Month: September 2010

There’s another thing about Julian Baggini’s rebuke of atheists for ganging up on the pope. It is the fact that it overlooks the gang on the other side. There was the gang that toddled obligingly along to Westminster Hall yesterday to listen deferentially to the pope telling them what’s what.

Pope Benedict tonight used the keynote address of his visit to Britain to protest at “the increasing marginalisation of religion” in public life, maintaining that even the celebration of Christmas was at risk.

In a dense, closely argued speech to an audience that included four former prime ministers, the pope said social consensus alone could not be left to decide policies…

Below him, seated in neat rows that stretched to the back of the vast, 900-year-old hall, were hundreds of parliamentarians and religious leaders.

Among them were Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Sir John Major, Lady Thatcher, William Hague and Nick Clegg.

That gang. The state, basically. There is also the vast majority of the mainstream media. Yet Baggini chooses to characterize atheists and protesters as being too many and too much and too rough.

I am glad that people are protesting on the key issues that the pope has got very wrong. If only a few people were doing so I might have felt it necessary to sign the petition. But when everyone starts piling in, it is perfectly reasonable for others to say it is time to back off before it gets too ugly.

Why is it the people saying “no” who are piling on and likely to get ugly? Why is it not the monarchy and the government and the media who are creating and enforcing a coercive consensus? Why is Baggini treating power, hierarchy and privilege as normal and protest against those things as deviant and excessive? Why is he worrying about “polarising disputes” and “contributing to an atmosphere” and “party lines” and “collateral damage” only in relation to the protesting minority while letting the theocracy-embracing majority entirely off the hook? Why is he blaming us while shielding them?

Julian Baggini says why he declined to add his signature to a letter protesting against the pope’s visit and why he thinks the pope-protest is a bad thing.

Consider for a moment why almost every secular, liberal-minded person thought that Pastor Terry Jones was wrong to plan to burn Qur’ans on the anniversary of 9/11…The main problem is that by burning the holy book of all Muslims, the protest would fail to target jihadist murderers and would be seen as vehemently anti-Islam.

But jihadist murderers are not necessarily the only problem with Islam; it is not necessarily the case that being anti-Islam is self-evidently bad. It could be the case that there are many things wrong with Islam, and that it is reasonable to be critical of Islam and even anti-Islam. One can be anti-libertarian, anti-socialist, anti-Tory, anti-union. Why should one not be anti-Islam?

The kinds of protests against the pope we’re seeing in the UK do not, of course, match the idiocy of Jones’s pyrotechnics. But they too are creating divisions at a time when mutual understanding is already at a low…

But if it is forbidden to “create divisions” then we can never change anything. If it is automatically and self-evidently bad to “create divisions” then we just have to accept whatever the status quo is without a murmur. Baggini is “creating divisions” just by writing this piece. So what? Yes of course protests against the pope “create divisions”; my relationship with the Vatican, for instance, is at an all-time low. But I don’t think that is a reason to stop saying how bad the Vatican is.

Take Britain’s five million Roman Catholics. They are a very disparate bunch. Many despair of their church’s stance on women priests, homosexuality, condoms and child abuse. They would also like to take this trip as an opportunity to let the pontiff know that his British flock cannot be loyal on these issues. A few have even joined the Protest the Pope campaign. But how many more could have found common cause with their secular brethren had not the latter opposed the trip outright. “Nope pope” is not a slogan of a campaign that is doing its best to bring dissatisfied Catholics along with it.

But you can always say that, about anything – if you made your message more anodyne and ingratiating, you could find common cause with more people. Finding common cause with more people is not always the goal; sometimes the goal is to say what one thinks needs to be said.

It strengthens the perception that Britain is under the sway of what Cardinal Walter Kasper called an “aggressive neo-atheism”. It means that when the pope made a comparison between “atheist extremism” and Nazism, far from seeing it as the absurdity it is, many found themselves wondering if he had a point. We atheists can protest about the slur as much as we like, but we ought to realise that the more we engage in polarising disputes, the easier it will be to portray us as contributing to an atmosphere which, at its extreme, leads to assassination plots against religious leaders.

He says, doing his bit to portray us as contributing to an atmosphere which, at its extreme, leads to assassination plots against “religious leaders.” And what are “religious leaders,” anyway? The pope is the only official one in the world, and none of them are leaders in the democratic sense; they’re just men who have reached the top of some clerical hierarchy or other. The rest of us are under no obligation whatsoever to obey them or “respect” them or bend the knee to them in any way. They’re not the bosses of us. They’re not anyone’s leader except maybe the clerics of their own institutions. I trust I can say that without being accused of contributing to an atmosphere which leads to assassination plots against them.

I am glad that people are protesting on the key issues that the pope has got very wrong. If only a few people were doing so I might have felt it necessary to sign the petition. But when everyone starts piling in, it is perfectly reasonable for others to say it is time to back off before it gets too ugly. Party lines are the death of rational, free-thought movements: divided we stand, united we fall.

So…the protest against the pope is very naughty because it doesn’t find common cause with more people, but on the other hand, the protest against the pope is very naughty because it is too big and everyone is piling in and it’s a party line and divided we stand, united we fall.

It’s both of those? At the same time? Srsly?

All right; in that case they cancel each other out and I will feel free to ignore them.

Andrew Brown, for some opaque and never-explained reason, devotes himself to explaining what the pope meant in his “atheists=Nazis” speech. He does a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy act, saying “the pope believes” or “according to the pope” throughout, while in fact saying things that he clearly enjoys saying.

For him, a nation that turns away from God entirely has nothing to keep it from treating people as disposable means, rather than ends in themselves. The liberal appeal to reason, to choice, and to human rights doesn’t go far enough. He believes in all three, but he thinks they must be derived from something else. That something else was once generally understood to be Christianity. If that is no longer true, Benedict believes we are all shrunken and impoverished.

Yes, we know. We know he believes that. That is what we object to – along with the stunning amount of deference that is paid to the guy and to his vicious illiberal beliefs. We know he believes that reason and human rights “must be derived from something else” and that that something else is “God” and that “God” is “God” as understood by the Catholic church, which means one that thinks women should die rather than have abortions, that people should die of Aids rather than use condoms, that child rape by priests is church business only, and that women must never ever be priests on pain of excommunication. We think that’s an imbecilic thing to believe, and also harmful and authoritarian and reactionary. We know the pope believes that “we are all shrunken and impoverished” if we believe that; that’s exactly why we hate him and his church.

The astonishing variety and force of invective thrown at the pope and his church in much of the media over the last week must certainly, some of it, come from people who would like to drive religious faith out of public life. At the same time, it’s hard not to suppose that in some of this the Roman Catholic church is standing as a proxy for Islam, which is certainly a great deal more unpopular.

So…on the one hand it’s the product of evil secularists who don’t want bishops making laws, and on the other hand it’s the product of evil Islamophobes who are just pretending to be Catholocismophobes. Seriously?

Where secularists see religion as a divisive force, and their own beliefs as the self-evident and true base on which a healthy society can be built, Benedict sees that secularism itself can be challenged.

Here Brown takes the mask off and speaks for himself – and he apparently thinks that a country governed by the Catholic church would be more “healthy” than a secular one. He apparently would prefer 1950s Ireland to contemporary Britian. Of course he’s not a woman, or an impoverished child, but still –

Seriously?