For those who, like me 5 minutes ago, have no idea what this refers to, an Iranian cleric attributed the “immodest” dressing of women to the increase in earthquakes.

Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes.”

As you can read in the article, a woman named Jennifer McCreight launched an effort to prove Sedighi wrong.  On April 26th, tens of thousands of women intend to wear their most revealing attire, figuring that if Sedighi is right, an earthquake should surely follow soon afterwards.

Chances are that nothing will happen, and that Sedighi is either a complete moron, or a ideological predator attempting to appeal to people’s sexual conservatism – through fear – in order to recruit more people to his particular moral code.

But what if – what if! – an earthquake did take place shortly after April 26th?  Or even a month later?  It certainly isn’t beyond the realm of possibility, given the seeming decrease in our planet’s tectonic stability.  Of course such an earthquake would have nothing to do with the “Boobquake”, and it would be just a coincidence, but can you imagine the fallout?

It’d actually be hilarious – a real cosmic sort of humor – except for the fact that earthquakes kill people.

But how much of a backfire against McCreight’s effort would that be?  For people already even remotely willing to believe Sedighi’s claims, this would only seal it in stone for them.  I can’t imagine McCreight herself would be too vocal about her experiment at that point.

In any case, as a heterosexual man (even as a committed ally to womanism), I am certainly looking forward to the 26th!

UPDATE (4/26/2010): I actually didn’t end up leaving the house on Boobquake day.  Oh well.  But even more interesting than all of the cleavage I missed is the 6.5 magnitude earthquake reported off the coast of Taiwan.  Apparently this is pretty standard seismic activity.  According to McCreight:

“No, the Taiwan earthquake is not statistically significant – yet.”

So no one’s connecting the quake to McCreight’s little (or, actually quite big in many cases) experiment just yet.  Still, it’s pretty funny.

Then as teenagers it is common for us to go through a rebellious phase – not necessarily acting outside of any established moral or ethical framework, but daring to venture out on our own, to establish our identities as individuals, and to explore for ourselves what constitutes “truth”. Sometimes we act like raving lunatics just to be contrary.

Then we enter adulthood, and invariably become more “grounded”, learning to temper our youthful passions, to focus that energy towards more “practical” pursuits.  We learn balance, objectivity, humility.  We are able – in most cases – to reconcile our personal views with the fact that others have different views.

We grow up.

It occurred to me recently that there may be a parallel between this maturation from childhood to adulthood, and people’s progression through different phases of belief and disbelief.  Of course not everyone has the journey through belief and/or disbelief, just as we don’t all mature at the same pace or experience the same things at any given point in our lives.  So the parallel I am drawing is meant to be generic and abstract, rather than a precise comparison.

For those of us who grow up in religious households, we are taught our parents’ beliefs, go to their church, temple, or mosque if they have one, and are saddled with our parents morals, ethics, and any baggage that might come with it.  We take what we are given at face value, accept it as truth, due to the trust we place in those that have proven themselves by caring for us.  But unlike our natural inevitable journey into adolescence, many people never push beyond the beliefs instilled in them during childhood, they do not dare to venture out on their own, to establish their own personal religious identity.

More often than not, those who do not “progress” beyond this stage are the fundamentalists of any given theology, the hardliners, the literalists.  These are people who retain their childhood stories but never learned to look at it with grown-up eyes, to appreciate things like subtlety, nuance, multiple interpretations – like only appreciating poetry where it rhymes, rather than being able to read between the lines.

For those that do move to the next phase, however,  some rebel violently against their former beliefs and institutions – or at least the most vile version or perception of those institutions.  Perhaps they rebel due to a falling out with a parent or preacher or other authority figure.  Perhaps because of some major discrepancy between what we’ve been told to think and what we’ve reasoned for ourselves or even directly experienced.  This discrepancy usually has some noteworthy psychological impact, forcing a person not just to let go of their beliefs, but to run away from them screaming and yelling.

These are people like the militant atheists and agnostics – those for whom it is not enough to simply disbelieve, but who feel compelled to attack those who do believe. Not all atheists fit this description as I’ll explain in the third phase below. Far from simply establishing themselves as individuals “free” of religion, they feel some pressing need to return to their old beliefs and institutions with venom and fire, to criticize and belittle them.  In this way they are just as tethered to those old institutions as they always were, their identities as atheists dependent upon there being a religion against which to rebel.

Just as angry teenagers do not listen to their parents’ reasoning, their attempts to defend their choices, militant atheists do not listen to the more rational believers, the liberal theologians.  They are too busy screaming and yelling.  They need to cast religion and religious people as villains against whom they must stand in opposition.  The ironic thing is that they become the very thing that they are trying to rebel against, like the worst nightmare of any rebellious teenager – to become just like their parents.

The new atheists, who attack a repugnant version of religion, use it to condemn all religion. They use it to deny the reality and importance of the religious impulse. They are curiously unable to comprehend those who found through their religious convictions the strength to stand up against injustice…The new atheists, like all fundamentalists, flee from complexity. They can cope with religion in its most primitive and abusive form. They are helpless when confronted by a faith that challenges their caricatures.

America’s New Fundamentalists pp. 33-34

My experience with this involved some evangelicals and their implication that my mother, for her experimenting with Buddhism and other religions, would be condemned to Hell.  Another example can be seen in the movie The God Who Wasn’t There, which presented itself as a critique of religion and the Jesus myth, but by the end revealed itself to be one man’s personal vendetta against his religious upbringing and parochial school.  Much like a teenager finally getting to tell her parents all the things they did wrong in raising her.

Finally, though, the incendiary passions of militant atheism, like adolescence, are tempered through a sort of rational – rather than physical – maturity.  We learn to read religion like poetry – to understand subtlety, nuance, interpretation.  We learn that no one interpretation is necessarily right or wrong, but that they simply are.  This is not to say that we become believers again, but we no longer categorically deny the possibility – or legitimacy – of believing again.  And should we choose not to believe, we are able to make peace with religion, to reconcile our disbelief with others’ belief, to accept that disbelief is merely another interpretation of our experience.

To clarify, I do not mean to imply any qualitative difference between people at the different stages of belief or disbelief.  I do not think that people at any given stage are better than any other, no more than adults are better people than teenagers, or teenagers better people than young children.  They all simply have different ways of viewing and interpreting the world and their experiences within it.  I do contend, however, that just as adults tend to be better educated, better adjusted, and to possess greater wisdom for their length of experience, those who have progressed to the “third phase” are also wiser and better adjusted.  They are more capable of higher order thinking, more rational, more objective, and more established and comfortable within their identities.

They are independent enough to think for themselves, to make their own choices, and wise enough to look deeper into things rather than taking them at face value.  They are secure enough that they no longer need to prove themselves against the standards or norms of another.  They are grounded enough to no longer need to fly to the attack on others’ beliefs, or the defense of their own.

In short, they have grown up.

Not-See

–noun.
a person able to ignore or deny certain realities, such as racism, sexism, classism, sexualism, ableism, or religious prejudice by virtue of the privilege associated with membership within a dominant group.

Origin: Unknown Date, Americanism

Word Origin & History
A play on words, the pronunciation of “Not-See” invokes the word “Nazi”. The crimes of the former are passive instead of active – those who would turn a blind eye to injustice rather than perpetrating it themselves. The ideologies of both, however, are predicated upon a certain egocentrism, social privilege, and stark self-versus-other mentality.

Not-Sees are people who witness racism or other prejudices and either are unaware of it, or even when made aware of it, deny it – even going to great lengths to explain it away or dismiss the grievances of those affected by that prejudice. Not-Sees love to use the term “race-card”.

Look into any discussion in an online forum about, say, whitewashing – or racebending – as it pertains to the upcoming Last Airbender film:

Here’s a clue – people invest millions of dollars into films because they want to make more millions of dollars, not because they want to help insecure people feel better about themselves. If some of the title roles are played by “white” actors, it’s not racism, it’s marketing.¹

Or blackface in The Secret of Kells:

You’re all babies, this is an animated movie, not KKK propaganda. Get over yourselves, either watch it or don’t, but don’t pollute a thread with this bullshit. Racism is bad ra ra we all get it move along please.²

And the PSP game Loco Roco:

…I’ve been playing the demo of this game for sometime now, and these thoughts never crossed my mind, and you know what, I’m sure the kids who will play this game will never see it as well. I’m 23 years old, and after you pointing out all this bollocks I still don’t see it, I see it as a fun, creative game…³

Not-Sees are those who accuse people of color of being “hyper-sensitive” for daring to notice what are for POCs obvious instances of racism. Not-Sees are people who would deny the legacy of slavery in the United States, and tell African-Americans – disproportionately poor and still denied access to quality education, housing, and employment – that they need to “get over it”. The Not-Sees themselves have, after all.

Not-Sees are people who see nothing wrong with Emily Blunt posing with crutches, or think that Abercrombie and Fitch are justified within their business ethos to reject a model with a prosthetic arm. They are people who think that gay marriage isn’t an important issue, because after all they are not gay, so why should they care? These are the same Not-Sees who would dismiss a transgendered person’s struggle with identity as mere “confusion”, or some sort of intended sexual deviancy.

Not-Sees are people who dismiss the outrage of feminists around the sustained gender inequalities such as wages, the sexual double standard, or the inordinate pressure placed on women to conform to the beauty standard, and to be judged by their physical appearances first, if not exclusively.

Ironically, Not-Sees can even be feminists themselves, Western or white who ignore the particular experiences of women of color, presupposing that the problems women face are universal or at least the same as their own; who would ignore Islamic women’s own voices while railing against the practice of covering.

It would be a wonderful world if there were no pressures on Muslim women at all to don the hijab. Frankly, if every Muslim woman in the world threw off her hijab, refused to be “modest”, and became a rad-fem activist, it’d suit me perfectly.⁴

Not-Sees are willing participants in a culture of willful, sustained, institutionalized obliviousness – people who out of laziness or for the sake of their own peace of mind ignore, shy away from, or attempt to delegitimize issues that do not affect them directly.

These travesties periodically lead me to a particular train of thought, but I don’t think I’ve ever expressed it publicly.  On the question of gods’ existence, my answer remains a “maybe”, and even a “I hope so”, and I’ve even gone so far as to offer theoretical explanations as to the very nature of a god or gods.

In considering the nature of god or gods, we inevitably come to two questions:

1. Are the gods all-knowing and/or all-powerful?
2. Are the gods benevolent?

By my analysis, it is impossible for the answer to be “yes” to both of these questions.  If the gods are all-knowing and all-powerful, then we often ask why they would allow tragedy and suffering?  Some people answer that it is all part of a divine plan, beyond our understanding.  And perhaps it is all for some greater good.  But if this is true, then the gods cannot be said to be benevolent, because to be all-powerful and benevolent would preclude the allowance of suffering.

A world such as ours – where child slavery and the murder of innocents take place on a regular basis – cannot possibly be a reflection of a benevolent divinity.  I am willing to accept that some grandiose plan for the universe would not necessarily be to the benefit of humanity, which is only a mote in a cosmic sea.  But an all-powerful god or gods – meaning they have the power to stop travesty – cannot be said to be benevolent if they do not stop that travesty.

On the other hand – and this is the idea I am more likely to accept – is that to whatever extent god or gods exist physically or metaphysically, or any higher beings exist that have a hand in the proceedings of the universe, they are not all-powerful, not all-knowing, and are completely fallible.

And if the nature of the gods is more along the lines of what I suspect – that they are extensions of the human collective consciousness – then it makes sense that they would be imperfect.

Following this line of thinking not only allows me to reconcile the concept of conscious divinities with the reality of human suffering, but makes the god(s) seem more personable, more accessible.  Because we have that in common – fallibility.

But to think that a god or gods could be both omnipotent and benevolent is to be completely delusional or intellectually lazy.  They can be one or the other – or neither – but certainly not both.

At least since the events of September 11th, 2001, the media and the blogosphere have reported on individuals and factions they regard as extremists – like those responsible for the attacks.  Most prominent in the reporting was mention of the religion of these offenders, that being – at least nominally – Islam.

The terms that subsequently emerged were “Islamic radicals”, “Islamists” and most venomously “Islamofascists”.  So often was Islam – as a faith of one-fifth of the human population – tethered to the inexcusable actions of an aggressive few, that one could hardly think of one without thinking about the other.  While for some this association produced a new and profound animosity towards Islam and Muslims, I was inclined to investigate the relationship, if any, between the religion and the deviant practice of terrorism.

What I found was that in most instances of separatism, radicalism, and/or militancy, Islam was more a mere fact of their identity or culture than the inspiration for their actions.  For all that Islam really had to do with it, the aggressors might as well have been called “turbanist radicals”, if they happened to be wearing turbans.  That there is such an emphasis on religion would appear to be a rhetorical attack on Islam as a global faith.

Today, as I read extensively about the Palestine-Israel conflict and more on the background of the general tension between the so-called “Muslim world” and the west, I often run into the term Islamist.  And everytime it stands out like a beacon.  The term is taken by those knowledgeable in these matters to mean “Islamic radical”, or a person who generally perverts the foundational messages of the religion towards political ends, and often in violent ways.

There are two problems, however, with using the term.  The first is that the suffix “ist” is not an adequate substitute for “radical” or “militant”, although perhaps it could be argued – spuriously – that it is the last three letters of “terrorist”, which for all intents and purposes is what Islamist is meant to infer.  For those who know very little or nothing about Islam – which is probably the majority of non-Muslims – “ist” does absolutely nothing to separate the religion from the violent activities conducted in its name.  The uninformed person is not likely to recognize the difference between “Islamist” and “Islamicist”, the latter being a person who engages in the academic study of Islam.  Nor are they likely to know the difference between “Islamist” and “Muslim”.  And in a climate ripe with anti-Islamic sentiment, the uninformed and angry have very little incentive to make the distinction.

The second problem is that Islam is mentioned at all when discussing radical, militant, or terrorist activities.  Because as I mentioned above, a more thorough investigation into the relationship between the religion and violence is tenuous.  That an ideologue like Osama bin Laden recites – or misreads – a passage from the Qur’an does not bind the rest of his words or his actions to Islam.  In any case, he cites the Qu’ran very little in his communications, either because his knowledge of Islam is wanting, or because he does not wish to expose the dubious connection between the religion and his personal ideology.

Most Muslims – for whom Islam is an inexorable part of their cultures and lifestyles – do not associate the words or actions of a bin Laden with their faith.  And they are surprised and offended whenever that connection is made.  Imagine, if you are an average American citizen, with no involvement in politics or the military, being labeled an imperialist by others around the world simply because you live in a country which many regard as the modern day empire.

As you consider the inadequacy of that classification – unless, of course, you are an imperialist – multiply that inadequacy by about four.  America is home to about 300 million people, at least some of which certainly are imperialists.  But those few do not necessarily speak for the majority.  The same is true for Islam and radicals, except to a greater extent, since there are around 1.2 billion Muslims, and probably fewer of them who are radicals, terrorists, and militants, than there are Americans who support imperialism – if only implicitly.

So with that said, what need is there to use the term “Islamist” in discussing the actions of a Hamas or a Hezbollah or a Lashkar-e-Taiba?  For these three groups in particular, all of which with varying degrees of legitimacy are considered terrorist organizations, Islam has little to nothing to do with their stated motivations.  The actions of Hamas have everything to do with the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians.  The actions of Hezbollah purport to represent the people of Lebanon, particularly in their relationship with Israel.  And Lashkar-e-Taiba – those responsible for the Mumbai attacks – acted in response to the relationship between Pakistan and India.

Regardless of how we see these organizations, whether as terrorists or radicals or a militant resistance, it is important to separate their actions – almost always politically motivated – from their religion, unless the two are truly inexorable.  Otherwise we risk maintaining an unnecessary distance and animosity between people who apart from their particular beliefs and practices, have many of the same needs and values.

It is the responsibility of a lawful and moral press to bridge that distance, to squelch that animosity, by providing the information we need to better understand our surroundings and the people who occupy them.

An example of how to provide information constructed with the appropriate cultural and/or religious context is this article by the Washington Post discussing pending peace talks between Hamas and Israel.