Such jeering
Yet another plea – or more like demand – that atheists shut up. Dave Hill foolishly comes right out and admits that’s what he’s demanding, in the very first sentence.
Even by writing this piece I risk perpetuating what I seek to end: arguments about religion that generate more heat than light.
He seeks to end arguments about religion – well at least we know where we are for a change. And where we are is (as so often) with someone who doesn’t think very clearly. He claims that ‘the critiques [AC Grayling and Polly Toynbee] offer, at least on this site, never develop beyond assertions that all religion should be got rid of because it’s always a bad thing,’ which is absurd (apart from anything else, that would make a one-sentence post, and Grayling and Toynbee don’t write one-sentence posts). Then he gets even more wild. He quotes Grayling on the influence of Catholicism:
Women enslaved to child-bearing, over-large families perpetuating ignorance and poverty, backward social policies and the iron grip of a clergy acting like the Stasi in controlling the minutiae of private lives.
Then he announces that he takes that personally because he ‘married into an Irish Catholic family,’ then he announces that he doesn’t ‘care for privileged British academics informing them that they were so supine as to have had their personal lives “controlled”,’ and then he ends with a flourish by saying ‘Such jeering at Irish Catholics has, of course, a long and ugly history.’
‘Such’ as what? What is that ‘such’ doing there? What jeering at Irish Catholics? There isn’t any, except in Dave Hill’s head! If he thinks the quoted passage about the influence of Catholicism is ‘jeering at Irish Catholics’ then he’s suffering from delusions of reference. That’s a cheap trick – doing a strained and highly subjective interpretation of a chosen passage so that it says something wounding to the self or the self’s relatives or ‘community,’ then moving instantly to treating the strained and self-centered interpretation as well-founded fact. (Then whining about the putative jeering or insult or offense or attack or sneer or abuse or other crime of reference.)
So, Dave Hill wants to end arguments about religion that he doesn’t like, and his method of choice is to accuse AC Grayling and Polly Toynbee of doing things they don’t do. And he calls himself liberal.
Judging by his general output, DH is a thoroughly good bloke. I think here he has been taken in by the general connection of religion to cultural and ethnic identities, and isn’t seeing the true targets of the critiques. A shame in this particular case, but I don’t think he should be written off like [ack, spit] Theo Hobson…
Surely, strictly speaking, an alternative, and more charitable reading of “arguments about religion that generate more heat than light” is that he means those arguments about religion that generate more heat than light as opposed to all arguments about religion?
I wondered that too, PM. It wouldn’t take much intellectual charity to read it that way…
PM & ChrisPer –
Ahhhh, but who exactly gets to decide and define when an argument is supposedly overdoing it on the warming as opposed to illumination front?
Evangelical Baptists?
The Pope (& His Donkey)?
Jayendra Saraswathi?
AC Grayling?
Christopher Hitchens?
Therein lies the rub…
There is nothing remotely strained or subjective in reading those remarks as demeaning to Irish Catholics. Grayling is like that; in his most recent ‘Comment is Free’ piece he compared his opponents to squealing pigs and then went on to lecture them about “manners.”
“Here he characterises the influence of Catholicism:”
“Women enslaved to child-bearing” Yes, they were in the past enslaved to having to bear children – whether they liked it or not. The priests reminded them of their childbearing duties, say, if and whenever after one year or so of marriage no little patter of feet by them, made a noise.
This in turn created “Over-large families perpetuating ignorance and poverty, “Yes, again! I was talking to a woman a couple of days ago, who was on holiday from England. She told me that she came from a family of eighteen children. Due to family difficulties, they all ended up during the fifties/sixties in separate industrial schools in Ireland. (Btw, Industrial Schools, in England, by the government, were in the early thirties abolished.) Because of been (by the Religious system) at such young ages separated from each other the family has to this day never bonded. They left their respective institutions not only ignorant but also poverty-stricken. Moreover, I add, very bitter. Catholicism ruled every particle of people’s lives. This particular one family has been there and worn the dirty T-shirt. “Backward social policies and the iron grip of a clergy acting like the Stasi in controlling the minutiae of private lives.” The clergy actually carried on their persons’ blackthorn sticks with which to whip young people who were fortuitously by them seen to be holding each other’s hand in public! Each year at every parish, special masses were by them, held – and woes betide anyone who according to the standards of the clergy during the course of the year did not abide by them – they were indubitably by priests ridiculed by name, from the pulpit. Everyone was afraid of them. God helped those not who did not cough up their tithes as the wicked priests pointed their fingers directly at them for all the holy Mary’s/Joes present to afterwards find reasons to send them to Coventry. The once yearly Mission Week was also a petrifying and disquieting time, Hell, Fire and Damnation was preached1 Children at schools had to have their catechism reeled off by memory. Children as young as seven had to know from it what ‘adultery’ meant, when asked randomly by the priest at their school.
Dave Hill: “I do not care for everything the priests taught them or the opinions some of them hold.”
Neither do I.
Dave Hill, again: “I also don’t care for privileged British academics informing them that they were so supine as to have had their personal lives “controlled” by someone else and that the up to ten-strong families of which they are so proud are “over-large” and have perpetuated ignorance.
“by their fruits ye shall know them.”
BTW, Catholicism, to this very day still largely continues to hold a tight rein on the lives of very vulnerable people from the poorest sections of Irish society. To give but one example… I was only just this day speaking with a lady (who has recently returned to Ireland, having resided in England for the past twenty years) She told me that she was dismayed, and horror-struck at the detestable treatment meted out to a sick resident (at the abode they both temporarily resided) at the hands of so -called religious do-gooders. The religious volunteers who run the institution threw the delicate person’s medication down a sink, whilst at the same time telling her that she did not need the medicine – that “prayer was the only answer“. This person is now very ill in hospital, but has no one to turn to, as she would not by anyone be believed, she is after all only a poor person. In addition, the returning emigrant whom she relayed the story to from her hospital bed is alas in desperate need of accommodation and cannot stand up for her because the religious management on to the streets will throw her out. There are Catholic principles for all to dwell on. It is stomach churning!
“by their fruits ye shall know them.”
You can say that again!