descent often cause terrorist problems. It is not caused by race, but religion.

This does not justify anti-immigration arguments, just as it doesn’t justify racism. There are white British Muslims, there are white British Christians, and all of these people hold the same basic meta-physical beliefs which led directly to terrorism in various circumstances over the last decades. These seeds flower into terrorism more often in non-secular countries, of course, but in my opinion there is every reason to believe that blanket immigration bans (which is the only way to guarantee no future terrorists enter the country) will lead to British nationals taking up the cause of Jihad instead. The most infamous British terror attack was in fact committed by British nationals.

 

Terrorism or Religion?

The difference between religious violence and terrorism, assumedly, is that when Christians bomb abortion clinics, or picket the funerals of dead soldiers, this is not called terrorism as it often involves white people. The logic and intent is the same but we judge the action differently due to the look of the aggressor involved. In countries which see themselves as ‘white’ countries, other white people are perhaps not terrifying.

This point is, of course, largely irrelevant when it comes to preventing future attacks; it doesn’t matter what we call it, even if it is an interesting side note about our bias. What matters is that we don’t aim our hostility toward people of certain races – this is irrational. We also shouldn’t fall into the arms of irrational political parties, especially those that couldn’t even run a country in theory, simply because we are scared of terrorists flooding into the UK. British nationals have been involved in terrorist activity before, and likely will be again.

It is important that we aim at progress though, which involves pointing out the role of religion. These dusty old books, if taken at face value, justify atrocious actions. So we can no longer deem unquestioned ‘faith’ to be the preserve of good people if we want to prevent terrorist attacks. The Woolwich murderers did not utter ‘End the recession’ or ‘Kill the British people’, they said ‘Allah Akbar’ which translates as ‘God is great’. We could ignore the idea of Jihad, and the sincere statements of people who happily risk their lives and their freedom for their religious views, but to do so is ignoring the source of the problem. This is not a problem of race or nationality, or of economic social problems. It’s a problem of religion. We shouldn’t shy away from pointing this out when innocent people are at risk, and it is also not ‘Islamophobic’ to do so. All religions cause these problems, it is simply the modern world where Islam happens to cause them more so.

The problem, in a nutshell

With the release of Rational Morality less than a month away, now would be a good time to go over what I believe to be one of the most important features of the theory: how to rationally solve the ‘is-ought problem’. Those who have read or studied any moral philosophy will likely not need an explanation of what this problem refers to; non-philosophers will not need a great deal either as the problem is so intuitive. So I’ll keep it short.

Science/rationality is a method of discovering and testing truths about the universe. It does not stop at things that we can directly observe, instead branching off into areas such as theoretical mathematics and physics, whereby answers are implied by evidence elsewhere. Science is a reliable method for teaching us about the way things are.

The is-ought problem claims that although science can tells us the way things are, it cannot tell us the way they ought to be. In other words the problem posits that no statement of ‘is’ justifies a statement of ‘ought’.

Many have approached and referenced this problem, and of those a fair number have disagreed with it. Alisdair MacIntyre, for instance, argues that ‘ought’ statements are related to goals, and thus it makes sense to say that a knife ‘should’ be able to cut by virtue of it’s purpose (the goal of making a knife). Thus we are justified in saying the knife is ‘bad’.

There is little to disagree with here, however it does not solve the moral problem; even if ‘oughts’ do relate to goals, why ‘ought’ we have certain goals? After all, no natural characteristic of human beings is constitutive of being an end goal, nor should it be, lest we commit the naturalistic fallacy of assuming something is good based on it naturally existing. So we are still faced with a perplexing question of how to derive moral facts from a materialist conception of the world?

This very dilemma persuades many to moral relativism. Morality, they claim, evolved entirely naturally as a useful social tool: morality is relative. This, of course, does exactly what materialists are trying to avoid. In stating that morality evolved relatively, and so is relative, they have been careless in deriving an ought from an is. Morality did evolve relatively, but this doesn’t mean we ought to be relative on moral issues.

 

A solution through lateral thinking

What the moral relativists did, as we saw in the last paragraph, was to try and come up with the most simple of solutions by using Occam’s Razor. Morality evolved relatively, so it is relative. This might still fall foul of the very problem is was trying to avoid, but it betters classical accounts of moral realism by not providing an untestable set of assumptions and instead just taking the simplest path. We know that moral relativism is rationally untenable, but we also know that accounts of morality that posit classical moral realist positions are also untenable (due to adding irrational assumptions in order to justify their conclusions), so if these are our only two positions then we begin to give up on morality being a rational subject to study.

In trying to either create new assumptions (which good science should never do) or else provide the simplest possible path through the problem, it seems everyone has missed the glaringly obvious solution. In order to be rational you need to justifiably derive an ‘ought’ statement from an ‘is’ statement, and we undoubtedly cannot do this with any naturally existing ‘is’ statements. The key part of that sentence is ‘naturally’. There is a social situation in which you can rationally invoke an objective theory of morality. If we live in a society where everyone agrees we need a code of morality, and thus a set definition is agreed upon, we have an ‘is’ situation in which ‘ought’ statements can be derived. Specifically, we can derive moral rules entirely rationally from our set base point at which we defined morality. It really is that simple.

From this very simple methodology we can then start using the work of Sam Harris (among others), who has argued very clearly for science to help us determine human values and has also provided us the best current definition of morality (in my opinion) with which to start: morality is about the well-being of sentient individuals.

 

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In recent weeks much has been made of the assertion that rational atheism is “being used as a cover for Islamophobia”. The following article, written by Glenn Greenwald, is one of the more well known examples:

Sam Harris, the New Atheists, and anti-Muslim animus

Harris, much like Christopher Hitchens, sometimes takes a somewhat perplexing political position for an atheist liberal. For Hitchens, politics became blurred after a famously socialist belief system and his the famous example was in support of the war in Iraq. Harris’ big issue has been with gun control, as he came out in support of individuals owning fire arms for protection.

This is not the conversation here, though. This attack, primarily focused on Harris, posits that the New Atheist argument against faith (in particularly the faith of Islam) is a cover for racism or xenophobia. Yet, it is difficult to even get the debate started. Harris and New Atheism in general have always been vocal in their criticism of all religion, with Harris himself writing an entire book on the Christian faith. Similarly, Islam is only focused on when the difference between Islam and the likes of Mormonism is described (Harris is right to point out that Broadway hit ‘The Book of Mormon’, if directed at the prophet Mohamed, would have lead to deadly terrorist attacks or threats and not just letter writing campaigns).

The articles on both sides have actually made these points already (the conversation posted by Harris explains it perfectly well: Dear Fellow Liberal). There are two further points which I haven’t seen dissected as yet.

Firstly, what should we say about the likes of Greenwald’s opinions? Harris has pointed out at various times that his criticism of Islam is primarily in defense of women and homosexuals, who are second class citizens under Islamic regimes. If American, or UK, citizens were treated the way women and homosexuals are treated under many Islamic regimes, would Greenwald be so quick to ignore the religious element? Liberals of Greenwalds position often defend themselves by releasing religion from the blame and trying to state that the problem is actually economic or social factors. The argument goes that In the US, the problem with gay marriage opposition isn’t Christianity, it’s bigoted people using Christianity as an excuse. Similarly, the problem with any Islamic regimes isn’t Islam, it is religious people being influenced by other factors.

There is a big hole in this argument…actually, there are two. Firstly, it doesn’t seem xenophobic to state that an Islamic regime is immoral because it follows Islamic law; and so noting the correlation between the two obviously connected things. That’s a factual statement. Islam is a religion, and like any religion it provides broad and arbitrary justification for more or less anything you want it to – especially, in Islam, explicit support for the dehumanisation of women and homosexuals. So even if people are just using it to justify what they already want to do, or what they feel they need to do, then the problem is still religion. In this case, the particular religion of Islam. In the UK, for instance, we do not dehumanise women under law, as we have peeled back the influence of religion by forcing an ever increasing secularization to counter the damage. It’s not xenophobic to note that many Islamic regimes are not secular and so are not reasonable.

Secondly, religion might be irrational but it does play a big role in people’s lives – for some people it provides reasons to live that go beyond the boundaries of the material. Those terrorists who flew planes into the world trade towers did believe they were going to a better place because of what they did – we have no reason to doubt this. Indeed, religion and spiritual worldviews are the only reason people ever reject rational, worldly reasoning in favour of the promise of an afterlife. If it turned out that they did not believe in what they said they did, then we would be at a loss to explain their behavior (peer pressure starts to become a weak motivation when it forces you to kill yourself in a place where your pressuring peers have little influence…). So if Greenwald were to use this counter argument, he would arbitrarily be doubting the sincerely stated beliefs of the religious – in this case Muslims. That is the very definition of xenophobia – doubting other people’s sincerity based on their cultural difference to you, whereas your own sincerity is obviously intact.

The only thing to take away from the debate – which, unfortunately, is one of liberals barking up an ever more distant tree – is to ensure that Islam is not isolated in the theory on the problems of faith. All religions are problematic in providing this justification for almost anything you want to believe and thus the separation of individual beliefs from rational consistency, not just Islam. In the west, we have started chipping away at Christianity’s stranglehold and have been successful at progressing toward a secular, more rational state – one in which even the more religious people in society are largely rational in comparison to what they were centuries earlier. But this is the only reason why Islam is currently a bigger threat than Christianity. Islamic regimes fight secularisation with violence and so long as reason and skeptisism fail to seep into public consciousness in these countries (or even into Western thought about these regimes) then Islam will always be a bigger threat to human safety than the likes of Christianity.

It isn’t xenophobic to identify these problems, but it arguably is xenophobic for liberal journalists to ignore them whilst maintaining a veneer of being ethically consistent; such a position requires xenophobic arguments about the sincerity of cultural beliefs.