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I have spent many years cataloging the differences between secular humanist and civil libertarian values of autonomy, democracy, and freedom over against the religious and authoritarian desire to control thought and behavior. I draw these distinctions because I believe that understanding authoritarianism is vital to defending civil liberty and promoting human rights.

Authoritarianism is a fear of freedom and individuality, a loathing of the elements of others and of the self that contradict traditional systems of moral regulation, that is religious, culturally, and politically closed systems. Fear, insecurity, intolerance, and poor emotional regulation leads to the desire in some to control others, to embrace and defend ideologies and arguments for aggressive violence dressed as defensive and just moral action.

The authoritarian mindset cannot abide autonomous lives and unwelcome opinions. The authoritarian cannot tolerate modes of thinking that do not align with his. He opposes association and assembly for groups expressing opinions with which he disagrees. He disrupts gatherings of individuals who are sharing ideas he opposes, although, granting his fashion sense, he hasn’t quite worked out why he opposes them. Either though force, shame, or defamation, he desires the imposition of speech codes. He takes offense at speech that makes him feel uncomfortable, that insults his identity, that hurts his feelings. He blurs the line between speech and violence, claiming at once that those who upset him are assaulting him, or that they are at least a physical threat to his person and with whom he identifies or sympathizes, offenses that justify according to him suppression and violence, coercive actions held up as legitimate forms of protest and resistance.

In contrast to the authoritarian, secular humanists and civilian libertarians teach that we should instead strive to be cognitively free and emotionally autonomous, a state of being that exists when people are at liberty to think and speak as they wish, enjoy free and easy access to the means to produce knowledge and share ideas, social spaces that do not exclude people with disagreeable views, or allow groups with particular political and religious standpoints to regulate and limit interaction by imposing their ideology and behavioral controls on others. Secular humanists and civilian libertarians recognize that free speech and free thought is as much for the audience as it is for the speaker or the performer.

This standpoint permits for autonomy of belief, allows for the richest democratic practices, pushing participation into the fundamental social structures (e.g. the economy), encouraging law and policy to emerge as the work of consensus, work performed in open spaces, while simultaneously respecting individual or collective action that does not physically harm others who did not or cannot consent to be part of that action. Secular humanists tolerate a diversity of opinion and beliefs, permitting ideas to be expressed so they may be engaged. We seek to persuade people to change their minds, not coerce them to behave as if they have.

The authoritarian attitudes I have described mark the right-wing – the conservative, the traditionalist – while that those on the left – progressive liberals, radicals, socialists – are the natural defenders of secular humanist and civil libertarian values. Indeed, I still believe the humanist-libertarian tendency comes more organically to those of us on the left. Yet, today, there are some on our side whose actions betray an internalization and even embrace of authoritarian attitudes. Meanwhile, there are some on the right whose politics are guided by, or at least dressed as such, secular and libertarian values of free speech, assembly and association, and religious liberty.

The tragedy of this is that authoritarianism on the left makes more palatable right-wing ideas, since these ideas come with those who are defending – or at least appearing to defend – the core values of free and open society, values that most people desire in the ideal, but who actually represent a politics for less material freedom and a more superficial democracy. This is compounded by the fact that identity politics, left and right, dovetail with capitalist relations, politics and relations that fracture solidarity, when the left should be unified in an anti-capitalist movement. Without a choice between sides where at least one is engaged in changing the perilous circumstances of economic uncertainty, it is more likely that young men and women will run with the ideas that promote a type of hyper-individualism.

Left-wing identitarianism as a response to right-wing identitarianism is not a solution to the problems of injustice but an authoritarian attitude that serves the interests of the status quo. The one commonalty across all the groups that represents the basis for unified action, the one politics that could transform the system that underpins other divisions and antagonisms, is fractured, and the working class left disorganized, its power siphoned off into self-reifying groups based on socially constructed essences. Left-wing identity politics cannot represent a negation of, but instead serves as a mirror to right-wing identity politics, reflecting its intolerance, exclusion, essentialism, hierarchy, division, rage, and aggression. Left-wing identitarians become like their enemies in form. It is a betrayal of what the left should stand for, namely freedom of thought, the open society, democratic politics, and anti-capitalist struggle.

One’s right to hold religious opinions is no different from one’s right to hold any opinion. We should stop treating the freedom to hold religious opinions as something distinct from freedom of thought generally. Our language and our law create an illusion of significance. One has as much right to be a Christian as one has to be a fascist. There’s no real difference.

It is unfortunate that religious freedom—aimed also at liberating individuals from state organized and sanctioned religious belief—was defined when it was and in such a way as to allow religious institutions to live off the social surplus without the obligation to pay taxes. In this way, the state promotes the creation of religions by recognizing them as such for tax purposes the First Amendment notwithstanding.

That’s what Scientology did. In 1993, the United States granted L. Ron Hubbard’s confidence game operation tax exempt status. In fact, in defense of religious liberty, the US State Department has criticized European countries for not recognizing Scientology’s religious status. This is not to say Scientology is not a religion. It is just as ridiculous as Christianity. It’s to point out how arbitrary all this is.

So why aren’t fascist organizations tax exempt? Fascism is reactionary Christianity. It has as much claim on being a religion as other Christian churches (read Mussolini’s “What is Fascism?”). Is the Catholic Church not a religion? Then why not fascism? The Ku Klux Klan is a Christian organization. It engages in charitable actions. Why doesn’t it have tax exempt status? Why do Mosques get tax exempt status but not fascists? They are both totalitarian, illiberal, and irrational, advocate gender hierarchy and gay hatred, and all the rest of it.

As alluded to earlier, the government sanctioned religious tag on ideologies that reference a higher power runs contrary to the First Amendment, which says that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Yet the government must in fact make law respecting an establishment in order to privilege chosen religions with tax exempt status.

The term “religious liberty,” except where specifically used to mark my right to not have to put up with religion’s bullshit, should be recognized not merely as an anachronism, but as a grand historic error in thinking and legal reasoning.

There is liberty in opinion. Religion is already included in that. That’s quite enough.

The Swedish government has been on the defensive since President Trump referred to a mini-documentary, published by the Gatestone Institute on May 30, 2016, that reported the problem of overrepresentation of Muslims in crime, violence, and unrest in Sweden. The government has sought to change the impression left by the Gatestone Institution in a GOS report published yesterday. However, belying its framing, the report’s own facts, along with other well-known facts, contradict the impression the government wishes to leave with its audience.

The Swedish government cites the 2010 Stockholm bombings (December 11) as the sole example of Islamic terrorism (Iraqi-born Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly is suspected of carrying out the bombing). However, in 2011, police thwarted a terrorism plot targeting an art festival in Goteborg and a planned stabbing of artist Lars Vilks, who, in cartoons, depicted Islam’s pedophile and mass murder prophet as a dog. In 2016, Swedish authorities thwarted another terrorism plot involving ISIS devotee Aydin Sevigin. Kudos to the Swedish police for preventing these attacks. Shame on the Swedish government for failing to mention these plots in their report.

As for crime generally, up until recently, Sweden enjoyed the historic decline in crime and violence statistics that all Western countries have enjoyed over the last several decades. Sweden continues to enjoy these declines among the native population. However, more recently, violent crime has been rising in Sweden. In 2015, incidents of lethal violence were much greater than they have been for years. Shootings rose 20 percent between 2006 and 2014. The number of people killed with firearms doubled between 2011 and 2015. And the statistics also show interpersonal crimes have generally increased. The Swedish media downplays stories of “no-go zones,” electing to call these “vulnerable areas.” But their descriptions of the circumstances belie (Orwellian) euphemisms.

But it not just spin. The Swedish government has attempted to downplay the overrepresentation of Muslim immigrants in official crime statistics. It initially did this by dropping demographics from its reporting (a practice that forced even the left-wing magazine Mother Jones to scold the Swedish government). In the latest report, the GOS has admitted that people from foreign backgrounds are suspected of crimes more often than people from a Swedish background. In fact, according to the most recent study, people from foreign backgrounds are 2.5 times more likely to be suspected of crimes than people born in Sweden to Swedish-born parents. But the government has not provided a comprehensive study of demographics and crime since 2005, when they found that the foreign-born presence was four times more likely to be involved in violent crime and four and as half times more likely to be implicated in sexual assault.

In denying the claim made by Swedish police officers that there are no-go zones in Sweden, the Swedish government has had to admit that, in a report published in February 2016, “the Swedish Police Authority identified 53 residential areas around the country that have become increasingly marred by crime, social unrest and insecurity.” Government officials also admit to the problem by reassuring the public that they have restricted immigration because of security measures and changes in the law. “In 2015, almost 163,000 people sought asylum here. The measures subsequently taken by the Government, including temporary ID checks and border controls, and the new temporary asylum legislation, have led to fewer people now seeking asylum in Sweden.”

The need for these restrictions is supported by recent riots in an immigrant suburb of Stockholm. Only a few days ago Muslim gangs looted businesses and burned police cars. A news photographer was hospitalized and a police officer was injured. The neighborhood, Rinkeby, has been the scene of previous riots in 2010 and 2013. The report fails to include such mass criminal events.

Finally, the Swedish report is marred by the use of the propaganda term “Islamophobia.” This is an effort to smear those who are concerned about the effect of Muslim culture on Swedish society by suggesting they are bigots and racists. The problems Sweden is facing is not just terrorism, violence, and unrest. Immigrant women, who should be enjoying Sweden’s legacy of vastly superior gender relations, are trapped in Muslim communities where they suffer the humiliation of being viewed as having less value than men. This is shameful in light of Sweden’s history of enlightened feminism. Apparently, Sweden’s multiculturalist practices trump their legacy of upholding human rights.

Sweden’s practice of permitting the existence of Muslims enclaves, its failure to assimilate Arabs and Africans into mainstream society, represents a great injustice to individuals escaping these backwards cultures. Multiculturalism and political correctness are barriers to Muslims leaving behind irrational and oppressive religious beliefs. Given the widespread atheism in Sweden and its benefits, this is a missed opportunity. The Swedish government is not helping anybody by trying to downplay the incompatibility of Islam with Swedish society. Hopefully, they will drop the public relations piece and deal honestly with the problem of assimilation in Sweden.

With the concept of “white fragility,” Robin DiAngelo, who earned a Ph.D. in Multicultural Education from the University of Washington in Seattle and tenure at Westfield State University in Massachusetts, claims that all white people are racist, that they all enjoy white privilege, but only some of them can admit it. She is one of them. Her expertise is “Whiteness Studies.” She also works as an anti-racist consultant and diversity trainer.

“I grew up poor and white,” she writes. “While my class oppression has been relatively visible to me, my race privilege has not.  In my efforts to uncover how race has shaped my life, I have gained deeper insight by placing race in the center of my analysis…. I now make the distinction that I grew up poor and white, for my experience of poverty would have been different had I not been white.” How could she possibility know this having always been white?

In 2015, Robin DiAngelo told a radio audience, “Racism comes out of our pores as white people. It’s the way that we are.” Believing she possesses an extraordinary capacity to harm nonwhites because she is, as a white woman, intrinsically racist, she said of her antiracist work, “I’m really confident that I do less damage to people of color than I used to do.” (See “Why all white people are racist, but can’t handle being called racist the theory of white fragility.”) It seems her argument is actually about “black fragility.”

Sociologists have defined racism in two ways. The first defines the phenomenon as a typology sorting humanity into subpopulations based on phenotypic attributes (for example skin color), as well as ancestry, and arranging these types hierarchically into superior and inferior types. Membership in these subpopulations determines the ability and disposition of those identified as such, traits assumed to be present in all members of racial groupings. As such, racism is an ideology motivating or justifying unequal treatment along these line, either advantaging or disadvantaging groups. Physical anthropologists and geneticists agree that such sorting of humans into racial groups is fallacious; however, racism is a ideological power that uses the typology to predefine social groups according to a scheme that establishes dominate and subordinate groups and justifies law and policy perpetrating this hierarchy.

The second way defines racism as systematic race-based discrimination resulting from institutional arrangements or structural power. Here the absence of conscious racism does not prevent the ordering of society along historically defined racial groups. In this view, groups that do not have the power to impose race prejudice or what would be prejudice if recognized, cannot be racist. Blacks cannot be racist towards whites, for example, since they lack the power to impose their prejudices on the white population.

According to the first definition, a racist would be a person who subscribed to racist or racialist ideology. It might be said (as antiracist activist Tim Wise asserts) that socialization in a culture where the notion of racial inferiority is endemic or ubiquitous exists implicitly in ordinary consciousness. This would need to be supported by evidence, which is lacking. And if one can find any exceptions, then the claim that racism oozes from the pores of white people is false. The same could be said for Christianity, but it would not make everybody Christian. A racist is somebody who accepts the doctrine of racial inferiority. It is simply not true that all or even most white people accept this doctrine.

Following the logic of the second definition, a white person who does not have the power to impose his race prejudice on black people is not a racist. A working class white man may be prejudiced against blacks, but if he does not organize with others to discriminate against them, then he does not possesses or does not exercise power to impose his prejudice. In the absence of legal machinery or political organization that imposes race prejudice, there is no mechanism for mobilizing white racial power in this way. Indeed, the entire legal and political apparatus of the United States is mobilized against the imposition of race prejudice against whites. The concepts of institutional and structural racism are deeply problematic abstractions.

Finally, there are non-prejudiced/non-discriminators, that is those who neither subscribe to racist doctrine nor treat people different on the basis of race. So even trying to get people both ways by accepting both definitions doesn’t make the claim “all white people are racist” true. If you need an example, I present myself. And if you say I’m in denial or suffer from “white fragility,” then you will have simply committed a logical fallacy, that is the fallacy of the self-sealing argument. It’s like the claim that all behavior is selfish. It’s vacuous argument, which is to say it is not an argument at all, but an assertion.

And it’s a self-loathing assertion, one that reflects a need to signal virtue by confessing sin. The psychology behind this phenomenon is the esteem one derives from redemption-seeking. It’s a performative act, one that compels the sinner to convert others to his point of view. Wise and DiAngelo are, in effect, evangelicals who have “seen the light.” Everyone is a sinner and they’re on a self-righteous crusade to steer sinners from the path of transgression so that they, too, can enjoy the elation of redemption. One sees this psychology in the “coming out of [fill in the blank]” personal story. The narrative is a public act of consciousness-altering the subject hopes elevates his status. Indeed, it is what we call in anthropology and sociology a status elevation ceremony. It’s like baptism. Folks love their baptism stories. And, like baptism, it doesn’t really change anything. But it feels so good.

Donald Trump has signed an executive order – “Executive Order 13769 “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” – restricting entry into the United States. The policy bars all persons from several states that represent in the administration and others’ estimation national security risks from entering the U.S. for 90 days and all refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days, as well as imposes an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees. It also reduces the number of refugees the U.S. will accept in 2017.

It has been called a “Muslim ban.” It is not. There are some fifty Muslim-majority countries in the world. The ban covers around 14 percent of them, thus allowing persons from the majority of Muslim-majority counties to opportunity to immigrate to the United States. The countries named in the executive order are Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, countries also named in a 2015 law, expanded in 2016, concerning immigration visas as “countries of concern.” It was therefore the Obama administration that passed the congressionally authored Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 (this was after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris). Trump’s order also calls for a review of the Visa Interview Waiver Program.

Trump’s order has also been called a “blanket ban.” It is not. It allows a case-by-case review of persons from these countries seeking entry into the United States (some have already been allowed in, in fact). It includes among the reasons for entry status as an oppressed religious minority. (For those unaware, Christians are persecuted in Muslim-majority societies. I actually met with Christians in Jordan who sought me out during my visits there and heard firsthand their plight in one of the more progressive Muslim-majority countries.) Thus, on two counts, the corporate media has distorted Trump’s executive order.

As a civil libertarian, I believe in defending individuals against state tyranny by upholding due process. I am a stalwart defender of freedom of thought and expression. I believe in the right to privacy. I believe people have the right to elect their leaders and to have their collective interests represented in law and policy. Majority rule limited by protection of individual rights is the ideal form of government. I say this not merely to disclaim. For these things to exist – for liberalism and democracy to prevail going forward – the state must preserve secular values and practices, and every person who enjoys the blessings of liberty should dedicate her or himself to ensuring the perpetuation of this state of affairs. A liberal democracy must proceed on the basis of reason.

Ultimately, the power of the state from which the individual must be protected must in turn protect due process and carry out the will of the people. Every person should, if they want to keep their democracy, obligate themselves to staving off the forces of superstition and irrationalism. This is the true meaning of religious liberty: freedom from religious obligation and religious interference in governmental and judicial affairs. To the religious and their apologists on the left and the right who read these words, freedom of religion means neither the right to impose religious beliefs and practices on others nor the toleration of such impositions. Religious-based violence represents a significant threat to the values of liberal democracy, including provoking growth in police and security controls. It is in the interests of the public – and democracy – to restrict and aggressively vet those who seek to enter our country and territories.

The terms of the Trump Administration’s order enjoy considerable popular support. A recent poll by Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that 50 percent of Americans are in favor of “banning future immigration from regions where there are active terrorist groups.” Not just restricting, but banning. An AP poll found that 53% agreed that fewer Syrian refugees (there are 10,000 currently permitted annually) should be allowed into the country. Only 11% felt that the number of Syrian refugees should be increased. In several news polls, while half of Americans opposed a specific ban on Muslims (which, again, this order does not do), sizable minorities (43%, 41%, and 35% respectively) support temporary bans on Syrian refugees, non-citizen Muslim entry, and Muslim immigration generally. Taking into account that admitting support for a ban on Muslim immigrants amounts to expressing a politically incorrect opinion, it is likely that at least some of those surveyed were less than candid with pollsters. As we saw with the election itself, there is probably more popular support for Trump’s policy than the polls indicate.

Some would characterize the attitudes that inform these opinions as racist. But throwing that label around mischaracterizes the character of the antagonism. Islam is a religion, and therefore an ideology, not a race or ethnicity. This rhetoric distorts the concerns of the public. As does calling this a “Muslim ban.” To be sure, there is much to debate on the legality and motives of the order. However, the strategy of many on the left of denouncing the policy as “Islamophobic” and “racist” functions to silence legitimate concerns about the future of free and democratic societies, while perversely mainstreaming acceptance of a belief system that is the paradigm of hateful and divisive religious ideology. This is not an acceptable strategy for those who wish to resist government overreach while at the same time preserve liberal democracy. Indeed, Americans ought to have a sober and non-partisan conversation about the impact of Muslim immigration on the United States.

This conversation should be grounded in an understanding of the unique problem Islam presents to human freedom, as well as an examination of the European experience with Muslim immigration. The problem that many on the left fail to consider is the corrosive effects of an ideology antithetical to the values and norms of Western society – government, law, politics, and culture – and the need for a policy that deliberately integrates Muslims with these values and norms, as well as promotes these values in the Islamic world. The reaction to Trump’s order is an opportunity to have a broader conversation about Islam and immigration.

Because of the character of its teachings, Islam is among the religions particularly corrosive. In belief and practice, dutiful Islam is incompatible with enlightened values. To be sure, Islam is not monolithic. There are at least three branches and many sub-sects among them. There are many schools of Islamic thought, as well as movements, the most destructive of these are Salafi and Wahhabism. However, the anti-feminism, anti-democratic sentiment, irrationalism, and illiberalism of Islam survive ideological and geographical variation, even among moderate proponents of the faith. Given that Muslims represent 1.6 billion of the earth’s seven billion inhabitants, Islam represents a very real threat to human freedom and already limits the freedom of a substantial proportion of the world’s population, as the reality experienced by people living under Islamic rule testifies to. 

Islamic culture is patriarchal, misogynistic, and heterosexist, often exercising strict controls over human sexuality. In Islamic regions and societies, women are commoditized and subject to modesty rules, which limits where they can travel and with whom and, in many places, finds them covering the head and even dressing in bags and blankets, with slits or grills for eyeholes (something of a portable prison). Muslim women are reduced to objects, their personalities erased. The abuse have been so thoroughgoing that many Muslims believe the imposition of modesty is freely chosen, desirable, and even liberating. Women and men are segregated in public spaces – this is even allowed in non-Muslim majority countries. Islam does not recognize the intrinsic right of women to control their reproductive capacity; it depends on which strain of Islam controls them and the opinion of their husband whether and how they control the size of their families. Extreme sexual control not only restricts the freedom of women. The genitals of male Muslim children are ritually mutilated; every year millions of children are robbed of parts of their organ that bring pleasure during sex (to both male and female). Homosexuals are ruthlessly persecuted in Islamic society. 

Islam is intolerant of diversity of thought, indeed of free thought itself, and its rules sharply restrict creative self-expression. The punishment for leaving Islam (the crime of apostasy) is death. Muslims in large numbers believe utterances critical of Islam (blasphemy) should be punished – even when those utterances are made by non-Muslims. In many Muslims communities, music that is made for entertainment and amusement is forbidden (haram). Only halal music is permissible. Muhammad taught his followers that singing is a sin for which the perpetrator will be made on the day of resurrection eternally blind, deaf, and dumb (without a body, what is left?). Woodwind instruments draw the same eternal punishment. This prohibition is connected to Islamic obsession with sexual relations; intentionally listening to music for joy is an enchantment for adultery and fornication. Even in the United States, Muslim parents send notes to their children’s teachers telling them to keep their children out of any musical activities. Tragically, our schools capitulate to this shameful act of cultural retardation. Muslims also believe dancing is haram. Can you imagine a world without music and dancing? Can you imagine telling children that if they intentionally listen to music for entertainment or amusement that they will exist eternally blind, deaf, and mute? Adultery, fornication, the consumption of alcohol – all these are Hudud, or crimes against the imaginary being (God) Muslims submit their lives to. Punishments range from floggings, stoning, amputations of hands, crucifixion, and beheadings – all carried out in public, in front of children. 

The fact that these punishments are not practiced everywhere merely serves to demonstrate the horror of Islam where it is most closely followed and effectively holds sway over the population (for example in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and by Islamist movements like al Qaeda and ISIS). As humanists, we should strive to see that these atrocities are not practiced nowhere. We are told that other religions are also dangerous when taken to the extreme. But two things must be said about this. First, these views are not extreme in the Islamic world. Hundreds of millions of Muslims subscribe to them and, where they have not been imposed, pine for them. Second, the chance of reforming Islam is remote; Islam teaches that the law (sharia) is fixed and mandated by their god, and failure to submit to god’s will is an unpardonable sin.  

It is this Islamic demand for ideological dedication – where an irrational system of beliefs must be central to one’s identity – and the failure of policymakers, particularly in Europe, to marginalize its power by failing to help Muslims find their way out of delusion that make it so difficult for Muslims to integrate with Western society. God is the final authority, and the Quran is true and perfect – every word of it. These things are true for all who share the umma, that is the religious community. European policymakers do not encourage or even make it easy for Muslims to question their faith. They insist on defining religious liberty in identitarian terms, passing laws that punish the critics of Islam for the offense of “Islamophobia.” Perversely, criticism of a hateful and divisive ideology has become redefined as “bigotry” even “racism.” Political correctness in legislative and administrative form. This is how multiculturalism erodes freedom: the individual is punished for the sake of an ideology to which they do not subscribe.

Islam is corrosive to the necessity of the separation of church and state for a free society. Unlike Christianity, which teaches Christians to submit to civil authority, Islam does not recognize this principle. Unlike the Christian messiah, who was a spiritual figure, Muhammad was a politician and a state builder, in truth a vicious warlord who slaughtered scores of people in conquering territories for Islam. Devoted Muslims can never finally accept the separation of church and state because that means abandoning their god’s plan for humanity as manifest in the actions of his messenger. Islam is the total solution, Muslims are fond of saying, an instruction manual for a complete way of life. In essence, Islam is a totalitarian ideology and thus antithetical to liberalism, the secular basis of Western civilization. Where allowed to dominate, Islam represents an existential threat to freedom and democracy. It is no more bigotry to warn of the problem this ideology presents to human freedom as it is bigotry to warn of the problem of fascism.

The existence of a just US republic depends on making sure that Islam does not gain such a foothold in our culture that it dictates laws, policy, and politics. The Islamic imperative is the inverse of this: for Muslims, just arrangements can only ever ultimately obtain where Islamic law prevails over everything. In the meantime Muslims can only live a relatively clean life by separating themselves from the kafir, the Muslim term for unbelievers and deceivers. The principle of no compulsion in religion notwithstanding, the Quran, Hadith, and Sira, the main works of Islam, are obsessed with addressing the problem of the unbeliever. Because Muhammad despised the kafir, and because it is obligatory on Muslims to hate what god hates and love what god loves, the kafir are despised by Muslims (who are in scripture explicitly permitted to lie about this fact). Therefore, when in the minority, Muslims separate themselves from the majority and other minorities, seeking their own their own systems of governance and justice. Hence their staunch but advocacy of multiculturalism and their human rights. When in the majority, Muslims impose Islamic law and culture on everybody, and the best you can hope for is that the strain of Islam that prevails is less brutal than the other possibilities. For the kafir have no rights under sharia.

I do not argue that all Muslims or Islamic sects are equally dangerous, that with time Muslims cannot become nominal in their identity like most modern Christians, or that Muslims are the only group whose religious beliefs and practices represent a threat to human freedom. There are millions of Muslims who move peacefully in liberal society. However, Islam on the whole, even its moderate forms, which represent the minority of believers, is stricken by totalitarian desire, while Christian extremists are checked by a large number of Christians who do not subscribe to most of the Bible’s obnoxious teachings. We should strive to see most Muslims become nominal rather than devoted. But achieving this means relentless criticism of the ideology in the same way that Christianity was tempered by the rationalists and fascism was driven underground by the democrats. 

The unique problem of Islam does mean that lax immigration policies work against the goals of integration of Muslims with American society and the deliberate marginalization of Islam. The problems of Europe are a clear warning to America. Europe’s policies have undermined democratic and liberal tradition, failed the people, including Muslims citizens and residents, and provoked an ethnonationalist backlash. The combination of neoliberalism and multiculturalism has given rise to right-wing reactionary forces. These policies have overwhelmed Europe’s societal capacity to integrate and liberate persons from culturally backwards regions. Europe should slow immigration in order to provide time for people integrate. The United States should also devise a plan for the orderly immigration of peoples from Islamic countries at a pace that allows for effective integration with American society. 

Social Democrats and the liberal left that should lead this project. A rational person is only obligated to tolerate religious belief on the basis of his commitment to free thought and expression. He is not obligated to accept Islam – or any other hateful or divisive ideology – as a legitimate way of thinking about the world and ordering social life. We tolerate Muslims in the same way that we tolerate racists, fascists, sexists, and other backwards thinking people: condemning their attitudes as unacceptable. This justice-first approach is not needed only for the sake of preserving the US republic, but it is also vital to the needs of Muslims who are, after all, human beings (which a Muslim women are seen as something less of when liberal feminists defend patriarchal oppression under Islam). Why should non-Muslims love Muslims so little as to abandon them to a backwards and punishing way of life? As humanists, we have an obligation to help liberate people from stifling and irrational belief systems. It’s why our criticisms of Christianity are so relentless and have proven highly successful in pushing Christians away from the extremism inherent in their religious texts. We do this because we love Christians and want to help them escape the limitations on their freedom that devotion to doctrine imposes.

Perhaps the reader might have thought that I would prefer Trump’s order to have actually been a ban on Muslims. This would represent a profound misreading of my argument. I do not believe in religious tests of any sort. I believe in a rational immigration policy that integrates persons with the secular traditions of the United States and helps free them from the burden of backwards and irrational ideology. We are only obligated to tolerate an individual’s beliefs and actions when they do not harm us. Toleration does not demand acceptance or silence. The ideals of the enlightenment demand something quite different: they demand we strive to liberate individuals from the authoritarianism of the corporate state and the authoritarianism of organized religion. 

There is another reason why we should pursue this course. Those of us who want to deepen democracy have to think strategically. We live in a capitalist society where a handful of families and individuals control the productive assets of our society, an arrangement that allows them to exploit the creative efforts of tens of millions of working people. Effective class struggle can only proceed on the basis of a politically conscious working class, a unification that is as thwarted by the divisive effect of multiculturalism as it is the divisive effects of racism and other forms of segmentation. A democratic society, over against a majoritarian one, must put central to its politics the protection of individual rights against narrow group identity. Identity politics is one of the main obstacle to the development of popular consciousness necessary for building a political movement to finally realize the democratic ideal. Suggesting that any religious group has a right to be apart from others is to own the alienation that keeps us from establishing democratic socialism.

I am not an advocate of forced assimilation. As free agents, people can believe and act as they want as long as their actions do not harm other people, including harm to those they claim as members of their own group (we can ban circumcision and arranged marriages and the chopping off of hands without violating freedom of conscience). On the other hand, I do not support deep multiculturalism, a species of the politics of separation and the source of the error left-wing opponents of immigration restrictions make. Instead of these extremes, I advocate integration, which I understand as people living under a common law in diverse communities where non-harmful cultural differences are shared or at least tolerated without controversy.

Race, ethnicity, and so forth are social constructions, in many aspects created to divide human populations, that, when pursued as organizing principles of social relations, entrench those divisions. In contrast, integrationists see humans as individuals first. Our primary obligation is to reason, liberty, and democracy, not to race, ethnicity, or other demographic variables. This is the recipe for an inclusive national community that at the same time tolerates (but not necessarily respects) differences.

It is not unreasonable to expect people who come to our country to at the very least accept the secular character of our government and law – the government and law that is charged with defending their civil liberties – and, ideally, seek to become rational beings, using reason and science to guide their actions instead of faith and superstition. We have a lot of homework to do in this regard. Christian fundamentalism presents the reasonable with plenty of problems. We should teach the value of reason to every child, native or immigrant, even over the objections of their parents. Much of the modern left has not merely been lackadaisical in this regard; it often endeavors to paint proponents of reason as bigots. As if reason has a color and a gender.  

The desire I am expressing is not bigotry, but reflects an anti-identitarian standpoint: pluralism is recognized for its contribution to producing a rich common culture; it is not however a justification for the creation and perpetuation of enclaves based on race, ethnicity, religion, or other exclusive categories. Beliefs and actions that undermine secular values and practices are harmful to liberal democratic ends and are therefore justifiably marginalized and, where manifest in action, restricted and even prohibited. My opposition is not to immigration per se but to the balkanization of Western society. That the desire for liberal democracy has become twisted into an expression of bigotry tells us that our understanding of human freedom and reason has become severely warped. The rot of identitarianism runs very deep indeed. 

I had an argument with a Christian last night in which I was told that my reference to Hell, which I regard to be one of the worst features of Christianity, was an “interpretation,” and, moreover, that I can’t know what Christians think. Let me take up the second claim first, a claims sometimes rendered, “You don’t know what’s in my heart.” This is a favorite argument of racists, as if being a racist is determined by what one thinks of himself and not what he believes and how he acts. The same applies to being a Christian but in reverse: with racism, you don’t get to deny you’re a racist while embracing racist beliefs and practices; with Christianity, you don’t get to say, “I’m a Christian” and then deny the core elements of your faith. I’m not giving anybody the wriggle room to escape their responsibility in these matters.

The fact is that the New Testament is full of references to Hell. In 2 Thessalonians 1:9, which has historically been considered to be one of Paul’s epistles, in which case it was written some three generations after the alleged birth of Jesus and therefore represents the earliest Christian writings (Paul’s epistles), putting the notion of everlasting destruction and eternal alienation from God at the beginning of Christian thinking. The verse: “They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.” It has been supposed more recently that 2 Thessalonians was probably written four to six generations after the alleged birth of the Christian messiah. If you are among those who put distance and authors between 2 Thessalonians from 1 Thessalonians, then Mark, widely believed to be the earliest gospel (probably written four to five generations after the alleged birth of the Christian messiah, and forming, along with perhaps a second common source, the basis of the gospels of Matthew and Luke), gives us chapter and verse 9:43: “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out.”

Hell is discussed elsewhere in the New Testament, as well. For example, in Revelations 21:8, the author writes, “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur.” (This book was probably written approximately four to five generations after the alleged birth of the Christian messiah.) Then there’s Matthew, who seems particularly keen on scaring the crap out of people with the idea of Hell. Matthew 10:28: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” Matthew 13:42: “They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Matthew 13:50: “and throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Matthew 25:41: “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’” Matthew 25:46: “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” (Matthew was probably written four to six generations after the alleged birth of the Christian messiah.)

One does not get to say that Hell is a product of my interpretation of the Christian scriptures. Hell is a central construct in Christian theology and appears in the earliest Christian literature, the very text deemed canonical and divinely inspired. If you believe the authors of the gospels had access to Jesus’s words, or were inspired to accurately reflect his views, then the fact that Matthew 10:28 is directly attributed to Jesus himself gives you no room for interpretation. If you believe you can be a Christian simply by saying you are, well, then have fun with your own self-satisfaction. But it doesn’t impress me at all.

Sure, you can rationalize Hell. You can say that it is not there to scare us into loving God, but that salvation is a gift from loving God to provide a way to escape Hell. There’s a downside to this view. It means that Hell is a place that exists independently of God – not a place created by him to scare you – and that, while God does not have the power to make Hell go away, he does have the power to save you from going there if an only if you sign your life over to him. God says, “I will save you from eternal torment if you love me.,” God says “If you don’t love me, sorry, there’s nothing I can do. You will burn.” Some all-powerful deity you got there. So full of love for his creatures. And if you object to me quoting God, remember, I have as much authority to do so as anybody else.

UW-River Falls is pursuing a “Check Yourself” campaign. Its purpose is to teach faculty and students proper etiquette surrounding talk about sex, race, immigration, and so on. It’s a speech code designed to impose terms of political correctness by those who have appointed themselves bearers of truth on the matter. 

One of the things its audience is warned about is the claim that all human beings are bisexual. The reason for this prohibition is because the claim denies bisexuality’s unique identity, as well as undermines the identity of those who do not believe they are bisexual. Everybody has a right, the campaign tells us, to their own identity. (Right, tell that to Rachel Dolezal.)

There are many problems with etiquette campaigns. But I find this item about bisexuality particularly troubling and representative of the problem of wide-ranging speech codes. There is a position, articulated for example by Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey, albeit in different ways, that homo sapiens are, as are many other species of mammal, innately bisexual. We are born without a sexual orientation (or a race, religion, gender, etc.) but experience socialization in heterosexuality as an social and cultural imposition, albeit a process that is never completely effective – nor should it be. However much our homosexual tendencies are repressed, our bisexuality is not erased, but lies in a latent, or unconscious state in our psyche. We remain, somewhere in the layers of our mind, sexually attracted to members of our designated and acquired gender.

Acknowledging the possibility of this basic reality provides important insights into human attitudes and behaviors. For example, because a heterosexual man finds other men sexually attractive, even if he is not directly conscious of this attraction, he escapes into rituals that sublimate his sexual desire as higher-order asexual relations and activities. The structure of masculinity can be explained in part as a bulwark against culturally disapproved sexual feelings towards other men. Compulsory heterosexuality thus comes with a complex symbolic system of ritual self-denial, which, without being able to posit innate bisexuality, is mysterious. In other words, homophobia exists in part because heterosexuality is an imposition – we fear ourselves. Repressive sexuality is a source of self-loathing.

If we are told that we cannot argue that all human beings are bisexual, then what we are being told is that Freud and his ilk are wrong. An official, or at least official sounding position, has thus been taken on a contested matter. UW-River Falls is telling faculty and students that this is a settled matter. Why else would there be a speech code?

But it is not a settled matter. Indeed, we should be encouraging students to consider whether human beings are innately bisexual. It is an open question. Being able to make this claim is not only important for scientific reasons. It is also part of a political argument that faculty and students should be allowed to make. If we are all innately bisexual, then the justifications for compulsory heterosexuality, for example the notion that we are born with a sexual orientation, becomes problematic. The ideology of heterosexuality loses its naturalist appeal. The deconstruction of the normalcy of compulsory heterosexuality is accomplished, not with revised etiquette pamphlets, but rather through dialectal engagement.

At its core, liberalism upholds two contradictory rights. The first is the right of private property, most importantly exclusive control over the means of profit making. This is the essence of liberalism: an ideology justifying class society based on property rights with an emphasis on markets. If a person does not believe in private property and capitalism, then he is not a liberal in an important sense.

The second right liberalism upholds is free speech and free thought. Opposition to free speech and free thought makes the supporter of private property and capitalism something other than a liberal. A fascist advocates capitalist arrangements, but does not preserve the right to free speech. Thus we say that fascism is illiberal, an authoritarian form of capitalism. On the other hand, free speech and other civil liberties can be present without a right to private property. 

Modern conservatives share with liberals the core principle of private property and the justness of capitalism as a social system. However, conservatives and liberals disagree on the importance of the rights of speech and expression, including religious liberty. Thus capitalism slides along a continuum of liberal to authoritarian. At the extreme conservative end is fascism. But authoritarian capitalism does not necessarily present as fascism. Neoliberalism is authoritarian capitalism with a liberal façade.

While liberals and democrats share a commitment to the rights of speech and expression, democrats do not share with liberals their commitment to private property and capitalism. Democrats (and I do not mean here the Democratic Party) recognize and seek to resolve the contradiction between free speech and private control over the means of communication. The economic system democrats seek is socialism; only by guaranteeing public access to the means of communication can everybody be assured venues in which opinions and information are maximally freely expressed and received by the population.

Democratic socialism is therefore the realization of the free speech ideals of liberalism. Liberalism cannot make fully substantive the free speech right because of its commitment to capitalism, an exploitative system resting on exclusive control over economic activity, thus restricting access to the means of communication. Liberalism will always be compromised by its commitment to property and the perpetuation of social class. This is why I reject liberalism in its totality as an adequate political and moral philosophy.

From the beginning, I have opposed Western military involvement in the Syrian conflict. I have argued against providing any material support to Islamist fighters in Syria. Liberals and conservatives alike who support the goal of toppling Assad do not grasp the threat Islamism poses to humanity. As we saw with al Qaeda, moral men do not use these people as a means of achieving ideological ends. They are not to be played with. The Islamists represent an existential threat to human freedom, and feeding this monster only makes the likelihood of their success greater. I also opposed military action in Iraq and all of the other countries the US has invaded, occupied, and bombed, as well as military and material support to insurgents in every situation. I am anti-imperialist. If you know me and read my work this should come as no surprise.

I have expressed support for refugees and argued that the nations of the world that can should take them and provide for them, especially those countries whose actions created the refugee crisis. The United States has taken refugees from Iraq, Syria, and many other places and I have supported this. I have also expressed the opinion that it is appropriate for countries to set limits on the number of persons coming across their borders, but if no evidence can be presented indicating that the person is a danger to others (criminal background, involvement in terrorism, carrier of a communicable and deadly disease), they should not be prevented from entering merely on the basis of point of origin. There are exceptions to many of these cases obviously. I am working from principle.

I remind people of these points because there should be no confusion concerning the intent of my argument about the legality of Donald Trump’s executive order. My observation that the administration devised the order to avoid the charge of religious discrimination is based on my interpretation of the text and analysis of the context and represents my thinking about how this order will fair in the courts. It is no way an expression of support for Trump or his order.

Some might be confused because I pushed back on the claim that it was a “Muslim ban.” I strive to make judgments independent of partisanship or ideology. Opposition to Donald Trump should not cause anyone to ignore or misrepresent facts. If distortion in pursuit of political goals is what makes the political right so contemptible, then the left needs to take special care to avoid distorted communication. We need to speak truthfully, and when I see people marching out with a particular (mis)characterization in tow, one that the other side can easily push back on, I thought something needed to be said.

Nothing I am saying here is meant to suggest that anybody be apolitical. I highly recommend you study the difference between neutrality and objectivity. They are not synonyms. What I argue for is objectivity. Reluctantly go beyond the facts you have. And when you have more facts, and your assumptions and interpretation appear wrong, be sure to correct them.

I followed the Quebec shooting in real. The initial sense was that it was a hate crime. I was unsure. When the first police reports came out claiming that the gun man suggesting the gun man was an Islamist, I finally posted about it and noted the troubling fact that victims of Islamic terrorism are often Muslims themselves. When later facts showed that it was a right-wing white nationalist, I made sure to correct the record. This is how one works in an objective fashion.

The Hebrew Bible does not have a notion of resurrection. When people die their souls survive and enter a shadow world, Sheol, from which they can communicate with the living. Sheol is the Jewish state of the dead. It could mean the grave or another dimension. Later, Jewish mythology evolved to include the notion that there will come a future time when the righteous will be resurrected, but this is not original to the ancient religion (but it explains all the bone collections – those unique stone boxes full of bones). The notion of Hell as understood in Christianity, Gehenna or Hades, where the soul and body suffer everlasting torment and destruction, albeit sometimes also denoting the concept of Sheol or Hades as the abode of the dead, is not of ancient Jewish origin. Moreover, in the Old Testament, Satan was one of God’s archangels (of which there were many and many other lesser angels). Satan resided in the celestial dimension with God and was deployed by God to test the faith of his followers, sort of a celestial prosecutor.

In the late Old Testament and intertestamental period, between late sixth century BC and the first century AD, Jews came under the influence of Persian culture (when Persia conquered the Babylonians in 536 BC) and were influenced by Zoroastrianism, which conceived of the universe – and the soul – as containing opposing forces of good and evil, or cosmic / moral dualism. The evil force opposed God’s creative force, polluting / corrupting God’s pure creative work, hence aging, sickness, etc. There are two paths you can go by: the righteous path, which is the stairway to Heaven and happiness everlasting, and the wicked path, which leads to wretchedness and eternal torment in Hell. Zoroastrians are optimistic that evil will finally be vanquished and humanity will realize Paradise on Earth (they became more optimistic as the religion evolved, but I digress).

Under this influence, Jewish cults emerged that re-conceptualized Satan as the personification of evil. Satan is no longer tempting man as God’s prosecutor to test for loyalty (as we see in Job), but enticing man to sin for his own sake. He becomes the corrupter of men’s souls. In the emerging cultish version of Jewish cosmology, God (and his angels) and Satan (and his demons) become independent forces, locked in a struggle for power.

Christian mythology takes this further: Satan, an archangel is depicted as rebelling against god in the celestial realm. God casts Satan out of Heaven. Satan falls towards Earth (although it’s unclear whether all the way). Jesus, another of God’s archangels, is sent from Heaven, eventually depicted as God incarnate, representing along the way the fulfillment of a revised Jewish prophecy, repurposed to wash away the stain of sin with his purifying magic blood. The idea of choice, central to Zoroastrianism, where one chooses to be good, is incorporated into Christian doctrine, producing a more agency-driven religious feel (and an early source of the coming fascination with individualism); a person accepts Jesus as his personal savior, honoring the sacrifice Jesus made, in order to be welcomed into Paradise, now removed from Earth to Heaven. Jesus, one of many savior deities, thus represents a composite myth, and is subsequently historicized via the Gospels, which are written in the second century AD.

This is confirmed by the epistles of Paul, which are the earliest references to Jesus in history, penned well after Jesus is supposed to have lived. Paul insists that he has no personal knowledge of Jesus, that scripture and revelations are the only ways to knows Jesus. It came to him in a vision (although he consorted with other wizards of his sort). Jesus is not connected to human history in any of Paul’s writings. All of the elements in the Gospels, written many decades after Paul, are not in Paul’s epistles: Mary and Joseph, the immaculate conception, the virgin birth, the time and place of the birth, the manger and three three kings, Jesus’ childhood, John the Baptist, Jesus’ baptism, the temptation, sermons, parables, and moral pronouncements, exorcisms, healings, and miracles, the last supper, Judas’ betrayal, Peter’s denial, Jesus’ arrest and trial, the witnesses at the tomb, the transfiguration – none of these things are known to Paul (for they had not yet been invented). Paul only knows about crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and ascension, and some vague notion of the sperm of David (which translates much like God’s manufacture of Adam) and it is not clear that any of these things even happened on Earth. They seem to have happened in the celestial space between the Earth and the Moon where God and Satan do battle.

In Paul’s story, Jesus is an archangel, a salvation deity, sent from Heaven for the sake of people. Decades later there is a dispute among Christians as to whether that’s for Jews and Jewish converts, i.e. Torah observant Christians (TOCs), specifically, which ties in with the entirely speculative historical case of Jesus as a rebel seeking salvation from Roman occupation, or for Gentiles, too, for a we-are-the-world go at things. That latter bit really caught on, as you can see. Or, more accurately, with elaborated and forced on populations by law and by sword, thanks to the Romans. However, the only recipients of Jesus’ message, according to Paul, are apostles like Paul, that is, recipients of revelations from celestial quarters (albeit not in the detailed ways Muhammad and Joseph Smith were informed by Gabriel and Moroni). The ritual of the Eucharist is transmitted to Paul in the same way God transmits to Moses the building of altars (that “Don’t let me see your testicles” bit). It is not conveyed to him or by him as symbolic of an actual historical moment (which had yet to be invented).

The Gospels, written much later, attempt to situate Jesus in history, but even here the stories take the form of the Greek myths that purport to report events happening on earth. Indeed, when people read the Gospels as history they are missing the fact that they are myths telling parables about spiritual matters (such as the story of Jesus and the fig tree in Mark 11:13). Thus the Gospels are instances of contemporary myth-making in the same way that Joseph Smith manufactured the Book of Mormon. And very much in the spirit with the Jewish tribes and all, which either Smith accidentally picked up or he was smarter that we think). And just as the Book of Mormon is a plagiarism of the Biblical text, so the New Testament is a plagiarism of the Old Testament, and the Quran is a plagiarism of both the Old and the New Testament – as they were known at that time.

So, the New Testament is a mix of Paul’s epistles, second century AD myth-making and plagiarism, and forgeries (such as 2 Peter). Moreover, the extra-biblical sources claim knowledge of Jesus either only have knowledge of the cult or are themselves forgeries. Jesus is not actual historical figure. He is myth through and through.