Author: Ophelia Benson

I’m reading Nicholas Wade’s book The Faith Instinct. The core of his claim is that religion is part of human nature and that it has evolved because it helps people survive because it fosters group cohesion. He argues that belief in supernatural agents who are watching and will punish wrong-doing and cheating is a powerful way to enforce group norms and that this is very useful for survival, especially in primitive societies without secular mechanisms for law enforcement.

Not wholly new, and not wholly mad. But – I have to wonder. CNN last night was showing UN trucks in Porte-au-Prince trying to distribute food, and what I kept seeing was a lot of men pushing each other and shoving their way to the front and grabbing for the food. ‘No women,’ I kept saying; ‘no women, no women; it’s all men; it’s all pushing and grabbing and men, there are no women. Maybe the men are taking the food back to women and children…’ But the reporters said they weren’t. The reporters said the men were pushing everyone aside and grabbing the food, and children and women were getting nothing. They said it was not a good situation.

Okay. We keep hearing how extremely religious Haiti is – and how crap its infrastructure is, so it must be badly in need of these watchful supernatural agents who motivate people to do the right thing. Okay – then why are the men pushing aside everybody who’s less strong than they are, and grabbing all the food they can grab? What kind of cohesion has religion bestowed on Haiti if that’s how things are? I can’t help wondering.

I heard a nice chat on the BBC World Service the other evening. Roger Heering was naturally very worried that the people of Haiti might have lost their ‘religious faith’ due to the recent unpleasantness, and he and a woman from a faithy charity group talked about it. ‘You might think this would undermine it,’ he said to her anxiously, but she was quick to reassure him. ‘It actually seems to have strengthened it,’ she said in a pleased tone. They hugged themselves in glee, and then Roger Heering turned to the sports.

But that’s interesting, isn’t it – having all the buildings fall down and tens of thousands of people die and tens of thousands more lying around screaming in agony is another point for God. Well if that’s the case, what would be a point against God then? What would God have to do to make everyone decide God was a shit? Not just letting children lie under a slab of concrete for hours and hours crying in pain and fear and misery and then die. So, what then? It’s frankly quite hard to think of anything. If that kind of thing goes in the credit column, it’s hard to think of anything that would be considered a demerit.

So what, you could say; what business is that of mine? But it is, because people don’t just think there is this God, they worship it. It’s not a matter of recognizing the existence and power of the local warlord or Mafia boss, it’s a matter of bowing down to someone taken to be superlative in all the good ways and none of the bad ones. Well if torturing people to death is something a god superlative in all the good ways does, then torturing people to death is apparently a good thing to do. So actually it does matter if a lot of people believe that perpetrating horrors is a reason to worship someone even more.

Of course there’s also the usual thing of calling it a ‘miracle’ when one person is rescued while the tens of thousands of people killed or mangled are just ‘whatever.’ It’s the same with that ridiculous ‘saint’ in Australia.

When Kathleen Evans arrives at the pearly gates, she will have a simple question for St Peter: ”Why me?” The 66-year-old mother of five and grandmother of 20, who identified herself yesterday as the recipient of the second miracle bestowed through the intercession of Mary MacKillop, has no idea why she was ”chosen” to be cured of cancer. She only knows that 17 years after a non-small carcinoma was found on her right lung, followed by secondary growths in her glands and brain, she is free of cancer.

And that she ‘prayed to’ a nun named Mary MacKillop, ‘and she wore a picture of Mother Mary with a small piece of cloth from the nun’s garments pinned to her nightie.’ That’s what she knows. And the nun gets the credit for this one disappearance of cancer, and nobody gets the blame for all the other cancers that don’t disappear. Credit for the good stuff, a free pass for the bad stuff – that’s ‘religious faith.’

You wouldn’t think people would be in a hurry to say stuff like this.

[Bishops] warned that Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill suggests some rights are considered “more important than others”. They backed calls for a “conscience clause” to be added to the law so that the rights of religious worshippers are not ignored by attempts to protect minorities.

You wouldn’t really think they would want to say quite so bluntly and clearly that they think ‘the rights of religious worshippers’ are in conflict with attempts to protect minorities. In fact, you would think, or at least I would think, they would want to shy right away from saying that. Haven’t they read their Karen Armstrong? Aren’t they aware of the lifeline she’s sending them by rushing around the world announcing that compassion is at the heart of every great religion? Don’t they realize they’re taking a machete to that lifeline by hopping up and down and squalling to the newspapers that their rights demand that they be able to pick on minorities?

Labour’s flagship equality legislation, currently in committee stage in the House of Lords, seeks to outlaw any form of discrimination against disadvantaged groups in the office or the market place. However, there are fears that it could undermine the ability of worshippers to express the traditional teachings of their religions, many of which believe that homosexuality is a sin; that only men and women can marry; and that sex outside marriage is wrong.

There’s that agentless ‘there are fears’ again – the same one we saw when ‘there were fears’ that Does God Hate Women? would anger Muslims. Could that be because the content is so nasty? Could the reporter feel more squeamish than the bishops do about linking bishops with dread of people being unable to shout in the office or market place that homosexuality is a sin? But why don’t the bishops feel more squeamish about that? Because they’re all 106 and were brought up to hate poofters and just can’t get over it?

The Bishop of Chichester, the Rt Rev John Hind, warned that the Government was wrong to make people separate their personal religious beliefs from their behaviour in the workplace. He said: “The attempt to privatise belief, whether philosophical or religious, is a profoundly dangerous tendency and one that we need to address as we consider not only this but later amendments.”

That depends, bub. It depends on what the belief is. If the belief is, for instance, that children can be possessed by devils or turned into witches, then that belief really does need to be kept out of the workplace.

On page 39 of The Dawkins Delusion Alister McGrath quotes Peter Medawar as saying, in The Limits of Science:

That there is indeed a limit upon science is made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer…I have in mind such questions as:

How did everything begin?
What are we all here for?
What is the point of living?

Doctrinaire positivism – now something of a period piece – dismissed all such questions as nonquestions or pseudo-questions…

So far so familiar. But what I really want to know is – who or what can answer the last two questions? (The first seems in principle a scientific question, even if science can’t in fact answer it.)

Who can answer those questions? What discipline can answer those questions? Plenty of people and some disciplines can offer answers, of course, but who can really answer them, in the sense of offering an answer that really is an answer?

As far as I know the answer is no person and no discipline. Does that make me a boringly out of date positivist? Or were the positivists maybe not quite so boring and out of date as people like to paint them? I don’t know, so I won’t belabor that. But I will belabor the first part. Those two questions are obviously subjective questions and as such not answerable in the normal way. It’s like asking ‘Does caviar taste good?’ There is no one answer to that, and there’s no one answer to Medawar’s questions, either.

Maybe what he meant was not so much ‘answer’ as ‘explore’ – but if so, then science can’t really be excluded after all. Science could perfectly well contribute to an exploration of those questions, as could many other disciplines. That’s especially true since for a lot of people the point of living is to find things out and what we are all here for is to increase human understanding.

I’m sure you already know that. I just felt like saying it.