Author: Ophelia Benson

This is the stupidest thing I’ve read since…well since the last eruption from the twins. There’s so much stupid in it that it’s hard to single it all out.

Saying that science has made religion redundant is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov, says Terry Eagleton in this gloriously rumbustious counter-blast to Dawkinsite atheism…paradoxes sparkle throughout this coruscatingly brilliant polemic…

Brilliant my ass. It’s tricksy, it’s decorated, but it’s not brilliant.

Eagleton is not anti-science or reason. He merely points out that science has produced Hiroshima as well as penicillin.

Because nobody would know that if he hadn’t merely pointed it out, and besides it’s stupid to say that ‘science’ produced Hiroshima.

Eagleton is stronger on reason than Ditchkins, for he thinks carefully about what his opponents say whereas Dawkins & Co prefer knockabout rhetoric to serious engagement with mainstream religious thought.

How would somebody who mindlessly follows Eagleton’s mindless lead in using ‘Ditchkins’ know what being strong on reason even looks like? And how can he claim without irony that Eagleton ‘thinks carefully about what his opponents say’ two words after he’s echoed that very Eagleton in calling two of those very opponents by a stupid schoolyardy nonce-name? Don’t ask me; I can’t begin to figure it out.

This is, then, a demolition job which is both logically devastating and a magnificently whirling philippic. Ditchkins, he says, makes the error of conflating reason and rationality. Yet much of what seems reasonable in real life turns out not to be true. And much that is true, like quantum physics, seems rationally impossible.

My foot my tutor, as Prospero said. Contrary to what Paul Vallely clearly thinks, neither Dawkins nor Hitchens is actually stupider than Terry Eagleton. Neither of them needs Eagleton to explain quantum physics. Neither of them needs him to explain that much of what seems reasonable in real life turns out not to be true. Eagleton is a conceited teacher of English who got way too much undergraduate adulation early in life and let it go to his head. He is not a polymath or a universal genius or a towering intellect. Dawkins and Hitchens aren’t necessarily right about everything (I hope it’s needless to say) but that doesn’t mean Eagleton is the guy to set them straight. Paul Vallely isn’t even the guy to comment on anybody setting them straight.

There’s more, but it’s too sick-making. I’m outta here.

Daniel Dennett gives the believers just the tiniest of prods.

Today one of the most insistent forces arrayed in opposition to us vocal atheists is the “I’m an atheist but” crowd, who publicly deplore our “hostility”, our “rudeness” (which is actually just candour), while privately admitting that we’re right. They don’t themselves believe in God, but they certainly do believe in belief in God.

Yes, but that is because belief in God is a very peculiar and special kind of belief that goes all spiky and painful if outsiders explain why they don’t share it. It doesn’t work the other way, of course – non-believers don’t double up in pain if believers explain why they don’t share the non-belief. They get bored, they roll their eyes, they wish they were somewhere else with a bowl of ice cream, but they don’t break or fall apart or need hospitalization. That’s why vocal atheists are called hard names even by other atheists, while believers are wrapped in three layers of cotton wool and kept at an even temperature.

Last week a journalist had a very disgusting encounter with a group of Haredi men in Jerusalem. They were protesting the local council’s decision to open a municipal carpark on Saturdays, and she was there to report on their protest. She dressed conservatively, but then she accidentally walked up the wrong street.

I suddenly found myself in the thick of the protest – in the midst of hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews in their long coats and sable-fur hats. They might be supremely religious, but their behaviour – to me – was far from charitable or benevolent. As the protest became noisier and the crowd began yelling, I took my recorder and microphone out of my bag to record the sound. Suddenly the crowd turned on me, screaming in my face. Dozens of angry men began spitting on me. I found myself herded against a brick wall as they kept on spitting – on my face, my hair, my clothes, my arms. It was like rain, coming at me from all directions – hitting my recorder, my bag, my shoes, even my glasses. Big gobs of spit landed on me like heavy raindrops. I could even smell it as it fell on my face. Somewhere behind me – I didn’t see him – a man on a stairway either kicked me in the head or knocked something heavy against me.

Why? Because ‘using a tape-recorder is itself a desecration of the Shabbat even though I’m not Jewish and don’t observe the Sabbath.’ That’s why.

In other words, a minor, formal, mechanical, petty rule is so important that it justifies dozens of men spitting all over a woman because she breaks it. In other words, something of no inherent importance whatsoever justifies revolting intimidation and bullying and humiliation of a human being.

Right. Just so, the action of a Florida college student in removing a cracker from a church justified death threats and a campaign to get him expelled from his university.

But the Toothpaste Twins don’t see it that way. They see it the other way. They think it’s the trivial infraction that is enormously important while the intimidation and attempted life-spoiling is trivial. They must, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t keep publicly raving about PZ Myers and his destruction of a cracker without mentioning the bullying and death threats directed at the student.

[W]e will end by elaborating upon why, in the wake of the communion wafer desecration, we decided we had to speak out about Myers in a way that would really be heard…[W]e were appalled. We could not see what this act could possibly have to do with promoting science and reason. It contributed nothing to the public understanding or appreciation of science, and everything to a nasty, ugly culture war that hurts and divides us all.

There’s a lot more in that vein, and very emetic it is. It’s also very misleading, because it never mentions the college student, just as the Newsweek article doesn’t.

I tell you what. I would dearly love to see a crowd of some five hundred women or so – a crowd big enough to win – surround that mob of Haredi men and turn on a whole truckload of recording equipment. You bet I would. No violence, no spitting, no pushing up against a wall, no kicking – just a spot of payback combined with demonstration. Demonstration of what? The unimportance of rules of this kind, that’s what. If people want to make them important to themselves, fine, but when it comes to punishing other people for failing to observe them – that’s bad and wrong and intolerable.

Would the Toothpaste Twins be appalled if a bunch of women did that? Apparently, they would. Their thinking is fucked badly up.