Swimming the Sacred River

Mohammad

Well, today is Draw Mohammad Day, and I am adding my own depiction.

I am not doing this with the purpose of offense, although I imagine some people will be offended, including non-Muslims. Normally I go out of my way to avoid offending people. Courtesy is a cornerstone of civilization and it’s a value I try to uphold, even when people cut me off in traffic. But I am not avoiding it today because I think there is an important message behind today’s project (for two great takes on this, read Hemant Mehta and Greta Christina).

That message is that courtesy towards religious belief does not extend to across-the-board censorship, especially when that censorship is enforced by threat of violence.

The image of Mohammad in this post is serving the purpose of illustrating that Islamic law does not apply to me. Freedom of expression is a vital liberty for any healthy culture and I am not willing to cede ground to Islam, even when doing so causes offense. And the only genuine way to protest efforts to curb freedom of expression is to freely express, and this is what I’m doing.

I do not hate Muslims as a people although I think their belief system is grounded in primitive superstition that too often promotes brutality and social injustice. I know that this drawing is poking at sensitive spots and I am sincerely sorry if it causes distress. But in this case, I think that censorship is worse than offensiveness. At the same time, I do not think that this drawing causes harm…it does not promote or even suggest discrimination, violence, or bigotry. It’s just a drawing of a man wishing peace on all people, and that it might inspire deep offense should be cause to consider the reasonableness of religious laws.

I suspect a deeper issue at hand is the notion that religions should be immune from criticism and that believers should be protected from offense. One effect of this sensibility is that many people resist opening critiquing religious beliefs which thereby undermines our ability to promote reason and scientific knowledge. Some people criticize my own orientation quite vigorously, sometimes to the point where I get distressed—should I demand they cease? Can I reasonably suggest that they have overstepped their moral boundaries by offending me? Of course not. In that light, I believe that Muslims are wrong to enforce censorship on me, either through social rebuke on one end to violence on the other, and the best way to make that point is to defy their expectation. I do not wish to offend, but I am willing to do so to make this point.

Peace be upon you.

Imagine for a moment a hypothetical religion. It is a major one with many millions of followers. One of the tenets of this religion states that wearing red clothing is disallowed, perhaps out of respect to its founder who died the bloody death of a martyr. Many adherents say that the ban on red clothing applies not just to members but to everyone and that for anyone to do so constitutes offensive disrespect towards their religion. A small but vocal minority go further and say that wearing red is punishable by death and regularly offer threats of violence towards those who refuse to respect their religious rule.

Now imagine someone saying, “Well, it’s a major religion and who am I to judge their rules, even if I don’t believe what they believe? I don’t want to offend anyone and religious people deserve respect, so I will stop wearing red and encourage my friends to stop as well. After all, there are many other colors to choose from, so it’s no real sacrifice to give up wearing red. True, it’s still within our legal right to wear red, but no good would come of intentionally offending these people by doing so; it’s best simply to comply for the sake of comity. Of course it’s wrong for anyone to threaten to kill people for wearing red, but they don’t represent the peace-loving majority. Frankly, anyone who would wear red is childish, rude, insensitive, and perhaps even hateful and bigoted.”

This hypothetical situation is, in principle, no different than the issue of creating images that depict Mohammad ibn ‘Abdullah, the founder of Islam. This practice is by many Muslims considered deeply offensive, and a small handful have issued and acted on threats of violence towards those who dare to do so. Even the more moderate Muslims claim that drawing a picture of Mohammad is insulting, hurtful, mocking, and so on.

A few weeks ago, Comedy Central infamously censored a portion of a South Park episode that illustrated Mohammad due, apparently, to a death threat from a handful of Muslims. Since then, various projects have sprung up in answer to this, including several secular/atheist college groups who have been drawing smiling Muhammad stick figures in chalk on campus sidewalks. The project that is starting to get a lot of press is “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day”, started by cartoonist Molly Norris, which is to take place on May the 20th. While Norris has since backed away from the project, it has taken on a life of its own, and naturally there are a lot of passionate responses to it on both sides, for and against.

The initial purpose was to show that we will not be intimidated by threats. Considering that artists have been physically attacked for portraying Mohammad, this is a real issue. It is fundamentally wrong to expect people not to exercise their right of free expression because of threats of violence, and this alone makes “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day” a worthwhile project. But I believe there are deeper reasons as well.

At the heart of all this is the notion that a religion has the moral, if not the legal, right to demand that their own rules should apply to everyone. Just as it is absurd to demand that everyone stop wearing red clothes, it is equally as absurd to demand that everyone avoid drawing a picture of a specific person. The given justification for this demand, given by both Muslims and non-Muslims, is that to do so would be offensive to them. On the surface, this makes sense (just like our hypothetical person above does)—after all, we’re good, tolerant people who respect the right of others to live peacefully; why should we purposefully offend them? Why punish all the moderate Muslims for the actions of a few extremists?

First: I am personally and genuinely offended by the idea that I shouldn’t be allowed to draw Mohammad; why is it okay for me to be offended? It’s okay because people are allowed to express themselves, even at the expense of people being offended! This is because offense is not automatically harmful. Harm implies the undue infliction of pain or the theft of something valuable, such as property, opportunity, or dignity. Painting a swastika on a synagogue sidewalk is harmful because it indicates support of Nazism and the murder of Jews. Drawing a Black man as a monkey is harmful because it perpetuates the idea that one race is inferior to another. But drawing Mohammad is no more harmful to Muslims than drawing Jesus is to Christians or Siddhartha Gautama to Buddhists or L. Ron Hubbard to Scientologists, because doing so (a) is not directly harmful and (b) does not reflect or incite harmful action. Offense in this case does not constitute harm and so is insufficient reason to avoid drawing Mohammad.

Second: the aim of such projects (as I see it) is not to offend but to disempower a sacred cow that has far overreached into secular territory. In fact, a central point is for people not to be offended—it would be wonderful if May 20 came and went without a single word of complaint. But as long as Muslims are treated with kid gloves, they will continue to make oversensitive demands that intrude on basic liberties. If we can resist such unreasonable demands with persistence, humor, and yes, respect for Muslims as people, then the hope is that eventually the taboo will become tolerable.

Yes, many Muslims will be offended on May 20.  One answer to this is, “you artists are childish, rude, insensitive, and hateful! See what you did? You offended Muslims!” But I think a better answer is, “We’re sorry you are offended, but we cannot apologize for a drawing that causes you no harm. You are free to believe Mohammad deserves the ‘ultimate respect’ but we are not obligated to agree with you. And that lack of agreement does not necessarily mean disrespect towards you personally; respect does not require compliance or immunity from criticism—it means that we will not demean you, steal from you, deceive you, or injure you. These drawings do none of those things.”

If peaceful Muslims really want to speak out against their extremists, as they often claim they do, they could sacrifice their comfort for one day and actually support the project. I don’t expect this, of course, although it would be an effective gesture. Rather, I expect many will don the robe of the martyr, woefully but courageously enduring the torture being inflicted upon them in the form of hundreds of badly drawn portraits. But people don’t have a right to be protected from offense, especially when the offense is not reflective of real harm—Muslims invented this rule out of thin air, not out of a history of injustice or injury. To cry racism! or hatred! or injustice! in this case is to utterly disrespect the real racism, hatred, and injustice that various peoples have endured through the years.

The fact is I have no real interest in drawing Mohammad. I don’t think I’ve ever drawn any religious leader and I have been an artist (doodler?) all my life. But I do have an interest in freedom of expression and in challenging religious dogma. So, I will be adding my contribution on the 20th.

The core metaphysical stance of Sacred River is naturalism. The shorthand definition of naturalism states that “the real is natural and the natural is real,” which lies in contrast to the supernatural, which naturalism posits is unreal. While this seems simple enough, things get sticky when we try to define exactly what we mean by natural and supernatural. This post does not try to provide any final solution to this question; it is part of an ongoing examination that will likely change over time. Much of what is here is a product of reading the ideas of Richard Carrier along with a wonderful conversation with Tom Clark who presides over at naturalism.org.

At a simple level, we can define the natural as that which mindlessly conforms to the fundamental laws that give rise to the cosmos. At this point in our scientific understanding, this means anything that fits within the model of matter/energy existing in space/time (as embodied in the Standard Model of Particle Physics). In order to be intellectually honest, we must admit that it is not impossible that we will discover something that will upset this model, say if we discover a substance that is not composed of the fundamental particles of normal matter. But even if we made such a discovery—as long as it could be shown that such a substance was an integrated component of the natural world—then the general definition of natural given above would stand.

It is also possible that our universe is only one such within a vast matrix of other universes, what is called the multiverse. If I understand what physicists are saying, then different universes can potentially have different laws (it’s even possible that there are distant parts of this universe that have variations on the laws we see). In such a case, the natural could be expanded to include that which mindlessly conforms to the laws that give rise to any given universe.

When we talk about what we mean by supernatural, we want to keep it reasonably consistent with how most people use the word and with common myths and superstitions. In that light, we can say that the supernatural is that which can interfere with the natural world but is not constrained by its laws. To be more precise, this definition is rooted in the following three propositions:

If the supernatural exists then:
(1) the natural and the supernatural are of two different orders regarding their underlying principles of existence, and
(2) the supernatural is unconstrained by our natural laws (i.e. those that underlie matter/energy in space/time), and
(3) the supernatural has the capability to cause physical changes by manipulating natural laws or bypassing them.

Let’s expand on these a bit more. If something exists or occurs—no matter how bizarre to our eyes—that is ultimately grounded in the same laws that give rise to our material universe, then it is a natural thing or occurrence. To the contrary, if a supernatural thing or event existed, that thing or event would not be reducible to our natural laws. It doesn’t matter if the underlying principles of its existence were, even in principle, explicable or inherently mysterious or even absent anything we would think of as fundamental laws—a supernatural thing would be utterly different than a natural thing from the bottom up.

The second point describes the basic freedom the supernatural has from what makes our universe possible. Whatever the properties of the supernatural thing or occurrence, it would not be constrained by our natural laws. For example, none of the four fundamental forces of our universe (strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravity) would play any role in the behavior of the supernatural. In pragmatic terms, this means that the supernatural cannot be (unwillingly) affected by any natural event, including human actions (except in the case of the mind itself being a supernatural construct…more on this below).

Finally, while the supernatural is exempt from natural laws, it has the ability to influence our material world, to cause changes within our physical system of matter-energy within space-time. For the sake of clear communication, we can choose to put supernatural interference into two categories: magic and miracles. Simply put, it is a matter of the intentional source: it is magic if the intentional agent is a human, human-like being (e.g. a fairy), or object (e.g. deck of tarot cards). A miracle has its source in a non-material mind, such as an angel or god. Although the final effects can take a wide variety of forms, they all share a fundamental similarity: a non-physical (matter-energy) causal agent, even if the event itself is physically normal (such as being made to fall in love via a spell; falling in love is perfectly natural, but the cause is not).

It might be the case that there are objects or events that appear to violate natural laws but in fact are perfectly natural. Absent scientific validity or plausibility, we call such a claim paranormal. A paranormal claim might be true, of course, although the current strength of the Standard Model requires that such claims provide extraordinary evidence. And even if true, it might be either natural or supernatural, depending on its features and what we learn about the fundamental properties of the universe.

One of the key sticking points in discussions like this is the issue of consciousness. Because it is unknown how the brain produces self-awareness, it is very common for it to be used as evidence for the supernatural, a typical construct being an immaterial soul. Despite our incomplete understanding of sentience and subjective experience, we have compelling evidence for the mind’s source in the material brain. But this essay is not intended to make such an argument, only to articulate a natural/supernatural distinction. As such, I propose that consciousness is natural if it is an emergent property of electrochemical processes in a brain; it is supernatural if it arises from conditions outside the infrastructure of matter-energy in space-time. Any other explanation that doesn’t fit these two must fall into the paranormal category, at least for now.

Based on this idea of consciousness, we can say that a supernatural agent is one that has a mind (of some kind) existing independently of a material brain. Any event that occurs due to a supernatural mind would itself be supernatural, even if it was otherwise completely indistinguishable from a natural object. And yes, that includes our entire universe—if the cosmos was created by a god, say, then the cosmos is a supernatural event. The only events that are natural are those that come about in mindless conformity to the laws that underlie the physical world.

The natural/supernatural dichotomy presented here is certainly not the only possible one. But this particular model has two benefits: it is grounded in our best explanations for reality and it makes metaphysical naturalism falsifiable. It also conforms to common conceptions of the supernatural. As a reminder, here is the basic outline of naturalism:

(1) only the world of nature is real
(2) nothing outside nature is necessary to account for its origin or ontological ground
(3) nature as a whole can be understood without appeal to any kind of intelligence or purposive agent
(4) all natural events are caused by other natural events in accordance with universal physical laws

Said in simpler terms, the essential claim of naturalism is that the natural is real and the supernatural is not. This brief essay has attempted to define what we mean when we say “supernatural” in such a way as to make the naturalist claim wrong. Of course, we do not think we are wrong and for very good reasons; but unless we allow for it to be falsified, we’ve simply rigged the game and created another dogma. If the supernatural is real, then so be it. But without a working definition, we also make claims to the supernatural too easy to make.

I hope this is not my final word on the matter…this is a philosophical exercise designed to bring greater precision to a physicalist naturalistic worldview, and as such should be amenable to improvement. With that in mind, I leave it here and invite feedback.