God tortures only those who ask for it
William C Chittick PhD is a professor of religious studies at SUNY Stony Brook. He wants us to understand “the Islamic notion of mercy.” He tells a story to illustrate it.
Another account tells us that the Prophet had stopped to rest at a bedouin camp, where a woman with an infant was baking bread over an open fire. The child slipped away and approached the fire, and the mother quickly pulled him back. She turned to the Prophet and said, “Do you not say that God is ‘the most merciful of the merciful’?” He replied that he did. She said, “No mother would throw her child into the fire.” For a moment the Prophet turned away and wept. Then he said that God puts into hellfire only those who refuse to go anywhere else.
Chittick seems to think that that illustrates genuine mercy. I think it illustrates the pathetic and disgusting tininess of the theocratic mind. “God” is all about mercy; for example, he puts people into hellfire for eternity only if they don’t jump when Mohammed says jump.
That’s not mercy, you fucking fool.
I love it—in the religious context, God’s mercy is happening even when He fucks us over. So Yaweh killing Job’s entire family (you know, to test him) was, in actuality, an act of love. The great flood in which only Noah and his family were spared?—that wasn’t God in a “rage.” Heavens no! That was also an act of love.
The political scientists, I believe, call this “spin.”
I remember a similar thing from my Mormon upbringing, that those who weren’t qualified for the Celestial Kingdom (the highest form of heaven in the Mormon mythology) wouldn’t be excluded because they were disinvited, but because they couldn’t even stand to be there.
It’s a trivially satisfying answer to the problem of a merciful God doling out eternal punishment, as long as you accept it as a priori true. If it is assumed to be factual, then it is a logically consistent answer.
But once one starts questioning whether such a statement was accurate, it suddenly becomes akin to those slavery apologists who argued that, in fact, bondage and the white man’s guidance was what the slaves really wanted in their heart of hearts. “Oh, it may seem like what I am doing is nasty and brutish, but really, I am only doing what the victim beneficiary wants me to do!”
Sadly, to a mind conditioned to accept these little precepts as unquestioned truth (such as mine was at that age), it is pretty effective. As I said, if it were really true, then it resolves the merciful/vengeful paradox.
Gotta remember to put that in the WTF box.
Quite so, about the adequacy provided you already accept the preconceptions. That’s one reason it’s worth trying to jar people out of accepting the preconceptions. Sometimes jarring is what it takes.
And he fucks only those who are impotent. And orders the murder of only those who do not believe in him or choose to leave the faith. And he commands the husband to beat his wife only when she disobeys him.
And he just asked me to show you no mercy if you still don’t accept him as merciful.
More evidence that believers suffer from Stockholm syndrome.
What else can we expect, ‘Allah’ is the invention of a complete psychopath and later generations of his demented followers. So much intellectual effort has been wasted in attempts to ‘explain’ the collection of verbal diarrhea also known as the ‘Koran’, efforts, by often well-meaning people, to gild that very poisonous lily are really black comedy.
Oh I dunno. Everything is relative. Perhaps an eternity of going from Hell’s fire to freezing water back again would be even worse. Be thankful that God in His infinite mercy did not set that one up.
I didn’t want to slap her. She gave me no other choice.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Camus Dude. Camus Dude said: #God #tortures only those who ask for it @opheliabenson http://t.co/FaqERbL #mercy #hell #allah #yahweh #god #christianity #islam #religion […]
Ah, okay then — all the people in Hell are incomprehensible cartoon props which think, feel, and behave nothing like anything human. That is, they may seem human on the surface, but it’s a show. When you get down to essentials, they really aren’t. They WANT to be in Hell. They’re Bad Guys and don’t count.
I’m sure that a basic life philosophy which considers a proportion of the population to be incomprehensible cartoon props will be respectful to all.
That could almost be acceptable if, like the Buddhist Hells, it was temporary-“do the crime, do the time” kind of thing.
The Christian/Islamic idea is “eternity without possibillty of parole”.
Calvinist preacher in the Hebrides, describing the torments of Hell:
An ye’ll look up and say, `Laird, we didna ken.’ And the Guid Laird will look doun and, in His Eenfinite Merrcy, will say, `Weel, ye ken noo.’
This is how the “merciful” allah treats women who disobeyed his commands by showing their hair (on their head!) to strangers, and other such grievous sins:
http://therationalfool.blogspot.com/2007/11/women-in-hell.html
I prefer to read that story as being about the bravery of an unnamed woman who faced up to the Prophet. His eventual answer sounds to me like a defensive stammer. Her point stands.
Decades ago I remember SUNY Stonybrook for their astronomers. I guess science was too expensive so they got into the bullshit business. What a pity there’s no hell for Mohammed and his imaginary Allah – or Bill Chittick for that matter. And this filthy Allah (speaking through the vile Mohammed of course) is always going on about how women should be beaten and murdered for the smallest things – and yet idiots claim that this Allah is somehow benevolent, loving, even merciful? There’s sure no shortage of imbeciles on the planet.
“For a moment the Prophet turned away and wept. Then he said that God puts into hellfire only those who refuse to go anywhere else.”
Who the hell does Mohammed think he is?
Glenn Beck?
It’s all a sign of love.
It’s all just a game.
It’s all very familiar…
But Chittick’s getting a fair bit of support in the HuffPost comments, about what a beautiful piece he has written, etc. Like Chittick, such people seem fundamentally to be sentimentalists who when told a pretty story notice only the prettiness and never sully their minds by thinking through its implications – that wouldn’t be cricket (or whatever gentlemanly sport you want to stick in here). It makes you wonder what people like Chittick gained from doing a PhD. Not bloody much.
This is helpful. I like her portrayal of Qaradawi.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbz2ZC59_yw
Mo just didn’t get it. The mother was far more merciful than his sicko god, she actively prevented the child from making a fatal mistake.
So if God (or Whatever) is almighty, do people have free will which will allow them to make decisions contrary to God’s will, in which case He’s not almighty but loves them enough to allow them some freedom, or is making them “refuse to go anywhere else” His deliberate decision which the unlucky person is forced to follow, in which case He is indeed almighty – but not very loving.
Cam, yes, I do like that part of the story.
I also hate the way Chittick gives Mo moral credit for blubbing a little before consigning people to eternal fire.
I think it is important to see the implications of this idea of Allah’s mercy for the way relations, between those who submit to Allah and those who do not, are to be organised. It is exceedingly uncompromising, The Qu’ran repeats many times that, once the Muslim has made the offer of faith to infidels, only to have it spurned, the Muslims are to consign those persons to their fate, which Allah has prepared for them. The clear implication of these repeated threats is that those who choose not to submit to Allah have in fact chosen to be treated by the faithful as the infidels they are. And the hellfire prepared for them eternally begins, in a sense, now, by being shut out of the redeemed community of the obedient and submissive. This is, indeed, the Islamic notion of mercy, and it applies right now, not just in the afterlife. There is, in these ideas, no obvious room for the idea that Muslims and infidels can live peacefully together, since to be in the presence of the infidel is, in fact, to be in the presence of danger. As it says in the second surah (27):
And a few verses later (39):
Notice, he is not talking of the dead, but the living. They are the rightful owners of the fire — right now. And so they deserve no mercy. The Muslim, the one who has submitted, must recognise this fact, and make sure that the infidel feels, now, the consequence of his or her choice, otherwise the Muslim has, by accepting with equanimity the choice of the infidel, effectively made the same choice. For later, after saying that women of the believers (the believers then are clearly men as Standing has pointed out) should “”draw their cloaks close round them (when they go abroad),” (xxxiii, 59) we are told explicitly that
The infidel is one who has chosen his or her fate. That’s why apostacy is immediately punishable by death. It is, you might say, the unforgivable sin. It is a choice to stand outside of the mercy of Allah, the all merciful. So the idea suggested by Chittick, that there is some kind of universal mercy, aside from the particular mercy shown to the Muslim, must be false, and the Golden Rule, as expressed in Islam, must be wholly ‘tribal’, and restricted to believers. History seems to bear that out.
‘…you fucking fool’
That’s not very nice is it?
Speak as you would be spoken to.
Mealy-mouthed platitudes with disgusting moral messages are far more offensive than a simple F-bomb.
Erica Blair – are you for real?
Erica,
You may want to stick to christian and islamic websites, where the suppresion of human rights is cloaked in faux-civility. We atheists prefer to show outrage when appropriate.
While “modern”, “sophisticated” theologians usually employs a language approximately as sharp as a sack of cotton, the example provided (probably form the ahadiths or the sira) is clearer. This usually also holds for numerous passages in the quran (and bible). -That is to say, they are quite clear, -and utterly reprehensible when employing the real context they reasonably should be put in. This “immediate” clarity does of course not mean there are no contradictions, quite the contrary. Both books have oodles of them -partly thanks to the “pseudo”clarity of the individual passages.
(All these blatant contradictions and logical inconsistencies are of course the very reason why the “sophisticated theologicans” have to take refuge in verbal fog)
But I have also been struck by some very newspeak-esque “qualities” of the sacred text:
War is peace….. slavery is freedom ….. Mercy is letting only some roast eternally in hell.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
You should never call a fucking fool a fucking fool. It’s not fucking nice.
The way it reads to me is that he cried because he knew he didn’t have a good answer.
Erica Blair
Well I know what I’d like to be called for my prior views on gay marriage so I suppose that gives me license per your golden rule to speak as I would like to be spoken to.
Andy Dufresne:
The worrying thing is that I don’t think it is spin. Spin is deliberate: the spinners know they’re, erm, stretching the truth. I’m not sure those who spout this stuff can actually see beyond it, can see the inconsistencies.