Author: Ophelia Benson

At last, at last I get to go to a conference, yee-ha. I feel so included. Plus it will be so much fun – networking, and drinks in the bar, and staying up all night, and sexual gossip, and putting disgusting things in people’s beds, and singing, and sitting around the campfire – wait, I think I’m getting confused. This will be all grown-up and serious, not like summer camp. Which is good, because I hated summer camp – both day camp and go away for two weeks camp. Sending me to camp was I think part of a half-hearted effort to make me more normal and extroverted, but it never worked. If anything it made me less extroverted, being forced to spend a lot of time with a bunch of unchosen strangers.

Oh excuse me, I didn’t mean to lapse into reminiscence. Anyway the Very Big Atheist Conference of 2011 won’t be like that. No lanyards and no marshmallows, for one thing; that will mark a difference right away. And then the exciting opportunity to explain about Etiquette and Comportment for Atheist Ladies – I have so longed to do that, and I am so ideally suited for the task. Never mind the business about not being normal and extroverted, that doesn’t matter – I’m great on the theory. I’m a student of the subject. I’m nerdy and sullen and quick to take offence, but I can say how to be polite and comportful as well as anyone in the business.

So see you all in Darwin City next year! No bed hair please – no deliberately torn jeans – no tongue studs. No pyjamas – no thongs – no baggy falling-down pants – no – wait, where are you going? Come back!

Hitchens coldly observes that the pope is not above the law. ‘The pathetic excuses of Joseph Ratzinger’s apologists evaporate before our eyes.’

So now a new defense has had to be hastily improvised. It is argued that, during his time as archbishop of Munich and Freising, Germany, Ratzinger was more preoccupied with doctrinal questions than with mere disciplinary ones.

So we read that New York Times article and we learn more about the pope’s preoccupations.

Cardinal Ratzinger ruffled feathers almost upon arrival in Munich by ordering priests to return to celebrating First Communion and first confession in the same year, rather than having the first confession a year later, a practice that had become established over the previous decade, and which its advocates considered more appropriate for young children. One priest, the Rev. Wilfried Sussbauer, said he wrote to the archbishop at the time questioning the change, and said Cardinal Ratzinger “wrote me an extremely biting letter” in response.

Hitchens draws out the implications.

So it seems that 1) Ratzinger was quite ready to take on individual priests who gave him any trouble, and 2) he was very firm on one crucial point of doctrine: Get them young. Tell them in their infancy that it is they who are the sinners. Instill in them the necessary sense of guilt. This is not at all without relevance to the disgusting scandal into which the pope has now irretrievably plunged the church he leads. Almost every episode in this horror show has involved small children being seduced and molested in the confessional itself. To take the most heart-rending cases to have emerged recently, namely the torment of deaf children in the church-run schools in Wisconsin and Verona, Italy, it is impossible to miss the calculated manner in which the predators used the authority of the confessional in order to get their way. And again the identical pattern repeats itself: Compassion is to be shown only to the criminals.

So the whole notion that it is invidious to hold the pope responsible for what some priests and bishops do is shown (more shown, re-shown, shown with even more emphasis) to be absurd, because the whole point of the pope is unwavering (and apparently rather aggressive) commitment and loyalty to this deeply sinister reactionary all-male closed organization and its warped way of viewing the world and its inhabitants. In the same manner a high officer in the Mafia would keep his underlings in line.

For Ratzinger, the sole test of a good priest is this: Is he obedient and discreet and loyal to the traditionalist wing of the church?…This is what makes the scandal an institutional one and not a matter of delinquency here and there. The church needs and wants control of the very young and asks their parents to entrust their children to certain “confessors,” who until recently enjoyed enormous prestige and immunity. It cannot afford to admit that many of these confessors, and their superiors, are calcified sadists who cannot believe their luck. Nor can it afford to admit that the church regularly abandoned the children and did its best to protect and sometimes even promote their tormentors. So instead it is whiningly and falsely asserting that all charges against the pope—none of them surfacing except from within the Catholic community—are part of a plan to embarrass him…This grisly little man is not above or outside the law.

Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

Josh Slocum suggested that I should flag up Alaina Podmorow’s retort to Melanie Butler’s article here, so that people who read just this page wouldn’t miss it. Good idea. So if you read this page and no other – well one, you’re a chump, because the front page is updated every day, so you’re missing news items and the occasional Flashback goody as well as a lot of very good articles – but two, don’t miss Alaina’s piece. Alaina is 13, she founded Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan when she was 9, she has raised a lot of money for women in Afghanistan and has seen the money matched by the Canadian government. She doesn’t agree with Butler’s strictures on ‘Western’ feminists who try to support women in Afghanistan.

No one will ever tell me that Muslim women or any women think it’s ok to not be allowed to get educated or to have their daughters sold off at 8 years old or traded off at 4 years old because of cultural beliefs. No one will tell me that women in Afghanistan think it is ok for their daughters to have acid thrown in their faces. It makes me ill to think a 4 year old girl must sleep in a barn and get raped daily by old men. It’s sick and wrong and I don’t care who calls me an Orientalist or whatever I will keep raising money to educate girls and women in Afghanistan and I will keep writing letters and sending them in the back pack of my friend Lauryn Oates as she works so bravely on the ground helping women and girls learn what it is to exercise their rights. I believe in human rights so I believe everyone has the right their own opinion, I just wish that the energy that was used to write that story, that is just not true, could have been used to educate a girl in Afghanistan.

I’m happy to see that several blogs have linked to Alaina’s article; Terry Glavin’s for one. So don’t miss it.

And now, for a different take on the whole ‘why are you telling atheists to shut up when we’ve barely had time to open our mouths?’ question, we can consider how these things should be done. With a little panache, that’s how.

[F]reethought thrives on contrarian impulses. The whole “Who says so?” attitude of many secular humanists leads to purist rigor, one-upsman-ship, even soteriology: The God I don’t believe in is bigger than the God you don’t believe in. The harm religion did me was more serious than the harm religion did you. The full-frontal unbelief I represent is truer and purer than the unbelief you’re espousing. Reason saves, faith enslaves. (That’s pretty good: try it on a coffee mug.) In the past, I’ve used the word “Pharisaic” humanism to describe this posture, but because the culprits don’t know who the Pharisees were the allusion has not become…code.

That’s pretty funny, and it’s not made any less so by the fact that I can’t entirely repudiate the picture.

I once repeated a Woody Allen joke in front of a heavily atheist audience, having just told it the week before at a local, liberal temple. “I don’t believe in an afterlife but just in case I’m taking a change of underwear.” My Jewish audience was tickled pink. My atheist friends looked at me as though to say, “Are you saying you do believe in an afterlife”? Twice-born atheists can make an outsider feel as unwelcome in the Temple of Bright as a secular humanist would feel in a tent meeting down in Tuscaloosa. (You know, where Groucho says they take the elephants because it’s easier to remove the ivory there).

Well I can entirely repudiate that picture, because that joke and that kind of joke always makes me laugh. But the whole thing is still pretty funny. If only all critics had that much wit.