MORALITY DEBATE:
ExamineTheTruth.com
vs.Tektonics.org
James P. Holding first
response
Tektonics.org’s response has been taken from here.
Go back to Morality Debate
page.
These days you never know what sort
of argument those in the relentless pursuit of insignificance will dream up;
here we have one Nadir Ahmed, a Muslim apologist, writing up something called, "Britney Spears vs.
Rebecca St. James debate Morality". Grammatically incorrect though it
is, it does manage to achieve at least the appearance of irrelevance for someone
like me who cares about as much about either celebrity as my poodle cares about
Japanese state fiscal policy. Mr. Ahmed apparently had some low-down hoe-down
with CARM's Matt Slick about relative morality, and while I'm not interested
enough to view the debate itself, I do have some comments on Ahmed's, well,
gross anachronisms and abounding ignorance of Biblical social science. Why not.
There was apparently at the start of
this some rhubarb in which St. James (a Christian pop musician) accused Spears (some
other secular pop musician, if you don't know -- eh) of dressing immodestly. I
really wouldn't know who dresses in what these days on the pop music circuit
(for all I know, clown outfits could be all the rage, and probably should be if
they are not) but where we get to crossing out Mr. Ahmed is with his wee little
comment:
...Rebecca
attempted to criticise Britney Spears on her clothing, accusing her of being
too promiscuous. Here, she gives the impression, that Britney dress style is
going against the Bible. But this is not true. All the Bible states is be
"modest" (1 Timothy 2:9), that's it. But, the Bible does not state
what clothing is considered modest. To put it in a nutshell, Modesty is simply
an emotion. It's a feeling one gets when they are personally satisfied with
what they are dressed in. Therefore, Britney Spears fully meets this
requirement, so long as she feels that she is modest.
Oh, dear. Well, we have two big
bonehead errors in this one, but nothing we would not expect from someone merely
reading the text in English and announcing his opinion. It goes like this.
First, the Bible does not have to "state what clothing is
considered modest." Surely Mr. Ahmed is not so pitiably dense as to think
that a word used in an ancient text was not without some contextual
understanding by its own readers. Mohammed certainly did not provide a glossary
of terms for the Quran; so likewise, it is safe to assume that when the Bible
uses "modest," it had specific meaning in the first-century context
it was written. Of course, if Mr. Ahmed wishes to take some pride in pointing
out the Quran's specific injunctions against, i.e., premarital sex, well, best
think that over. The Biblical world was a high-context society; there was much
taken for granted in documents of the period and lack of specific admonitions
is, if anything, normal. In fact, given that the Quran was developed in the
same type of society, if anything what this tells us is that Mohammed's
contemporaries were so badly depraved that they needed the reminder. Not much
virtue in that.
Can we find out what
"modest" meant to these people? Easily. As Mounce notes in his
commentary on the Pastorals, the word here is used in many secular texts; it is
"one of Plato's four cardinal virtues"; the same word is also used as
a requirement for elders (1 Tim. 3:2) and other persons in the Pastorals. The
comment is also followed upon by a slam against overdone hair and jewelry. So
what is likely in view here when Paul says to cool it? Not hard to see.
Which does lead to a certain point.
Rebecca St. James is likely not any sort of Greek linguist, but
"modesty" is in this case something of a modern interpretative
understanding, and her application of the word to Spears' apparently sparse
accoutrements is something of an indirect application. The word itself has a
more general meaning of having restraint or self-control. I assume that if Mr.
Ahmed is told to have restraint he is not going to stand aghast with his mouth
agape not knowing what he is being asked to do. His culture tells him what is
required, which leads to our second major point. This is obviously not an
"emotion" as Ahmed says it is. It is also not the case here that it
is, "a feeling one gets when they are personally satisfied with what they
are dressed in." In fact, this is where Ahmed makes his most enormous
bungle when it comes to the Biblical social setting. As we have noted on this
site many times, the world of the ancient
Ahmed wants to know, "is
wearing pants modest? Is wearing shorts modest? Tank tops? Dress covering the
entire body? Swimsuit? Therefore, modesty is left up to the individual to
decide." Sure it is. I'd invite Mr. Ahmed to take a stroll down a Saudi
Arabian beach wearing nothing but a fig leaf; I am sure the police there will
appreciate his plea that he as an individual decided it was A-Ok and they
should just shut up. Or perhaps he might try sending a female relative out
there without a burka. Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, calls nudity shameful, so
where Mr. Ahmed gets his own ideas is something worth a mull.
So Mr. Ahmed's silly little
"challenge" to Christians to "prove from the Bible that wearing
a Britney Spears type outfit is sinful or wrong" misses an enormous point.
Ask Plato then to prove that kosmios is really a cardinal virtue.
There follows some rap about how St.
James apparently accused Spears of dressing so as to be treated as a sex
object. Ahmed claims that "the very same objection can be used against
[St. James], but even more forcefully, because she has many traits, which men
would consider to be sexy." If he says so. I can well imagine that for Mr.
Ahmed, it might be "sexy" for a woman to turn up the corner of a burka
and flash a little ankle; a cartoon I once possessed, from the early 1900s in
America, depicted a man googling women's lower calves on a windy street corner.
Of course there is quite a world of difference between a Britney who
(apparently) knows what a great many find sexy, and dresses accordingly, and a
St. James who is blissfully unaware of the knucklehead who happens to get his
jollies from That Particular Shade of Lipstick. Short of specifics, there is
not much that can be said.
I don't know what to make then of
Ahmed's comment that, "it is a well-known fact, that the dress a woman
wears has a direct correlation to the moral decadence of a society." In
this he seems to cut off his nose to spite his face; I also know of no such
"well-known fact" from anthropology, but perhaps further
enlightenment awaits us. I rather doubt Mr. Ahmed has done the requisite social
science legwork (pun intended) to become an authority. Christianity, Mr. Ahmed
says, has no solution; Islam does, by which he apparently means it solves the
problem by being dictatorial. True enough, killing the patient does cure the
disease. I can't dispute that. On the other hand, he seems rather bewildered
that the Bible does not get as explicit as he thinks it ought to be: "For
example, the Bible does not condemn using a computer or driving a car,
therefore, the logical conclusion is that it must be ok to drive a car or use a
computer. Using the same common sense, if the Bible does not condemn those
sexual acts, then it is ok to do." He then issues another inane challenge:
"...prove from the Bible that it is ok for men and woman to kiss and hold
hands on a date, but it is wrong or sinful for them to engage in any other kind
of sexual activity except intercourse according to the Bible." Hmm. Here's
a clue for Mr. Ahmed: In the date and place the Bible was written, there was no
such thing as a "date"; marriages were arranged, and to dally
sexually prior to the covenant was, well, dishonorable. In other words,
the social context (preformulated as it were before pen even went to scroll)
already had the rules in place. There is no condemnation of drug use because
there were no drugs to use; at most you have the Scythians getting lightly high
off the smoke of the hemp plant, something practically unavailable to the
first-century Mediterranean; and don't even ask me why the Bible needed to
condemn use of the coca plant found only in the New World at that time. To
demand that the Bible get more specific is like asking it to tell us the sky is
blue. If you really need to be told this, you are so out of it that an explicit
rule isn't going to change you anyway. If Mr. Ahmed thinks the Bible promotes a
society of skimpy outfits, I would like to ask him for proof of skimpy outfits
in Christian communities of the first century
Mr. Ahmed thinks Islam will solve
these ills, and that's a remarkable statement given that Islamic countries like
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