Praying for a world without fatwas

Faith keeps making a comeback in 2007, as it has for some years. Is this a good thing? It depends. Adversity and mortal danger often turn people into believers. If it's true, as they say, that there are no atheists in the trenches, a resurgence of faith may only indicate a world becoming increasingly entrenched.

As a secular soul, I'm viewing the panorama at a remove. For me the transcendental is only accessible through art -- music, primarily, and poetry. I don't know whether God exists or not -- I'm an agnostic -- but should the Creator be revealed, he won't look anything like the Judeo-Christian God of the burning bush or the praiseworthy merchant's Allah, or any of the deities and avatars of mankind's great religions. Possibly he'll look like an equation by Euclid and sound like The Art of Fugue by Bach, but I wouldn't bet on that either.

Artists tend to be either worshippers or iconoclasts by temperament, in addition to being lovers, storytellers and wounded souls. Most works of art I've ever encountered fall under one (or more) of these five headings. At their centre lies the artist's submission to, adoration of, quarrel with, or rebellion against, God. If I were a believer, I would find this reassuring circumstantial evidence for His existence.

Some artists worship God directly; others are devoted to one of his manifestations or attributes, such as compassion. "A poor exchange: God's shelter for knowledge./ The mind's blade is dull. Mercy has the edge," wrote the German religious poet Silesius. The Russian poet Pushkin's devotion was to liberty: "...invite me, pray, to stare down death, to serve,/ to offer liberty a hand. A pleasant duty./ Whoever ignores it, doesn't know or deserve/ the bliss of her kiss, the caress of her beauty." (My translations and sentiments.)

Is peace on Earth a step closer as the year is winding down? There's a long answer, but the short answer is no. Sectarian coexistence within the same faith is tenuous even on good days: See the Protestants and Catholics of Ireland. On bad days (see the Sunnis and Shiites of Islam), it's explosive. Intercourse between the great faiths ranges from the distant and polite to the distant and not-so-polite. Ecumenical spirit? Yes -- as time permits, between honour killings. As for relations between the faithful and the faithless, don't push it. An exchange of fatwas isn't a dialogue.

Talking of fatwas, I've been suggesting for years that super-liberalism is likely to have sub-liberal consequences. What's super-liberalism? It's a condition, common in Canada, whose main symptom is bending over backwards to be straighter than vertical. What do fatwas have to do with liberalism? Well, super-liberalism's fatwas are routinely issued by Human Rights Commissions, federal and provincial; and their sub-liberal consequences include a denial of constitutional guarantees of fundamental freedoms.

What freedoms? Try those listed in clauses 2(a) and (b) of the Charter of Rights, such as freedom of expression, opinion, belief, press and conscience. There was a revealing piece in these pages on Thursday -- called "All we want is a chance to respond" -- showing what the new sub-liberals, unleashed by the old super-liberals, think press freedom means. To them, apparently, it means their freedom to demand that the press print what they want it to print.

A journal is free to print what it considers right as long as it also prints what it may consider wrong, according to sub-liberals. They wouldn't have complained to the Human Rights Commission about Mark Steyn writing in Maclean's that many Muslims are "hot for jihad," say Nasseem Mithoowani and three fellow complainants, had Maclean's agreed to publish a rejoinder "from a mutually acceptable source."

No, this wasn't an offer to invest in the magazine or to buy ad space, but an exercise in free press, Islamic-style. "If Maclean's wants to publish articles alleging that many Muslims are 'hot for jihad,' " explain Mithoowani & Co., "it has to provide an opportunity to respond."

In the West, "free" means that if Maclean's wants to publish articles alleging anything, it publishes them. If it then wishes to publish other articles alleging the opposite, it does that, too. C'est tout. End of story. That's what press freedom means in both official languages. If it loses something in translation into Arabic, Urdu, Persian or Human Rightese, too bad. For the time being, English and French govern.

If defamatory, a paper gets sued; if seditious, it gets charged; and if wrong, it has egg all over its face. A free press may offer a space to respond -- most papers do, including Maclean's -- but it's not obliged to rebut itself. If it did, it wouldn't be free.

I must admit, though, it's a novel approach: the Human Rights Commission as a literary agent. Ingenious. Maclean's is a hard market to crack and Steyn is tough to compete with, but perhaps if I get my agent a pair of jackboots and turn her into a Human Rights commissar ...

Freedom is not a concept any Muslim really understands, because in Islam there is no such thing as free will. Allah’s will is all, and Allah’s will is capricious and inscrutable.

Freedom as we understand it today, including freedom as agnostics understand it, was basically a discovery of Judaism and Christianity. Regretably, Muhammed had no interest in freedom, preferring to enslave those he conquered.

The God of Israel offers His people freedom to choose whether or not to obey the Covenant. If they obey, they will be happy; if they disobey, they will be miserable, but they are still given the freedom to choose.

“Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you today; and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside from the way which I command you today, to go after other gods which you have not known” (Deuteronomy, 11:26-28).

Free will entered western civilization mainly through the influence of Christianity, which in turn grew out of Judaism. Those (like Philip Pullman, for instance) who think that Christianity is a tyrannical religion are sadly mistaken. Without it, they wouldn’t even have the concept of freedom.

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