(Liberal) Implicit Egotism Fallacy or Bias and Islam

I was talking recently to a fellow liberal who happened to be a Hindu making correctly scathing attacks on UKIP (a right-wing pseudo-libertarian UK political party similar in many ways to the Tea Party), media bias and misrepresentation and, you guessed it, Islam. Again I was somewhat frustrated that an intelligent and informed guy was getting so much right and yet made one big error. I see it so often and have been involved in debating it here and here that I had to answer my critics here. The problem is so common that I am formally going to name it as a fallacy or bias (though no doubt it already exists and you readers will tell me).

In simple terms it goes like this:

I am a liberal and I much more appreciate the liberal and moderate Muslims, and I don't like it when fundamentalists are used to represent Islam. As a progressive liberal, I better associate myself with liberal Muslims and therefore think that they better represent Islam than fundamentalists.

I could call this the liberal Implicit Egotism fallacy or bias, but in more general terms it could be called the Implicit Egotism Fallacy or Fallacy of Implicit Egotism. I have talked about implicit egotism before: it is where people look in others for traits about themselves and thus end up favouring the others who better reflect themselves. In this case, people with liberal persuasions better align themselves with those in the subject group who reflect those persuasions. For example, the other day, on BBC Radio 5Live, Adrian Chiles was interviewing two liberal Muslims who worked in the field of dealing with and working against Islamic extremism in the community. This was in response to a raft of new proposed legislation for anti-terrorism in the UK by Cameron's Conservative government. Chiles said the give-away phrase, "Of course, not all Muslims hold to the genuine peace-loving Islam that you do". Chiles, here, automatically, and without much question, took on the liberal "peace-loving" Islam as being the correct "genuine" one. Who gets to decide that? Is such peace-lovingness actually borne out in the holy texts? I would argue not. Whether it is or not is not so relevant here. The idea is that Chiles projected his own peace-loving morally progressive worldview onto others, or sought out his own worldview in others, such that they became representative of the "genuine" Islam.

And this happens day in, day out. This is how it looks as a syllogism of sorts:

1. I have traits A
2. I morally evaluate a group of people X which includes people with traits A, B, and C
3. Associating with those with traits A, and implicitly due to this, I come to take them as properly representing X

Yes, the (UK) Daily Mail and other right-wing rags do misrepresent Islam on account of their inherent biases and closet racism and otherisation. However, this does not mean, by default, that Islamic liberals are the more correct form of Islam. I have expressed this at length elsewhere as linked above. The main point is that we should question our approaches to other groups of people especially when it appears that we are merely seeking reflection of ourselves.

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/liberal-implicit-egotism-fallacy-or.html

isnt this EXACTLY what myself (and to an extent Tommy too) have been saying for a long time?

the important part I think is "who says" that "the liberal "peace-loving" Islam as being the correct "genuine" one."

is right.....

and yet if anyone casts doubt on this they are drowned in howls of indignation.....

He does make a good case if based on the Quran being actually what was claimed to have come from Muhammad. That is one big drawback in his view. But based on Muslims literally believeing the Quran whether authentic or a later adaption, his views would be 100% correct. It cannot be used in a historical context.There is another point he doid not really touch on, the hadiths. This are so unreliable as we have no originals and this does make up a huge influence on how Muslims create sharia law based off Muhammad seen to be without fault as a Prophet. The big mistake many Muslims also make, though not all, Quranic Muslims, being an exception. Is that they basically are deiying and making so called suras of Muhammad on a par with the deity Allah. His was the messenger and their leader. So what the hadiths claim, should have no relevance to the principles of Sharia law. The Qiuran is very clear on only suras of Allah are valid. This the vast majoirty of Muslims contradict their faith by adpating them. There is always disagreemnt on hadiths and the fact they are clearly have no real evidence to suggest they are geuine. When they are not found written centuries later. This part he missed is important, as hundreds of thousands of hadiths have already been rejected. If they downply their significance this would go some way to improving Islam as sharia

Anyway the point over claiming who is more closer to the Islam based off the known works, s dnagerous ground to promote whilst at the same time helping the liberal Muslims help combat the ISIS extremism. Of course trhe best course would be for people to willingly leave the faith see its faults and wrongs. So whilst I agree 85% with him, I cannot say 100% because the Quran has only fragments of Qurans 50 years after his death and written in early Arabic devoid of vowels. So I clearly say they are the closest ISIS to ISlam which is the works they use. Its thus possible the Islam being followed for centuries is not the true Islam that Muhammad is claimed to have recited.

He makes very good case but it is not fool proof Victor.
I like he reasoning best on how people have defended a religion (or lets just call it what it is, an ideology), who hold liberal views. I once also did the same, as you know and have since stopped defending many religious ideology from criticism.
He made some very good points and also read his other links at the start I posted Victor.
Did you get a chance to read them?

I am going to post the article from the link above in reagrds to criticism he recives, as its also very good.






On Islam and answering my critics

I have had many discussions concerning Islam and my views pertaining to it. I would like to flesh out here some of the criticisms I have had and answer them properly, also offering this as a post that I can point people to when this undoubtedly pops up again. Before I get properly started, one claim is that the number of posts concerning Islam (for example, on facebook etc.) seems to show I am prejudiced against Islam, or some such claim. I am a philosopher of religion. That’s my bag. I criticise religion. I have, for seven years, harshly criticised Christianity, I have written, edited or contributed to almost ten books attacking Christianity. No one has once levelled this accusation at me regarding that. Or the right-wing, Republicanism. libertarianism or any other position. But as soon as I criticise Islam, fellow liberals take offence (on behalf of the Islamic community). So if some stats about the 88% of Egyptian Muslims favouring the death penalty for apostasy comes up, I am asked why I am not apoplectic about 48% of Britons favouring the death penalty, or that the US do A or B and that I should worry about that more. But:

•Why aren’t those philosophers of the death penalty more concerned about the Egyptian numbers in support of it for apostasy?
•This is a red herring
•I am a philosopher of religion, so this is my area of expertise. It’s like demanding an economist spend more time arguing for biodiversity, or an expert on Greenland be told it is more important that she concentrates on American economics, because X and Y. We all specialise.
And so on. I would ask that when I criticise other groups of people, these same critical fellow liberals actually pick up on defending those subgroups and labels of people. In some sense, it says more about my critics than it does about me.

What would be interesting is to look into the motivation for such defence. Ibn Warraq talks about liberals, over recent history, failing to criticise Islam in serious ways. When Salman Rushdie was issued a fatwa, at the time many liberals defended the Ayatollah in Iran and the street demonstrations calling for Rushdie’s death rather than defending Rushdie himself. Warraq maintains that this, and other things (like liberal newspapers failing to review his books critical of Islam even though he is a staunch defender of liberal democratic values), seem to point to liberals siding with the enemy of their enemy. In other words, liberals often hate the imperialistic machinations of the US, and the US reacts against countries which are predominantly Islamic, so liberals side with Islam. In fact, only the other day a staunch liberal on facebook was telling me how amazed he was that fellow liberals were defending Putin seemingly for this same reason! It is acceptable to be critical of both. This is not a false dichotomy.

The confusion largely comes in a misappropriated conflation. Attacking Islam is not to attack Muslims, per se. If I attack the Bible as being a terrible book detailing terrible decrees for its adherents, I am not attacking my Christian friend down the road as being terrible. But this is clearly what is going on in the minds of many such critics of my position. Nowhere have I stated that “all Muslims are terrible” in some kind of hasty generalisation. And that annoys me. Attacking Islam is not necessarily to attack each and every adherent.

The next misconception, similarly, is that my complaints do not take into account what most Muslims do believe or how they do act. Correct. This is entirely not my point, In moral philosophy, descriptive ethics is about describing how the world is, what it believes. Normative (or prescriptive) ethics deals with what people should believe. That is what I am interested in. I set out some axioms, and then talk about what Muslims, if they accept those axioms, should believe and how they should act (if they want to adhere accurately to those decrees), and take it from there. This becomes frustrating, because throwing around 1.6 billion Muslims as some kind of evidence that I am wrong is missing the point in a very major way. My point remains whether there are 0-infinity Muslims bucking the trend.

It seems that there were several things going on with such discussions in general, which I will list here:

1.Tarring all Muslims with the same broad brush used to attack radical jihadis
2.Using circular methodology of setting out the axioms to then bring about a conclusion that I want
3.The prevalence of my posts is representative of a bias and prejudice against Muslims
4.That upwards of a billion Muslims is evidence against my position
I have already sort of mentioned this point above, but let me expand. What is my case? Well, as set out to begin with here, and then largely here and then in public debate in Bournemouth the other night is as follows:

Christianity and Islam are different in that Christianity is based on the Bible which is the inspired word of God and can be seen in a myriad different ways (fallible, metaphorically etc.) and is written in unknown times and places by unknown people. It can be interpreted literally, but it is not the literal word of God. Written by man, there is an interpretative layer which gives it greater wriggle room and adaptability. With 42,000 different denominations of Christianity, it can be cherry picked to support any position you might hold: loving/hating gays, slavery, blacks, prosperity, socialism etc. etc. It’s success has been in its dilution and adaptability, like an organism adapting to its environment in evolution.

Islam is different, it is the word of God, dictated through Gabriel over 22-23 years in a cave to an illiterate prophet. Thus the Qu’ran, which the revelations became, are accepted by all Muslims as being the immutable word of God, a divine monologue if you will. It is not an anthology of poetry, history, proverb, allegory, myth, narrative etc. as the Bible is, but a set of divine decrees and guidance from the “mouth” of God.  This means that Islam demands that society adapt to it, scientifically, economically and morally (to a much larger degree than Christianity, say).

This is crucial, and was not seen clearly enough by detractors.

Let me start by looking at one of the axioms. To be a Muslim, which literally means one who”submits to the will Allah” (Islam meaning “submission” or “surrender”), one must believe, then, in Allah. Otherwise, you would be a deist, or some other religious label. If this word has meaning and properties, it must refer to a belief in Allah, and this must come from somewhere. I would like to a thought experiment or set of propositions for the reader to answer:

•a) Imagine that God existed
•b) Imagine he actually revealed decrees (X and Y) to mankind through a prophet which was accurately recorded
•c) Does it then follow that a follower of this God could more or less accurately behave as according to X and Y?
What follows is, it seems, yes, a believer could be more or less accurately following the decrees of God in some meaningful sense.

This is the idea of “True Islam” that I go to lengths to express. I don’t think any Muslims, or any substantive number that could in any way represent Islam, believe in the denial of a) or b).

http://www.skepticink.com/tippling/2015/06/30/on-islam-and-answering-my-critics/


Lots more to read on the link