Instead of atheism, Canadian clergy choose alternative views of God

2016/06/13 Leave a comment

Douglas Todd summarizes the survey, provoked by United Church minister Gretta Vosper, a self-proclaimed atheist:

Admittedly, the survey captures only the views of United Church clergy, who tend to the liberal side of the theological spectrum. But I suspect they illustrate the main ways most people in Canada think about God:

Panentheism: This was the most common view among active United Church of Canada clergy.

Fifty-one per cent of active UC clergy agreed with the statement: “I believe in the existence of god/God, and that God/god is greater than the universe, includes and interpenetrates it.”

Bott believes this statement illustrates the core tenet of panentheism, an emerging form of theism that is often referred to as “natural theology.” Bott acknowledged he counts himself in this group, citing American Marjorie Suchocki among his favourite theologians.

Recognizing panentheism is a term that combines “pantheism” with “theism,” Bott said he understands it to mean “that God participates with all that exists. When changes happen in creation, changes happen in God. I see God in a dance with creation.”

Classic theism: Thirty-four per cent of active UC clergy hold this classic theistic belief in God.

They agreed with the statement: “I believe in one god/God as the creator and ruler of the universe, and further believe that God/god reveals godself/Godself through supernatural revelation.”

Classic theism is “what most people think of when they think of God,” said noted Bible scholar Marcus Borg. It is generally believed such a Supreme Being can supernaturally, unilaterally “intervene” in the world.

Deism: Deism was popular in 19th-century among European intellectuals. It basically teaches that God created the laws of the natural universe, like a clockmaker makes a clock, and then stood back and let it tick away.

Only 2.3 per cent of active United Church clergy supported the deistic statement: “I believe in the existence of God/god on the evidence of reason and nature only, and reject supernatural revelation.”

God only as a metaphor: Some people think God is at least partly a metaphor for love, truth or beauty.

But just 2.1 per cent of active United Church clergy agreed with the statement: “God is solely a metaphor for what is good in the human condition.”

The finding suggests that, while many think God is an ineffable entity only understood through metaphors, United Church clergy don’t therefore buy that God is not real.

Agnosticism: Only 1.2 per cent of active United Church clergy chose the agnostic option — that they “neither believe nor disbelieve in the existence of God/god, as it can be neither known nor proven.”

Atheism: Fewer than one in 100 active United Church clergy were atheists. Only 0.7 per cent agreed: “I do not believe in the existence of God/gods.”

Together these results provides evidence that Vosper is much more rare in the United Church of Canada than she suggests.

It’s why many say that, while there is nothing wrong with “not believing in God/gods,” it’s another thing to proclaim atheism while being paid as a Christian minister.

Nevertheless, Vosper has brought in lawyers to fight the confidential review of her ordination that’s underway in the Toronto region of the United Church. So far, her lawyers have failed to stop it.

The United Church is an extremely tolerant organization when it comes to clergy’s spiritual beliefs. So anything can happen yet.

But if Vosper ends up losing her public platform as a clergywoman in a Christian denomination, she will also lose much of her novelty value to journalists.

She will become just another one of the 4.5 million Canadians who are atheists.

Source: Instead of atheism, Canadian clergy choose alternative views of God | Vancouver Sun

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How Timbuktu’s Bad-Ass Librarian Got Lucky – The Daily Beast

2016/06/04 Leave a comment

Good long read on the efforts of Abdel Kader Haidara and the Ahmed Baba Institute to find and preserve rare manuscripts and a reminder of the rich historical intellectual tradition within Islam.

Islamist militants set fire to the Institute in 2014 but many manuscripts were saved and moved to more secure locations:

Nor did Haidara have second thoughts about the life that he had chosen. “I was well paid for this work. They let me do whatever I wanted, and I did it well,” he recalled three decades later. “I had my freedom. And I had a great responsibility. I had to convince people not to lie. I had to convince them to hand over their manuscripts. They gave me this responsibility with confidence, and I had to fulfill it. And when I started reading these manuscripts, I discovered amazing things, and I couldn’t leave them alone. I couldn’t stop reading.” He steeped himself in the lives of kings and savants, in the wondrous encounters of Timbuktu’s intellectuals with the city’s first Western visitors, in the divisions within Sufism over fikh, or Islamic law, and in the ethical arguments of Ahmed Baba and other polemicists.

He was particularly interested in manuscripts that contradicted Western stereotypes of Islam as a religion of intolerance—pointing with pride to Ahmed Baba’s denunciations of slavery, and to the strident correspondence between the jihadi sultan of Massina and Sheikh Ahmed Al Bakkay Al Kounti, a mid-19th-century Islamic scholar in Timbuktu known for his moderation and acceptance of Jews and Christians. As time passed he became something of a savant himself, revered by many peers in Timbuktu for his knowledge of the region’s history and religion, sought after by parents to offer their children guidance.

Source: How Timbuktu’s Bad-Ass Librarian Got Lucky – The Daily Beast

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ICYMI: Offing the boss: Does killing terrorist leaders make us safer?

2016/06/01 Leave a comment

Another interesting piece by Doug Saunders:

But does it work?

One reason why Mr. Obama’s Taliban-termination received hardly more attention than his other acts on Monday is because people increasingly feel like it doesn’t. The Taliban appointed another leader, its third. Al-Qaeda has sprung back to life. Some have likened decapitation policies to Whac-a-Mole games: Bash a bad guy, and another one springs up.

Boss-offing is not a mysterious topic: In recent years, an entire science of decapitation analysis has sprung up.

The most influential number-crunching was conducted in 2009 by Jenna Jordan, a researcher at the University of Chicago (she is now at Georgia Tech). She analyzed 298 incidents of “leadership targeting” over six decades and looked at their impact on the organizations whose leaders were the recipients of these abrupt terminations.

Her results were far from encouraging. Her data showed that decapitation, on average, “does not increase the likelihood of organizational collapse beyond a baseline rate of collapse for groups over time.”

In fact, the extremist groups most likely to fall apart (that is, to stop being able to commit attacks and wage war) are actually those whose leaders have not been killed: Hitting the head honcho actually seems to help groups keep fighting longer – perhaps because it rather literally injects some fresh blood into the organization.

More recent analyses have questioned these findings. Certain groups have indeed self-imploded following the untimely demise of their figurehead: Peru’s Shining Path faded into irrelevance after its leader Abimael Guzman was captured; Italy’s Red Brigades did not outlast its founding leaders; the capture of Abdullah Ocalan disempowered Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party for a decade.

In a big-data study last year, Bryan Price of the U.S. Military Academy analyzed 207 terrorist groups from 1970 to 2008, but instead of looking at their effectiveness, he examined their longevity.

He found that taking out the executives “significantly increases the mortality rate of terrorist groups, even after controlling for other factors” – but it often takes longer than we’d like. Counterterrorism, he concluded, is a long game. He also found that the groups most likely to implode after things blow up in the head office are nationalists. Groups that see themselves as religious, he found, are more tolerant of bloodbaths at the top. Of 53 religious groups, only 19 have ended – 16 of them after their boss was wiped out. But of the 34 such terrorist groups still in existence (including al-Qaeda and the Islamic State), 20 have endured a decapitation strike.

There are other good reasons to knock off the kingpins: Inspiring morale in your troops, hurting jihadi recruitment by looking all-powerful, sowing moments of chaos that can be exploited. But there’s no reason to think they’ll make the fight any easier, or the world less bloody.

Source: Offing the boss: Does killing terrorist leaders make us safer? – The Globe and Mail

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Islamic Terrorism Is A Form Of Islam And We Can’t Deny It, Says Salman Rushdie

2016/05/31 1 Comment

Worth noting, and there is a difference what words intellectuals and writers may use and those that governments may use:

However, Rushdie has contended, that, ““If everybody engaged in acts of Islamic terrorism says that they’re doing it in the name of Islam, who are we to say they’re not? I mean now of course what they mean by Islam might well not be what most Muslims mean by Islam. But it’s still a form of Islam and it’s a form of Islam that’s become unbelievably powerful in the last 25 and 30 years.

He goes on to talk about ‘this liberal spirit of appeasement’, ‘of political correctness’.

He explains that it is true that several Muslims in America and Western Europe are actively discriminated against, putting them in a position of economic disadvantage and one needs to talk about ending discrimination. However, he adds, religious ideas held by them necessarily doesn’t become legitimate because they belong to economically or racially disadvantaged people in countries like America.

He adds that when free speech is shut down, minority communities are the ones who suffer the most. So they should actively promote the need to let free speech remain truly ‘free’ and if some criticism of their own religious ideas have to faced in the process, so be it. “It comes with the territory,” says Rushdie.

“Most of the oppression of Muslims in the world right now is carried out by other Muslims, you know. Whether it’s the Taliban in Afghanistan or, you know, the Ayatollahs in Iran or wherever it might be. But to say that this is not Islam is to misname the problem. The problem is that there’s been a mutation in Islam, which has become unusually virulent and powerful. And it needs to be dealt with, but in order to deal with it we have to first call it by its true name,” he says.

Source: Islamic Terrorism Is A Form Of Islam And We Can’t Deny It, Says Salman Rushdie

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The anti-Trump: Sadiq Khan and triumph of mainstream Islam – iPolitics

2016/05/18 Leave a comment

Shenaz Kermalli on Sadiq Khan’s win:

Last year, we saw Muslims in Canada unite strategically for the first time in a non-partisan, grassroots organization to achieve a single goal — to increase the participation of Canadian Muslims in the democratic process. This, coupled with the former government’s crude anti-Muslim strategy (not unlike the tactics employed by Zac Goldsmith, Sadiq Khan’s Conservative Party competitor), was a key factor in bringing Justin Trudeau’s pro-immigration party to power. We’ve also seen Maryam Monsef, who came to Canada an as Afghan refugee, sworn in as minister of Democratic Institutions in Trudeau’s cabinet, and Ginella Massa, a hijab-clad journalist, become an on-camera reporter for the Toronto-based CityTV.

Britons, too, have seen a rise in the number of British Muslims taking on high-profile roles. From Nadiya Hussain — winner of the popular television program The Great British Bake-Off — to Somali-born and London-raised Mo Farah, winner of two Olympic Gold medals in 2013, it has been exhilarating to see Muslims make headlines in stories that were not about suicide attacks or beheadings.

In the U.S., we saw videos of Dalia Mogahed, director of research at a DC social policy institute, go viral after she smoothly took on contentious questions about the hijab and radicalization on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah — using U.S. polling figures as evidence that there was no correlation between the two. We also saw professional fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad become the first U.S. athlete to complete in the Olympics as an identifiable Muslim.

None of these people ever publicly condemned ISIS’s abhorrent actions during their moments of fame for a very simple reason: It wasn’t in their remit. They are all skilled professionals in their own right — recognized as Muslims but celebrated for the extraordinary skills they use to contribute to mainstream society.

Which is the way it should be. Muslims are no different from anyone else. For that reason, their achievements should be commended no more, or less, than anyone else’s.

Perhaps the next step in fostering genuine equity in society is for news outlets to drop the ‘Muslim’ descriptor altogether. Would it have made headlines across the world if a Jewish or Hindu mayor had won the London mayoral race, or The Great British Bake-Off?

Canadian journalist Muhammad Lila asked the right question after Sadiq won the mayoral race: “Wouldn’t it be nice if one day Muslims could just do stuff, without pointing out their religion?”

Source: The anti-Trump: Sadiq Khan and triumph of mainstream Islam – iPolitics

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For Muslim women in Canada, a sense of vulnerability: Sheema Khan

2016/05/16 Leave a comment

Sheema Khan focuses on gender differences in analysis of the recent Environics Institute survey:

The recent Environics Institute survey of Muslims in Canada reveals a community that belies facile stereotypes – no more so than when you analyze the results along gender lines.

For example, the survey (for which I served as an unpaid consultant) found that fewer Muslim women share the optimism about Canada felt by their male counterparts. And while both groups believe that their Muslim and Canadian identities are very important, when asked to choose between the two, women choose their Muslim identity at a far higher rate. As a corollary, fewer women than men believe that immigrants should set aside their cultural backgrounds and try to blend into Canadian culture. Furthermore, more female immigrants have indicated that their attachment to Islam has increased since moving to Canada.

The survey, based on telephone interviews with 600 Muslims across the country, also provides an interesting snapshot of gender-based attitudes toward community institutions. For example, only 33 per cent of Muslim women attend a mosque at least once a week for prayer, compared with 62 per cent of men. The lack of female attendance is not surprising, given that many mosques do little to encourage female participation. Interestingly, a core of about 20 per cent of women (and men) is unhappy with opportunities for women to play leadership roles in Muslim organizations. This could provide the basis for an unmosqued movement, or the creation of women’s mosques.

 When it comes to family life, a whopping 90 per cent of Muslim men and women believe the responsibility for caring for the home and children should be shared equally. However, more men believe that the father must be the master in the home, placing the Muslim level of support for family patriarchy roughly equal to that of Canadians in the 1980s. However, today’s younger Muslim generation rejects patriarchy at roughly the same level as that of other Canadians.

Muslim women are less optimistic about relations with non-Muslims than men are, the survey found. A greater number worry about the reaction of Canadians toward Muslims, believing that the next generation of Muslims will face more discrimination. They are also more concerned about media portrayal of Muslims, and stereotyping by colleagues and neighbours.

It seems the crux of the matter lies in discrimination, as 42 per cent of Muslim women (compared with 27 per cent of men) say they have experienced some form of discrimination or ill-treatment during the past five years. Such incidents occurred mainly in public places – stores, restaurants, banks, public transit. Of women who experienced xenophobia, 60 per cent said they are identifiably Muslim. This ratio is reversed among the 25 per cent of Muslim women who experience difficulties at border crossings. As a result, women worry far more about discrimination, unemployment and Islamophobia than men.

The discrimination concerns are real, as illustrated by employment statistics from the 2011 National Household Survey, in which the unemployment rate of Muslims was 14 per cent, compared with the national average of 7.8 per cent, despite Muslims having high levels of education. The unemployment rate was highest in Quebec (17 per cent), which was double the provincial average. In comparison, the national unemployment rate of visible minorities hovered around 10 per cent.

Even Canadian-born Muslims, who graduated from a Canadian institution, fared worse than the national average, with an unemployment rate of 9.5 per cent. One can only imagine the difficulties in finding employment for the 60,000 Muslim women who head a single-parent household.

Clearly, Muslim women feel more vulnerable about the future, given that they bear a greater brunt of discrimination than their male counterparts.

Source: For Muslim women in Canada, a sense of vulnerability – The Globe and Mail

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Islam and terrorism: Gurski

2016/05/02 Leave a comment

Phil Gurski, citing the recent Environics Institute survey on Canadian Muslims, on how integration and participation in Canadian society highlights the “acceptance of the rules of the road in a democracy:’

And yet it would at the same time be difficult to maintain that these groups represent normative Islam.  A very small number of the world’s billion and half Muslims resort to terrorism, and even if we include those that support violence the resulting figure is still minimal.  It should therefore be obvious that Islam does not lead inevitably to terrorism.

Where then does Islam enter into the solution?  We need look no further than to our own country for the answer.  The recent Environics poll on Muslim Canadians provides some intriguing material.  Carried out a decade after the first such survey, the poll shows that a majority of Canadian Muslims feel that this country allows them to practice their faith freely, are proud Canadians, want their communities to integrate into the greater Canadian polity and, of greatest importance for this article, want to cooperate with government agencies to address radicalisation.  This last finding coincides with my experiences and exchanges with Muslim communities across Canada during my time with the federal government.  In addition, the spike in Muslim voting in the last federal election clearly demonstrated that Canadian Muslims engaged in the political process to effect change.  That is the hallmark of one’s acceptance of the rules of the road in a democracy.

The incidence of Islamist terrorism will unfortunately be with us for some time.  Whatever happens to Islamic State and others, the spectre of jihadism will find another body to invade and wreak havoc.  Combating terrorism will take many forms and involve many actors.  Some of the most crucial actors will be our fellow Muslim Canadians.  We have the advantage here that we can have this dialogue about religion: as I heard repeatedly in the UK, EU nations struggle with this topic.

In the end we in Canada will not solve terrorism on our own, but we can make a contribution.  Yes, a small number of Canadians will venture down the path of Islamist violent extremism, and others around the world will act in similar ways.  We cannot, however, allow the fringe to dictate our relationship with our co-citizens who make a real contribution to the success, and envy of many, that is Canada.

Source: Borealis Threat & Risk Consulting

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So who says Muslims can’t be both devout and patriotic? – iPolitics

2016/05/02 Leave a comment

Amira Elghawaby’s take on media coverage of the Environics poll of Canadian Muslims:

CBC’s original headline acknowledged some of the good news — but somehow still managed to frame the results in a negative light: “Muslim Canadians love Canada, but faith more important to their identity: survey”.

That “but” seemed to suggest that one couldn’t both love Canada and strongly identify as Muslim — that somehow, for Muslims, patriotism and faith are mutually exclusive. To its credit, the CBC quickly reacted to the feedback and changed the headline — but the damage had been done. The majority of reader comments reacting to the initial story were negative, harping on stereotypes portraying Muslims as people who are unable or unwilling to integrate — people who want to ‘change’ Canada to suit themselves.

“Faith overrides their ‘love’ of Canada … what does that tell you folks. Tells me importing people more loyal to religious dogma then (sic) laws, culture and peoples of this country is a bad idea,” wrote one commenter.

The Toronto Sun’s coverage was simply obtuse. One Sun columnist offered this observation: “It’s a stretch to say this survey shows Muslims are in fact becoming more Canadian. It paints more of a complicated picture. But based on the increases in the Muslim population and their religious observance, Canada’s certainly becoming more Muslim.” At least one anti-immigrant blogger wallowed in this interpretation of the poll, using it to support his dire warnings of a Muslim takeover.

Given the slant on some of the coverage, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that two-thirds of the Canadian Muslims polled cited “media representation” among their top concerns — followed closely by anti-Muslim discrimination. That slant helps explain why there is such unease about the media among Muslims — and why close to half of non-Muslim Canadians surveyed still hold negative views of Islam and Muslims.

Source: So who says Muslims can’t be both devout and patriotic? – iPolitics

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The Divide Over Islam and National Laws in the Muslim World | Pew Research Center

2016/04/30 Leave a comment

How_much_should_the_Quran_influence_our_country_s_laws____Pew_Research_CenterUseful indication of the differences among countries in the Muslim world:

As strife in the Middle East continues to make headlines, from the militant group ISIS to Syrian refugees, the Muslim world is sharply divided on what the relationship should be between the tenets of Islam and the laws of governments. Across 10 countries with significant Muslim populations surveyed by Pew Research Center in 2015, there is a striking difference in the extent to which people think the Quran should influence their nation’s laws.

Source: The Divide Over Islam and National Laws in the Muslim World | Pew Research Center

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Why Muslims are proud Canadians: Adams and Bullock 

2016/04/29 Leave a comment

www_environicsinstitute_org_uploads_institute-projects_survey_20of_20muslims_20in_20canada_202016_20-_20final_20report_pdfWell worth reading the report in its entirety. The finding that the younger generation demonstrates greater religiosity, within the general context of integration, is of particular interest (same-sex relationships appear to be area of greatest divergence):

Our survey found that young Muslims are often more religious than their immigrant parents. For many, their religious identity is becoming more important to them – not less. At the same time, Canadian-born Muslims are now among the most likely to believe their community wants both integration and to remain distinct, suggesting the development of a unique “Canadian Muslim identity.” More than 90 per cent of young Muslims believe that “other cultures have a lot to teach us; contact is enriching.” Canada promises freedom of religion and young Muslims appear ready to take up this constitutional offer.

Interestingly, while religious practice and identity remain salient, other values change. A big one is patriarchy. In Muslim households, as in most other Canadian families, gender roles are becoming more equal. In our 2006 survey, 70 per cent of Muslims strongly agreed “that taking care of home and kids is as much a man’s job as a woman’s.” In 2016, that number is up to 76 per cent. Among those born in Canada, more than eight in 10 reject the notion that the “father in the family must be the master in his own house,” signalling value convergence over time between many in the younger Muslim community and the broader Canadian society.

Modernization and secularization evolve in different ways in different countries as majorities and minorities interact; groups can fight each other, or they can accommodate. Canada has the aspirational ideology of multiculturalism, as well as the policy framework that goes by the same name. Neither inoculates against discrimination or injustice, but if we look at public attitudes, citizenship acquisition among immigrants and minority representation in our legislatures, it seems that ours may be the worst system in the world, except for all the others.

Muslims report positive feelings toward Canada and non-Muslim Canadians are more likely to have positive impressions of Islam than negative ones. As well, the more Canadians report encountering Muslims in daily life, the more positive their impressions: familiarity breeds good feeling, not contempt.

These findings may explain why we see so little conflict between Muslims and other Canadians; when such conflict does erupt (as when a hijab-wearing woman in Toronto was harassed last fall), public figures are unanimous in their condemnation. The data may also help to explain why Canadians, in sharp contrast to Americans, have been so supportive of accepting Syrian refugees by our government and through private sponsorships.

These numbers are the big picture against which the news of the day unfolds. They offer an empirical grounding against which individual incidents – stories of harmony or harassment – can be judged as typical or unusual and they serve as a useful corrective to inflammatory anecdotes and stereotypes.

Whatever the headlines of the day, the deeper story is that Muslims are proud to be Canadian and they appreciate the same things about Canada that other Canadians do.

Source: Why Muslims are proud Canadians – The Globe and Mail

Some of the better analysis of the study to date:

A third of Canadian Muslims say they’ve experienced discrimination (Nicholas Keung)

Muslim Canadians are different — but not that different: Neil Macdonald

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