Author: Ophelia Benson

The victims of the Catholic church also see the pope’s eyewash as self-serving and beside the point – and above all as a gross evasion of accountability.

Marie Collins, who was abused in 1960 by a priest when she was a patient at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children…pointed out the statement “doesn’t deal with the past. No one has taken responsibility for what went on in Dublin. There is no accountability.”…Andrew Madden, who was abused by Ivan Payne when he was an altar boy in Dublin’s Cabra parish…[said it was] “self-serving nonsense”…and he for one, as a survivor, hadn’t asked for prayers. “And they say they listen to survivors?” The statement was “an attempt to deflect attention away from accountability”.

That’s certainly how it looks to me. There is something more than a little sickening about the head of an organization responding to a report of that organization’s long-term systematic protection of abusive employees by making a big fuss about his own emotions while completely failing, not to say refusing, to take any real responsibility. It’s as if the pope thinks that all he has to do is make a display of his own appropriate feelings when really his feelings are entirely beside the point; what is wanted is accountability, and the feelings of one guy are no good as a substitute.

Both he and Ms Collins said what was necessary now was for the five sitting bishops named in the Murphy report to resign. “All bishops in place over the period investigated by the commission should step down,” said Ms Collins. “They are collectively responsible for what went on in the diocese. It all happened on their watch. They must take responsibility.”…Andrew Madden dismissed the pope’s intention of writing a pastoral letter to the Irish people with a “big deal!” comment. He too felt the five serving bishops named in the Murphy report must resign. They had been “responsible for covering up for paedophiles,” he said, and should “go, go, go”.

See? Emoting is no good, showy apologizing is no good, talk of prayers and pastoral letters is no good. They have to take responsibility – and, remarkably, they’re not doing it.

One in Four chief executive Maeve Lewis said she was “deeply disappointed” at the pope’s statement. “His reaction is wholly inadequate…We had hoped that the pope might apologise for the culture of secrecy and cover-up by Catholic Church authorities documented by the report and that he might accept responsibility for his role in the creation of that culture,” she said. His response echoed “that of the Irish bishops in attempting to focus blame for the destruction of countless lives on individual sex-offending priests rather than accepting accountability for the role of the Catholic Church authorities in recklessly endangering children,” she said.

It’s not just a few individual bad apples, it’s the institution. It will be a chilly day in hell before the pontiff admits that.

Really. Really. There is a limit.

After meeting Ireland’s most senior Catholic clerics in Rome, Pope Benedict said he shared the outrage, betrayal and shame felt by so many of the faithful in the country.

Don’t insult us. Don’t insult everyone over the age of two. Don’t insult the victims of your horrible tyrannical authoritarian unaccountable church. Don’t talk self-serving self-flattering nonsense. Don’t pretend you’re all shocked and upset and distraught now when this crap has been going on for decades upon decades! Don’t pretend you’ve only just found out about it. Come on, Ben – you know we know that’s ridiculous – so don’t insult us.

The Vatican said ‘the Holy Father was deeply disturbed and distressed.’ Well poor baby, but why was he not deeply disturbed and distressed before? Why did he not give a rat’s ass while the report was in progress and the Vatican ignored all its questions? To say nothing of while the abuse and the cover-up of the abuse and the perpetuation of the abuse via refusal to do anything about it, were going on? Why is his distress so god damn late? Why is he bothering to do a Bernie Madoff, pretending to be all sorry and repentant after it is no longer possible to conceal and deny and hide?

”He wishes once more to express his profound regret at the actions of some members of the clergy who have betrayed their solemn promises to God, as well as the trust placed in them by the victims and their families, and by society at large.” The Vatican said the Holy Father shared the outrage, betrayal and shame felt by so many of the faithful in Ireland, and that he was united with them in prayer at this difficult time in the life of the Church.

No he doesn’t! [jumps up and down in fury until the windows rattle] He doesn’t, he doesn’t, he doesn’t! It’s all soothing oil, it’s all sleazy self-exculpation. He does not share the outrage, betrayal and shame felt by so many of the faithful in Ireland because he and his Vatican are what the outrage, betrayal and shame are all about. He doesn’t get to make himself another subject; he’s the object. He’s not one of the victims, he’s the top perpetrator. He has an unbelievable gall claiming to feel all this sorrowful emotion when he is the head of an institution that did everything it could to protect itself and did nothing to protect children who were assaulted by its priests. He shouldn’t be talking eyewash about his emotions, he should be saying the Vatican behaved like a criminal organization. He should resign. They should all resign. They should fold up their tents and go do something useful.

And knock off the ‘Holy Father’ crap, too. With a father like that, who needs enemies?

Just to be thorough about it, I also disagree with Hemant Mehta. (I’m not crazy about his title, for one thing – it implies that atheists in general are not ‘friendly’ and perhaps that they are hostile and mean and crabby.) He starts out well, pointing out that ‘aggressive’ and ‘friendly’ atheists actually want the same things and aren’t as distinct as Stephen Prothero claims. But then…

The difference is that the “aggressive” types don’t care who they offend. They’ll go after religion in all its forms — it doesn’t matter if they criticize the Vatican or the local church down the street or your sweet neighbor who happens to be religious.

That just isn’t true. It just isn’t true that we ‘go after’ sweet people who happen to be religious. We do go after people who do horrible things for religious reasons – but that can’t be what Mehta meant by people who are sweet and happen to be religious. He has to have meant sweet people who are not made cruel by their religion. Well we don’t ‘go after’ people like that! We don’t refrain from disputing religious truth claims on the grounds that people like that exist – but that is not the same thing as ‘going after’ them. It does get pretty tiresome to have people constantly accusing us of being more sadistic than we in fact are.

The “friendly” types are willing to do some triage here. They’re not going to spend the same amount of energy going after a local pastor or national politician who happens to espouse a personal belief in a god. There are more important battles to fight.

But what has the local pastor done? It depends, doesn’t it. If the local pastor is just the local pastor, most ‘new’ atheists also don’t spend much energy going after her. The national politician is another matter – national politicians in a secular democracy really shouldn’t be ‘espousing’ a personal belief in a god, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of energy to say so. Of course there are more important battles to fight, but so what? We can multi-task.

I would much rather keep as allies those religious people who do things like support sound science, fight for equal rights for the GLBT community, and believe in separation of church and state.

But why is it one or the other? Why would religious people who support sound science, fight for equal rights for the GLBT community, and believe in separation of church and state stop doing those things merely because some atheists (or all atheists for that matter) are explicit about their atheism? I don’t believe for a second that they would. Who is that stupid and petty? People who support sound science, fight for equal rights for the GLBT community, and believe in separation of church and state are probably already not the kind of people to change all their views and actions because they’re in a snit. They might even be so reasonable and fair-minded and sensible that they really think atheists have every right to be public about their atheism. They might even be interested in the arguments!

I know others prefer a no-holds-barred approach, but I think that’s counterproductive when dealing with the people we want to reach out to the most — those who are on the fence.

What fence? Which fence are we talking about? And who’s ‘we’? What is this imaginary ‘we’ that accommodationists always have in mind? The always-right secular but friendly but atheist but civil but liberal but soft-spoken…Everyliberal? Or what? Why is there a ‘we’ who wants to reach out to people on the fence – why aren’t the people on the fence a ‘we’ who want to reach out to us, but find us too boring and anxious and timid to bother with? There’s something weirdly patronizing and de haut en bas about all this grand strategizing and we-invoking, as if all accommodationists were best buddies with David Axelrod or something. Why do the ‘friendly’ atheists think they have some heavy responsibility for what they perhaps think of as ‘the atheist community’ and how it appears to everyone else? I don’t know – but it makes me so huffy that I think I will become a conservative evangelical Republican, just to punish them.

I’m late in doing a meany-atheist dance on Stephen Prothero’s sweet little valentine to the laydeez but here it is anyway.

Today, most Americans associate unbelief with the old-boys network of New Atheists, but there is a new generation of unbelievers emerging, some of them women and most of them far friendlier than Hitchens and his ilk. Although the arguments of angry men gave this movement birth, it could be the stories of women that allow it to grow up.

So men are angry and women are friendly. So angry is the opposite of friendly and vice versa. Well that’s wrong for a start – it’s perfectly possible for people to be both. Being angry about particular things does not rule out being friendly; it especially doesn’t rule out being friendly some of the time. Granted some people are friendly all of the time, but they tend to be bores or intrusive or both. Who doesn’t know this? People who are never angry about anything aren’t paying attention! You can’t have real compassion without anger. If you see the world as it is, you’re going to be angry some of the time.

That fact by itself makes Prothero’s ludicrously sexist opposition incredibly insulting. Men have the energy and passion and commitment to get angry, and women are lukewarm and permanently unthinkingly friendly. Well the hell with that – and fortunately it isn’t true.

I heard two very different arguments at this event. The first was the old line of the New Atheists: Religious people are stupid and religion is poison, so the only way forward is to educate the idiots and flush away the poison. The second was less controversial and less utopian: From this perspective, atheism is just another point of view, deserving of constitutional protection and a fair hearing. Its goal is not a world without religion but a world in which believers and nonbelievers coexist peaceably, and atheists are respected, or at least tolerated.

That’s a lot of bad stupidness in one paragraph. One, that is not ‘the old line of the New Atheists.’ Very few ‘new’ atheists say simply ‘Religious people are stupid’ – that’s a typical anti-atheist canard, meant to inflame hatred against any atheists who actually argue the case for atheism. Two – that second thing is crap. If atheism is ‘just another point of view,’ then it really is on all fours with religion (and other ‘perspectives’), where we just choose whatever we want to believe and there is no need for a reality check or an argument or evidence. But atheism of the kind that goes to meetings, as opposed to just non-theism, is based on reasons. People are active or argumentative or meeting-attending atheists for reasons, real reasons, and we don’t agree that atheism is ‘just another point of view,’ because we think it gets things right. We think theism gets things wrong, and atheism gets things (the relevant things) right. We don’t think all points of view are pretty much the same kind of thing, all mixing it up together in the great salad bowl of life.

These competing approaches could not be further apart. One is an invitation to a duel. The other is a fair-minded appeal for recognition and respect. Or, to put it in terms of the gay rights movement, one is like trying to turn everyone gay and the other is like trying to secure equal rights for gay men and lesbians.

No. Dead wrong. Wrong all the way down. Wanting to confront religion and dispute its truth claims frankly (which does not equate to having the goal of ‘a world without religion,’ which I think most of us know is a highly unrealistic goal and potentially coercive) is not an invitation to a duel, it is simply an expectation of an equal right to talk freely. It is also not the case that the ‘fair’ alternative is simply ‘a fair-minded appeal for recognition and respect,’ because that’s not the real or the only issue. We don’t want to beg for recognition and respect just because we exist, because we are another point of view; we want to be able to say why religious truth claims are mistaken. That’s part of what ‘new’ atheism is about. We are of course legally able to do that, but we’re not always socially or institutionally able to, and that’s why there is a need for campaigning and agitation and, yes, anger.

There was one female speaker, however, and she spoke in a different voice. Amanda Gulledge is a self-described “Alabama mom” who got on her first plane and took her first subway ride in order to attend this event. Although Gulledge stood up on behalf of logic and reason, she spoke from the heart. Instead of arguing, she told stories of the “natural goodness” of her two sons…

Got that? Is it clear enough? She’s ‘a mom,’ so she’s acceptable – she’s not one of those angry loudmouth aggressive women who would dream of self-describing as say a lawyer or a geneticist or an engineer – no, she’s a ‘mom,’ and bless her heart, she speaks from that cuddly organ instead of from her pesky and doubtless feeble little head, and she talks about her children. Isn’t that sweet? Don’t you feel less threatened already? Now she’s the kind of woman we can approve of, we professors in religion departments.