Psychoanalysts have operationally dealt with the difficult question of free will by essentially assuming that our patients have free will and that their neuroses, character pathology, and psychiatric symptoms impair their full expression of their free will. This is a perfectly adequate formulation which only becomes problematic at the intersection of Psychiatry, Social policy, and the law. When the evidence that various parts of the brain are involved in behavior is used to support the contention that untoward behavior is the responsibility of the brain rather than the mind that has emerged from the interstices of the brain's substrate, agency is diminshed if not completely obscured. Those Psychiatrists who continually look to enlarge the purview of their profession by discovering new, potentially treatable (by them) conditions, are inadvertently lending their imprimatur to those who promote a neo-Marxist ideology which assigns responsibility for all poor outcomes to the oppressive ruling class. In their formulations, they excuse the victims of any responsibility for the effects of their own behavior. Thus, drug addicts who commit crimes must be treated as if they were sick and offered treatment rather than incarceration; violent Islamists who murder innocents are simply responding to the intolerable oppression of occupation and giving the responsible parties what they deserve; the list is endless and I have commented before on the locus of responsibility and its importance for determining policies.
As we once again face the turmoil that seems to follow wherever Islamic hypersensitivity and rage is deemed expedient, and embark yet again on the malapropism known as the "Peace Process" between Israel and those who desire nothing more than the Peace of death for the sons of dogs, Oswald Spengler offers some thoughts about Hirsi Ali, atheism and Islam [HT: Dick I.]:
... all the Muslim apostates whose voices we hear are atheists - not only Hirsi Ali, but also Salman Rushdie, the celebrated author of The Satanic Verses, the Syrian poet Adonis, and the pseudonymous Ibn Warraq, author of Why I am not a Muslim and several compendia of Koranic criticism.
Why do Muslim apostates gravitate towards atheism?
First I would to dispense with Spengler's initial apparent contradiction and then look at his rather more interesting discussion of the nature of free will in Islam.
Spengler wonders why "all the Muslim apostates whose voices we hear are atheists", though he overtly contradicts himself when suggesting that "Muslim apostates gravitate towards atheism." Certainly the apostates we notice in the West gravitate towards atheism, but as Spengler notes, millions of Muslims have been converting to Christianity throughout Africa and in smaller numbers more covertly throughout the Muslim world. Spengler mistakes those whose apostasy is the result of a blind pseudo-rationality versus those whose apostasy results from their faith. Those who adopt Christianity because of a crisis of faith, find belief in the love of Christ a powerful bridge toward enhanced freedom of action and enhanced faith; there is a great deal more "choice" in Christianity than in Islam, which quite overtly means "submission" in every way. The intellectualized atheist versus the believing deist; which is more likely to find their way onto the MSM radar?
[My point about atheism as pseudo-rational is based on the nature of the belief (faith) in atheism. Since the existence of God can neither be proved nor disproved by science and rationality, ultimately to believe or not is a choice, (at least for those of us who still believe in free will.)
If a person chooses to believe and is wrong, he has lost nothing; if he is right, he has gained everything.
If a person chooses not to believe and is correct, all he has gained is an illusory and ephemeral sense of superiority; if he is wrong, he has lost everything. That is an irrational choice, considering the stakes involved.]
Returning to Spengler, he does an excellent job of describing the nature of Islam and the absence of free will that emerges from Allah:
As Benedict XVI explained in his September 2006 Regensburg address:
For Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here [Professor Theodore] Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that "nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice" idolatry.
What does it mean for God to be "absolutely transcendent"? In the normative doctrine of the 11th-century Muslim sage Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Allah does not limit himself by ordering the world through natural law, for natural laws would impinge on his absolute freedom of action.
Spengler must be read to appreciate the distinction between the Judeo-Christian God, who can be understood albeit imperfectly, and an Allah whose will is total and capricious. How can there be free will if Allah determines everything?
I have commented before about the deep structural congeniality between Islam (at least the Islam that is presented to the world by those who speak in its name) and the far left. In both cases, their ideology facilitates and excuses the free expression of primitive instincts. For the far left this is primarily libidinal while for Islam it is primarily aggressive, but there is a great deal of overlap. As a bonus both encourage the most overt expressions of rage and hatred while maintaining a posture of assumed morality. It is an appealing combination for those who have difficulty controlling themselves. Since the rioter calling for the death of those who insult Islam is merely following the dictates of Allah, he has no more responsibility for his behavior than the promiscuous gay man who has contracted AIDS because of a miserly and uncaring society. Their future clash is yet to come, after the common enemy, the bourgeois West with its quaint notions of responsibility and free will, has been dispensed with.
Perhaps I have no choice in the matter, but I will continue to believe that we have enough free will to be held responsible for our behavior and that our world, however it has come to be, follows natural laws that man can understand.
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