It was already quite clear in the Archbishop’s lecture that he was not advocating a system of ”˜parallel’ courts or jurisdictions as exist in countries with arrangements known as ”˜legal pluralism’, such as India, Malaysia or Israel. Such a system assigns an official religious group identity to citizens and thereby requires them to have matters such as marriage, divorce or inheritance adjudicated under the relevant religious courts empowered to rule on them (including Islamic and Christian ones). It is occasionally possible to appeal successfully against such rulings to the civil courts but it is a costly business unavailable to many. (See Martha Nussbaum, ”˜Religion and Women’s Equality: The Case of India’, in Nancy Rosenblum, ed., Obligations of Citizenship and Demands of Faith: Religious Accommodation in Pluralist Democracies, Princeton, 2000, 335-402.) In my view such systems unacceptably infringe the civil liberties of citizens, although for political reasons it is not possible simply to legislate them away. Much of the criticism of Archbishop Williams (including Lord Carey’s article in The Sunday Telegraph, 10 February) seems to have been directed at this sort of arrangement, but it is not what he suggested.
Nor did he give the remotest succour to the idea that Islamic penal law might be countenanced in the UK, and it is fanciful to suggest that it ever could be. However, it is obviously understandable that those who live in, or who have suffered under or fled from, or who campaign against, officially Islamic states, almost all of which are dreadfully oppressive, would be alarmed at any suggestion of ”˜recognising Sharia law’ in the UK. The Archbishop may have given a flattering portrait of what ”˜Sharia law’ means in practice, but nothing at all in what he actually said justified such an interpretation.
What he actually referred to was not ”˜parallel jurisdictions’ but ”˜supplementary jurisdictions’. The model he seemed to be pointing towards (with regrettable imprecision, we now see) is something like a system of private arbitration, available to those who consent to use it, and made accountable by being accorded some sort of public recognition.
I’m glad that at least one other person noticed that many of the criticisms being leveled at the Archbishop last week by the press, politicians, and public were not based on rational opposition to sharia in particular, but on dogmatic hostility to the claims of religion in general. They were precisely the same totalitarian claims for the state over private conscience that lay at the core of the German Church Struggle.
“The Archbishop frequently quotes from the writings of Tariq Ramadan, an Islamacist scholar denied entry into the US and France because of numerous terrorist ties. This is a man who refers to the 9-11, Bali and Madrid terror attacks as “interventions.” He is a polished spin master and a pure propagandist. Very likely an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood, which his grandfather founded, Ramadan is a rabid anti-Semite and conspiracy theorist. He believes Jews run the worldwide media and Al-Qaeda was not responsible for 9-11. He blames the west for terrorism. He refuses to renounce stoning. He obfuscates the realities of Shari’a. He is a popular charlatan, a pied piper of European and American liberals who wish to believe Islam truly is a religion of peace and all this bother is of our own making. The Archbishop buys it all.” The Shari’a Archbishop By Lance Fairchok at The American Thinker
#2… I would recommend the following web site: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html
From the text cited:
“Archbishop Williams, however, unwittingly sowed confusion by seeming to refer to such a practice as the ‘delegation’ of certain legal functions to non-state bodies.”
Hmmm, even a proponent of the ABC’s notes the confusion the ABC engenders. Wonder of wonder, the the elusive perspicacity is not an absolute.
It appears the revisionist Bishop retort goes well here for Mr. Chaplin: “I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure that you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”
Wow, a reductio ad hitlerum in the very first comment.
Now the Friends of Rowan have to chime in, usually by claiming that his cerebrally challenged readers didn’t understand the subtlety of his thought. Thus Tom Wright and ‘Fulcrum’ enter a damage limitation exercise, realizing that RW’s stocks in Africa have sunk even lower and Lambeth ’08 has taken another hit. As for Dr Chaplin’s essay, the UK commentariat of Janet Daley, Melanie Phillips, Matthew Parris etc are not stupid, neither are they (for the most part) professedly Christian (more usually, they are agnostic or Jewish). The most serious criticism to be made of RW’s lecture is not its opacity (which bespeaks a confused mind, not a profound one) or its inability (or unwillingness) to grasp the reality of Sharia, but the failure to think though the question of the sources and limits of law (and the concomitant question of conscience and right) from a *Christian perspective.
‘Fulcrum’ has to fight a more difficult corner all the time, as the Communion unravels (look as the news from Canada this weekend), but there have to be some limits to personal loyalty to persons and institutions (‘my denomination, right or wrong’), for the sake of common sense, let alone the Gospel.
(There, you see, the reductio can cut both ways.)
The main criticism of Rowan Williams ill-conceived ideas is that 60% of British muslims don’t want Sharia, 40% do, and 0% want this nebulous Sharia-lite. The main criticism of Rowan Williams himself is that he was warned that this would be contentious, warnings he ignored and that he disregards the ramifications of his words and actions to those who try carry on with Christian witness in areas under the dark cloud of the Islamists.
Not certain how an exploration of one of the ABC’s sources of knowledge about Islam is an “ad hominem” against the ABC.
Are people to no longer point out the weaknesses of certain sources now?
BTW, Gordian, Dale’s argument is an (amazingly quick) example of [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law ]Godwin’s law[/url] – critics of Rowan Williams are equivalent to the Nazis or their supporters, choosing state over individual conscience.
I am not sure that Dale’s #1 represents [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum ]reduction ad hitlerum[/url] which is a logical fallacy where one states – the Nazis were in favor of X, therefore X is evil. This is not necessarily the case. For example, the Nazis were in favor of good roads, something not inherently evil. The Nazis were in favor of eugenics, thus eugenics is evil. Whether eugenics is evil should be argued on its own merits.
Perhaps, it is a straw man fallacy [i]combined[/i] with reductio ad hitlerum: (1) The critics are choosing state over private conscience (straw man) and (2) “state over private conscience” is bad because that is what the Nazis did.
# 9: I understood ‘reductio ad hitlerum’ to be something like ‘You support X, the Nazis supported X, so you’re just the same as the Nazis’. But, quien sabe?
Perhaps we need a new, additional category: invocatio wikipediae.
Sarah, the reason is because the quote refers to Ramadan’s personal opinions, not his scholarly work. It is insinuated that Rowan thus supports terrorism or radical Islam, even though he very clearly stated that supplemental jurisdictions would have to be voluntary. Celtichorse quotes a fellow who says, “the arcbishop buys it all.” Buys what all? And where is the evidence? The ABC said clearly that aspects of Sharia law should not be permitted in Britain. And he undermined fundamentalist Muslims and secularists when he described how religions are culturally constituted.
Rowan is fully aware of how Sharia is often applied – and in the cases described, he opposes it. As far as how it affects Iran or Saudia Arabia – the talk was about British Law!
#7 – the 60/40 distinction just shows that people didn’t understand Rowan Williams. He didn’t say that it should be imposed. It would be voluntary. And it could not supercede British law. What people did miss is how he undermined Islam as the total identity of a person. A small – but important – crack in Islam. Second, a leader is not the sort who opposes contentiousness. and now far more people are forced to handle the issue. He was a catalyst for one of the most important discussions the West can have at this time. Further, do not blame him for what happens to Christians in the Arab and African world. The blame lies solely with the Muslim leaders in those countries.
In the end, he is the best friend of Conservatives – undermining fundamentalist Islam while giving the intellectual justification for conservatives to oppose abortion and homosexual priests.
Too bad they refuse to see it.
[blockquote]the 60/40 distinction just shows [b]that people didn’t understand Rowan Williams.[/b] [/blockquote]
Again the argument that people are too stupid to understand Rowan Williams. Did anyone say that Rowan Williams was calling for a mandatory participation in his Sharia-lite program? A resounding no to that silly straw-man argument. It is my contention that there is a dichotomy of muslims in Britain: those that don’t want Sharia (or Sharia-lite) and those that want full Sharia and restoration of the Caliphate. Have I taken any polls? No, but I have read hundreds of responses to the fiasco. Thus, this whole mess has given a black eye to the Church of England – all for naught.
I did not mention Hitler. I was talking about the German Church Struggle, which was an internal debate among German Evangelicals (and to a lesser extent Lutherans and Catholics). It is a little hard to quote folks like Karl Barth or Dietrich Bonhoeffer without referring to the context of the Barmen Declaration.
We are in really big trouble if you people can’t see the exact parallel between that situation and statements like [blockquote]”Being British carries rights. It also carries duties. And those duties take clear precedence over any cultural or religious practice,”[/blockquote] or [blockquote]”Sometimes, religious believers will be forced to choose whom they obey, a religious judge or a civil one. They must choose the latter every time. Democracy and the rule of law demand it,”[/blockquote] or [blockquote]”Matthew Parris noted that it was precisely because the Archbishop believes that religious faith is all-embracing in its claims over human life that he sought more autonomy for religious communities from the state, adding: ‘it is the reason we should resist him’,”[/blockquote] or many the like we have heard over the past two weeks.
Barmen answered,[blockquote]”The Christian Church is the congregation of the brethren in which Jesus Christ acts presently as the Lord in Word and sacrament through the Holy Spirit. As the Church of pardoned sinners, it has to testify in the midst of a sinful world, with its faith as with its obedience, with its message as with its order, that it is solely his property, and that it lives and wants to live solely from his comfort and from his direction in the expectation of his appearance.
We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political convictions.”[/blockquote] and [blockquote]”Scripture tells us that, in the as yet unredeemed world in which the Church also exists, the State has by divine appointment the task of providing for justice and peace. [It fulfills this task] by means of the threat and exercise of force, according to the measure of human judgment and human ability. The Church acknowledges the benefit of this divine appointment in gratitude and reverence before him. It calls to mind the Kingdom of God, God’s commandment and righteousness, and thereby the responsibility both of rulers and of the ruled. It trusts and obeys the power of the Word by which God upholds all things.
We reject the false doctrine, as though the State, over and beyond its special commission, should and could become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church’s vocation as well.
We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church, over and beyond its special commission, should and could appropriate the characteristics, the tasks, and the dignity of the State, thus itself becoming an organ of the State.”[/blockquote]
Or how about this Dale:
[blockquote]Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. Romans 13:1-2[/blockquote]
Dale protests, “But I didn’t mention Hitler”…by name. And I really don’t know how he can even mention Dietrich Bonhoeffer when Dale is a cheerleader for one of the leading purveyors of cheap grace.
#12 has it really given a black eye to the church of England? I doubt it. If it happened, it happened long ago. You’re being hysterical. If anything, given the FT and Economists picking up of his comments, he’s shored up his credibility by sticking to his guns (it helps, also, that he’s done it in a way familiar to anyone who’s taken a tough seminar. You say something, but are willing to change).
What has changed is the technology around mass communication. And while everyone is demanding the archbishop submit to the powers and principalities of the media, he has steadily stayed his course, recognizing that it is, finally, in God’s hands. Robroy the Problems the archbishop is having are not, really, his problems. They are problems with other people’s perceptions. If I would have found him obscure, I’d be working harder. As it is, I don’t find him obscure, and I don’t hear what you say he’s saying.
#13: “The Barmen Declaration or The Theological Declaration of Barmen 1934 is a statement of the Confessing Church opposing the Nazi-supported “German-Christian” movement. The “German Christians” who were hostile to the Confessing Church combined extreme nationalism with anti-Semitism. The Barmen Declaration specifically rejects the subordination of the church to the state. Rather, the Declaration states that the church “is solely Christ’s property, and that it lives and wants to live solely from his comfort and from his direction in the expectation of his appearance.”
The Declaration was mostly written by Reformed theologian Karl Barth, but was also crafted in part by other Confessing Church leaders, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
(Woops, ‘invocatio wikipediae’!)
…. and do I have to spell out where and by whom extreme nationalism is combined with anti-Semitism today?
I am being hysterical? Thanks for giving me a chuckle. Interesting that you bring up the Financial Times of London. Here is[url=http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c47c68bc-d676-11dc-b9f4-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1] what they had to say[/url]:
[blockquote]
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is one of the most thoughtful people in British public life. But his call for aspects of Muslim legal practice, or Sharia law, to be recognised as a “supplementary jurisdiction†in English law is badly muddled.
…
He anticipates many objections, ranging from the rights of women under Islam to its historic prohibition of apostasy. But on smaller, more culturally and religiously intimate matters of mainly family law, he thinks we should have a sort of market of rival jurisdictions, competing for the loyalty of the citizen.
This newspaper begs to differ.
[/blockquote]
Oh, they are just being hysterical, too. And you know those guys at the Financial Times are too dense to understand the ABC like John does:
[blockquote]If I would have found him obscure, I’d be working harder. As it is, I don’t find him obscure, and I don’t hear what you say he’s saying.[/blockquote]
If only we could be as enlightened, John is.
“Robroy the Problems the archbishop is having are not, really, his problems. They are problems with other people’s perceptions.” The problem is with everyone else. I like it!
#15 I don’t know where John is, if he is in the UK, it doesn’t sound like it to me. May be he’s in a parallel UK? Because to think that the ABC has brought credit to either himself or the CofE through all this beggars belief. It is fantastical! It is to bury your head in the sand and to deny the obvious reality. I have lost count of the emails I have received, the phone calls I have received and the conversations that others have initiated with me – from my congregation and the local community, decrying the damage that has been done to the cause of the gospel and the church through all this. I am afraid to try and present this own goal as something of a victory is total delusion and shows how out of touch one is. The analogy to a black eye is actually way too weak to describe what has happened.
#14: I have always felt (as did Barth and Bonhoeffer) that when it came to choosing between the authority of the State and the authority of God, Christians had a fairly easy choice. You obviously disagree. I suppose you think we are all purveyors of cheap grace for not recognizing our duty to accept the costly choice of choosing the State [b]every time.[/b] “My country, right or wrong” no matter what my country chooses to do.
To repeat, Wikipedia notwithstanding, the German Christian vs. Confessing Church debate was primarily an internal debate within the churches about the unconditionality of the principle stated in Romans 12:1-2. It was quite clearly not a struggle between the churches as institutions and the Reich, because the religious institutions had quickly succumbed to the uncritical application of Romans 12. This was a debate in which the supporters of Barmen constituted a clear minority who were soon silenced, as much by their fellow believers as by the democratically-elected Chancellor.
Rob roy – check out the tone. The FT didn’t call for his head. They said they disagreed. +Williams himself has said that he is open to other ideas (and that he’s no expert). Your response, and the FTs were different in tone. The FT knows when this is an open discussion, as does +Rowan. Others just instantly call for his head and go with the ad-hominem attack.
Plenty of people are calming down, Robroy, and are examining what he said with a bit more charity. Even those who disagree. Giles Fraser, Deborah Orr and others.
#19 – I just don’t think we know. Only time will tell. But I see scapegoating all the time. Plainly, +Rowan is being crucified. And since lots of people are eagerly participating, we don’t see it.
The ABC is being crucified, John Wilkins? My, aren’t you the one complaining of hyperbole? When is being called to account for being muddled the equivalent of crucifixion? If the great and dilatory perambulations about sharia by the ABC are so lamentably unclear and are called “muddled” because they are, in fact, muddled, why call readers “crucifiers”? It is possible that the ABC over-reached and came up a strike out, you know. All on his own. Even those who claim to grasp his intent state -once again-
“Archbishop Williams, however, unwittingly sowed confusion by seeming to refer to such a practice as the ‘delegation’ of certain legal functions to non-state bodies.†Do try to give credit where it IS DUE.
#20: I fear you don’t understand much about 20th century German history then, Dale, or the pro-Hitler Deutsche Christen, or the Enabling Bill in 1933 of ‘the democratically elected Chancellor’ that outlawed opposition. That was the essential context for the Declaration.
Here’s the Declaration itself, with the authors’ preamble explaining that it is a response to the damage caused to the Geramn Evangelical Church by the ‘teaching methods and actions’ of the ‘Deutsche Christen’:
http://www.presbyterian.org.nz/1850.0.html
After leaving alone for several days these discussions of the ABC’s widely mis-apprehended remarks, I’ve just found it useful to listen to the ‘Question Time’ panel discussion from the BBC which Ruth Gledhill has posted:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_4090000/newsid_4097900/4097948.stm?bw=nb&mp=rm&news=1&bbcws=1
Only the first half or so needs to be heard, perhaps 10-15 minutes. It is quite helpful and enlightening to hear the level of discussion among the British participants and audience.
RE: “It is insinuated that Rowan thus supports terrorism or radical Islam, even though he very clearly stated that supplemental jurisdictions would have to be voluntary.”
Uh . . . no it didn’t. It “insinuated” — quite rightly — that one of Rowan William’s sources for his “knowledge” is dreadful, as this same source “obfuscates the realities of Shari’a” and claims that “Islam truly is a religion of peace” while at the same time being a radical Islamicist.
And I pointed out that pointing that out about a Williams’ source isn’t an “ad hominem” against Rowan Williams in the least.
And then you, in an effort to defend your fellow progressive’s incoherent and quite inapt use of the words “ad hominem” made up a new thing that Celtic Horse was “insinuating” in his objection to one of Rowan Williams’s source for knowledge.
JW, you do understand, don’t you, that reasserters have watched this tendentious rhetoric of yours for years, and have learned to respect even less your “arguments” than three years ago. That sort of deliberate and calculated obfuscation and blurring of slip-ups and irrationalities merely causes people to recognize how weak and shifting a foundation you stand on.
Sarah: the source is dreadful for ad hominem reasons. Who has red Ramadan? We only know how he feels about sharia from a few interviews. There is a difference between the person and the argument. An awful person can make a great argument. A person might make one argument that is good and another that is poor. Best to go to the text and see what is argued.
The pronoun “it” in my sentence was not directly tied to celtichorse but by others who are busy spreading the lies about what Rowan actually said. The insinuation is clear even from the simple photo of +Rowan in a Burkah. It’s funny. But it was a lie.
Again Sarah, brilliant at the name calling. Waiting for the evidence.
#22 – DWstroudmd,
The FT, in its wisdom, did not join in the immediate piling on of Rowan. Unlike others, they seemed to read what he said, and disagreed. That’s fine. They didn’t say he was stupid. They didn’t wonder about his talents as an Archbishop. They took the argument and examined it without hyperbole. That’s good. The vitriol against the archbishop was pretty intense. Or maybe I have that wrong.
But I noticed that lots of people were selective in their quoting, assuming the worst. they didn’t get the post-enlightenment, anti-liberal aspect of his argument. They didn’t get the liberal aspect of his argument. What is true is that liberals reading him should, rightfully, be horrified (he’s exposed much about the nature of common law and identity). What is ironic is that lots of conservatives are. For different reasons.
Fortunately, over time, people are reading him with much greater charity, and understanding. But what he said, as reported in the NYT on Sunday, was nothing unfamiliar to what we ourselves are struggling with.
No no . . . merely descriptive adjectives of your [i]actions and “arguments”,[/i] JW, not of your person. But . . . thank you for the compliment about those descriptive adjectives of your rhetoric.
; > )
Why I should desire to provide evidence to you of those descriptive adjectives, I don’t know. I’m certainly not trying to convince [i]you[/i] of the truth of those descriptive adjectives — you already know what you attempt to do when you have your flounders pointed out. And as for other commenters . . . you provide the evidence of those descriptive adjectives almost every day. ; > )
Whether people decide that your actions and rhetoric — and the descriptions of those actions and rhetoric — warrant actual names of who you are and not what you do, JW, is certainly up to them.
It’s an age-old question. Does the action — repeated, over a period of years — make the person the sum of those actions. My own personal opinion is no. A person who lies repeatedly, for instance, is not actually merely and simply a “liar”. A person who murders repeatedly is not actually merely and simply a “murderer.” And a person who covers for his own weak arguments with attempts at sophistry and obfuscation is not merely and simply a “calculated sophist.”
As to whether others privately have decided that the repeated actions over the years “make up the descriptive identity” of the person, I don’t know and cannot say.