Author: Ophelia Benson

Georges Rey says many pointed and relevant things about belief in “God”: meaning “a supernatural, psychological being, i.e., a being not subject to ordinary physical limitations, but capable of some or other mental state, such as knowing, caring, loving, disapproving” who “knows about our lives, cares about the good, either created the physical world or can intervene in it, and, at least in Christianity, is in charge of a person’s whereabouts in an ‘afterlife’.”

Now, it doesn’t seem to me even a remotely serious possibility that such a God exists: his non-existence is, in the words of the American jury system, “beyond a reasonable doubt.” I am, of course, well aware that plenty of arguments and appeals to experience have been produced to the contrary, but they seem to me obviously fallacious, and would be readily seen to be so were it not for the social protections religious claims regularly enjoy.

That’s exactly it, and that’s what puts the “gnu” in “gnu” atheism – the fact that it doesn’t seem to us even a remotely serious possibility that such a God exists and that we don’t feel inhibited about saying so in public discourse. It’s exactly that, at heart, that so annoys the unfans of gnu atheism. It’s supposed to be rude or intolerant or fundamentalist or conceited or vain or we think we’re so smartish of us to think that and to say it.

Yet that doesn’t apply to other obviously preposterous claims or beliefs or stories. Just the goddy one. Just the local goddy one, pretty much.

Odd.

Andrew Anthony is good on the subject of Warsi’s little talk on “Islamophobia.”

She has complained that the last government was “too suspicious” of faith and treated it as “a rather quaint relic of our pre-industrial history”. Given that Tony Blair was overtly religious, his government expanded and promoted faith schools and consistently tried to pass censorious blasphemy laws, it gives pause to wonder how much more religious Warsi would like her own government to be. 

Really. She thinks Labour wasn’t religious enough?

In citing liberal critics of religion such as Polly Toynbee as representing an “abhorrent” attitude, she certainly made it clear how much less secular she would like society to be.

A lot less.

Last year, Number 10 made her withdraw from the Global Peace and Unity conference in London. Despite its title, the GPU event featured several antisemites and Islamic hate preachers. By all accounts, Warsi was disappointed not to attend. Had she spoken, she intended to challenge extremist attitudes.But she also saw in the GPU a chance to show the power of an organised faith community. As she put it in another speech: “In Britain, the resilience of religion gives us the confidence to reject the intolerance of secularist fundamentalists.”

This is the kind of language that plays well among many religious activists. However, there is a hidden paradox in Warsi’s position. She wants to give greater voice to religion in the political arena, yet she also wishes there to be less criticism of religion, in other words, power without scrutiny.

Just like the pope.

Something Eric said in his latest post struck me. The subject is again Wilkinson at BioLogos, this time on his raised eyebrow at Eric’s moral arguments. Eric wonders why the eyebrow is raised.

But why, I wonder, does Wilkinson think that my moral arguments are quaintly old-fashioned? Is this just an example of theological scatter-shot, or did he have something specific in mind? My belief is that religion has completely disastrous moral consequences…

My own central moral concern, at least as this is exemplified in the name of this blog, is the religious insistence that people suffer intolerably as they die, and that they should be denied help in bringing their dying more quickly to an end.

I stopped reading there, because I wanted to think about that. It suggested something…

What it suggested is that religions of this type don’t love us. We’re not their cherished children or the objects of their concern or even empathy. They don’t give a rat’s ass about us, not us – not as we are, not our real fleshy mortal vulnerable selves. They may care, or think they care, about some abstract perfected us that lives on after we’re dead, but they don’t care about us as we are here and now. We know this because they want us to suffer. They are willing and indeed eager to force us to suffer if the only alternative is our deciding for ourselves. They are willing and eager to force us to suffer if the only alternative is our breaking one of their rules. They love their rules, and they don’t love us.

The bishop of Phoenix is angry because that mother of four young children is not now dead. He is morally indignant because she is not dead. It is his considered opinion that she should be dead now.

They want us to suffer when we would prefer not to, and die when we would prefer to live, for the sake of their rules.

They’re a cold-hearted lot.

Giles Fraser is all in a lather about “Islamophobia.” He quite understands that it’s permissible to criticize Islam as such, sort of, though he’d much rather you didn’t, but still he does realize he has to say you can if you really want to, but

but but but

it’s really not. Actually. Since you ask.

Conversations generally begin with the sort of anxieties that many of us might reasonably share: it cannot be right for women to be denied access to education in some Islamic regimes; the use of the death penalty for apostasy is totally unacceptable; what about the treatment of homosexuals? The conversation then moves on to sharia law or jihad or the burqa, not all of it entirely well informed.

And then and then and then it falls right off a cliff into just plain hating Muslims, so the fact is, you can’t talk about the we might reasonably share items either, because if you do, an invisible cable will attach itself to your ankle and drag you inexorably over that cliff. No discussing women’s rights under Islamist regimes, no discussing the death penalty for apostasy, no discussing sharia or the burqa. Just don’t talk about it at all, if you please, because you do it rong, or you risk doing it rong, and therefore you have to stop before you start.

What can begin as a perfectly legitimate conversation about, say, religious belief and human rights, can drift into a licence for observations that in any other circumstance would be regarded as tantamount to racism. Like the 19th-century link between anti-Catholicism and racism towards the Irish, one can easily bleed into the other.

Racism towards the Irish? “Irish” is a race now?

Never mind. The point is, talking about one thing can lead to talking about another thing, and the other thing is bad, so talking about the first thing is forbidden, lest it lead to the other thing. Clear? And fair? And compatible with notions of the value of free speech and free inquiry? Certainly.

“I treat the Islamic religion with the same respect as the bubble-gum I scrape off my shoe,” suggested one contributor to the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, in response to Warsi’s speech.

He means commenter. If it were a contributor, he would of course provide an actual name. He’s so hard up for examples of his one thing leading to another thing that he offers an unnamed commenter on Dawkins’s site. He feels justified in ruling a large and important subject out of bounds because of an anonymous comment on Dawkins’s website.

I think we can safely discount his advice.