Alison, you wrote, regarding the "Cocooned in Dylanesque.... thread and
David Riddell's participation in it:
>>I'll see what other list members think.<<
I decided early on that I would stay out of this particular discussion
because I have very strong feelings about it and I don't have right now in
my life the time or the energy that I know the discussion would demand of
me, but David Riddell's unambiguously religiously bigoted, if not outright
racist comments about Islam have made me angry enough that I've decided I
want to say what I have to say. Before I do so, though, I do want to be up
front about my personal stake in this subject, because it is not only that I
find Riddell's comments about Islam offensive on their face; it is also that
my wife is a Muslim, as is her whole family a family of Muslims, as is the
country she comes from a country where Islam is the dominant religion, and I
have friends who are practicing Muslims, and it is this personal connection
that impels me not to be satisfied with other people responding to Riddell,
as Alison did so well, with things that I would have said also.
So let me start here: You can't argue with faith. Faith is, at its core, a
deeply private and non-rational phenomenon. If David Riddell chooses to have
faith that the god of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles exists and that what
this god says and the commandments and consequences contained in those texts
are all part of a verifiable reality that those of us who do not have his
faith choose to deny, there's nothing, no notion of historicity or facticity
that anyone can bring, that will make one iota of difference to him. I have
known orthodox Jews, rabbis even, who were perfectly capable of accepting
the facticity of, say, the different authors of the Hebrew Bible,
specifically the two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis, but who
were nonetheless able to assert that the whole text was divinely authored,
etc. and so on. And this is fine; I would even go so far as to say this is
as it should be. David Riddell's faith should not be at issue here.
It is also true that I do not know David Riddell, except as he has presented
himself in this forum, and he has presented himself, as Alison says in her
post, as a provocateur who seems more interested in provoking than in
discussing, whose responses have, more often than not, been nothing more
than further assertions of his faith embodied in literal readings of
biblical text than real, sustained engagements with, say, the notion of what
it means to have faith, or what it means to have differences of faith, or
whatever. A friend of mine who used to be an evangelical Christian would
probably call this a very awkward and ineffective and offensive form of
"witnessing," trying by example to enlighten unbelievers and encourage them
to join the fold. Now, let me be clear, I am not suggesting that Riddell's
objective is to witness in this sense, or to proselytize at all; I want
merely to point out, as someone who has very often in his life been the
target of Christians of all different stripes who wanted the extra notch on
their belt (and yes, that is my bias showing) that would come from
converting a Jew, that many of Riddell's posts and the ways in which he has
used them remind me of the kinds of things that proselytizers say and do,
even as they try to convince you that they are not proselytizing.
I also don't know if David Riddell is, consciously and purposely, the
racist/religious bigot his comments about Islam suggest, or if he is, like
some other people I know, merely so angry at the suicide bombings and
September 11th and so on that, in his ignorance of Islam and out of the
arrogance of his faith that his/our way of life is somehow inherently
better/less violent/more just/whatever than "theirs," he feels he must make
statements about Islam like the ones that he made. I don't know which, or if
either of those descriptions of David Riddell is accurate and, frankly, I
don't care. What I know is that his statement reeks of religious bigotry, if
not racism, and it is, given all his other posts, difficult not to connect
those feelings about Islam to what he has to say about his god and his
version of the Christianity that he says he believes in. It is worth asking
how people on the list would have responded if he had made similar kinds of
comments about Blacks or women or Jews or gay men and lesbians; choose your
Other.
Finally, Alison, there is, of course, nothing wrong with discussing all of
the different topics that have come out of this thread, and there is nothing
wrong with discussing biblical texts, or the notion of a god or of how it is
that religions which preach peace in their texts end up inspiring violence,
and there is nothing wrong with someone like David Riddell asserting his
faith as part of that discussion, but his flirtation with martyrdom at the
very least--he refers to himself at one point as the "pagan" here, and at
another makes reference to his being in a lion's den--and his continued
stance as a provocateur, at the most, goes beyond assertion, as do his
comments about Islam. I understand and share your reluctance to remove David
Riddell from the list, and I am glad I am not in the position to have to
make that decision, but I did want to share with you the fact that, for me,
he has crossed more than a few lines.
Rich Newman
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