Author: Ophelia Benson

The Church of England is gearing up to give the BBC a damn good scolding for being so mean to Christianity and so nice to Islam.

Concerns over the appointment of Aaqil Ahmed, who was poached by the corporation from Channel 4 last month, will be raised in a Church document to be published tomorrow…Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, met with Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director-general, in March to challenge him about the issue. Now a motion prepared for the Synod calls on the corporation to explain the decline in its coverage of religion and its failure to provide enough programming during key Christian festivals.

Sorry to be clueless, but what’s the deal here? Is the archbishop of Canterbury the boss of the BBC? Is the BBC a branch of the church of England? Is the church of England the boss of everything that happens in England? What is all this? Why does the archbish get to challenge the BBC’s director-general about the BBC’s appointments? Why does the Synod get to call on the corporation to explain things? How does all this work? What kind of power, exactly, do they have? Apart from all those bishops in the House of Lords, of course. What kind of temporal political power do they have? What entitles them to be so bossy and so explain-yourselfy?

“BBC 3 tackles religion rarely but does so from the angle of the freak show, and many of the Channel 4 programmes concerned with Christianity, in contrast to those featuring other faiths, seem to be of a sensationalist or unduly critical nature.”…The main Christian documentary broadcast for Easter [last] year, called The Secrets of the 12 Disciples, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Pope’s leadership of the Roman Catholic Church.

Yes…But you guys are Protestants, remember? You’re supposed to have some doubts about the legitimacy of the Pope’s leadership of the Roman Catholic Church yourselves! Have you forgotten all this? Have you forgotten your own history? Bloody Mary? Foxe’s Book of Martyrs? Latimer and Ridley? We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out? Ring a bell, any of that? It had quite a lot to do with the pope. Surely you remember.

Ah yes but that was then; now the pope is a bulwark against secularism, and the enemy is everyone who doesn’t want to grovel to religion, like that god damn atheist BBC.

Nigel Holmes, a General Synod member and former BBC producer, who has tabled the motion and who wrote the paper, said that the Church needed to tackle the issue at a time when the future of religious broadcasting was under threat…”Religion is higher on the political agenda than ever before and we are crying out for programmes that give a moral view.”

And religion alone can do that of course because religion alone is moral while everything else is inherently and adamantly anti-moral. This is common knowledge.

A spokesman for the BBC said…”The BBC’s commitment to religion and ethics broadcasting is unequivocal. As the majority faith of the UK, Christians are and will remain a central audience for the BBC’s religious and ethics television and other output.”

See? Religion and ethics are the same subject, they go together like waffles and syrup or god and bothering. Got that? So no worries: the church of England will harmoniously combine with the Roman Catholic Church and Islam to impose religion and theocracy on everyone else. Can’t say fairer than that can you.

Jerry Coyne quoted Tom Clark the other day; I want to quote another passage from the same article, ‘Reality and Its Rivals: Putting Epistemology First’.

Of course, many non-empirically based convictions are relatively harmless as guides to behavior so long as they’re confined to our private lives. Beliefs in god, astrology, psychic powers, cosmic consciousness and so forth can be the epistemic equivalent of victimless crimes. But the presumption of such beliefs – that there are reliable alternatives to empiricism – isn’t so benign when carried into the public arena…To imagine that one’s worldview, whether religious or secular, is beyond disconfirmation helps to license an absolutism which brooks no dissent and countenances the demonization of those with different ideas…A little epistemic humility would go a long way toward reducing the ideological tribalism underlying the culture wars. (What’s ironic is that populist suspicion of bi-coastal know-it-alls gets it precisely backwards: empiricists are just those who realize they don’t know it all.

The whole article is an excellent antidote to all the muddle about naturalism and supernaturalism and methdological versus philosophical naturalism that’s been splashing around lately, ever since Chris Mooney got the urge to lecture Jerry Coyne on civility to theists. Enjoy.

Meanwhile, there is this book we wrote. Bunting purports to be criticizing it, but in fact what she is doing is yanking out particular sentences that caught her attention and flailing at them in isolation, as opposed to understanding them in context. This is stupid, and uninformative, and misleading. That’s why I call her reckless. It’s so easy to point out how thoroughly she misrepresents the book. (How does she square that with her Catholic conscience, one wonders?)

But the kind of strident atheism which Benson epitomises intrigues me. It’s driven by a curious intensity which is really peculiar. How about this from the conclusion to her book: “religion is like the total body irradiation that destroys an immune system and lets an underlying infection take over. It’s like a pesticide…” ?

The page in question is 177, the penultimate page of the book; it’s the peroration. The final chapter is intense, but it is intense in a context. It starts, as mentioned, with the public murder of a raped child by people who said ‘We will do what Allah has instructed us’. It goes on to point out that that is a kind of God that all too many people believe in, and that that’s a terrible thing. It then says

Religion doesn’t necessarily originate ideas about female subordination and male authority, but it does justify them, it does lend them a penumbra of righteousness, and it does make them ‘sacred’ and thus a matter for outrage if anyone disputes them. It does enable and assist and flatter moods of intolerance for all those who seek to challenge cultural and religious values and religious abuse of power. It does turn reformers and challengers into enemies of God.

Used in this way religion is like a matrix, a nutrient, a super-vitamin. It doesn’t necessarily invent, but it amplifies, and nourishes, and protects. Religion is like the total body irradiation that destroys an immune system and lets an underlying infection take over. It’s like a pesticide that destroys some insect species only to let others, freed from predators and competition, explode. It’s like an antibiotic that kills some strains of bacteria only to help resistant strains thrive and flourish.

You see? Bunting ignored the first paragraph and thus distorted what was being said.

Or from the same page, “Religion is the whited sepulchre, the warthog in a party dress, the dictator in a pink uniform plastered with medals.”

Again (and on the same page, too) she has left out the paragraph that precedes the line she doesn’t like. The preceding paragraph leads into the whited sepulchre bit.

It’s also a kind of protective colouring. There is no very compelling reason left to treat particular groups of people as inferior. It used to be possible (just barely) to think that human groups were literally and essentially different in some way profound enough to justify inequality, but it isn’t possible any longer. All that’s left is a literalist idea of God’s will along with a conviction that God’s will must not be disputed or disobeyed. Without that, a defence of unequal rights just looks like what it is – a frank defence of injustice. This puts religion in the uncomfortable position of being that which puts lipstick on a pig.

That is uncomfortable but it is exactly the position religion is in. Religion, in the hands of the literalist defenders of God’s putative will, is in the business of dressing up what would otherwise obviously be tired old prejudices and hatreds and plain exploitation, and making them seem vaguely respectable. Religion is the whited sepulchre, the warthog in a party dress, the dictator in a pink uniform plastered with medals, the executioner in white tie and tails.

One could still think and say that that’s too strong or harsh or intense, but with the context at least it’s clear what is being claimed. Bunting’s quote-mining just makes it look like vulgar abuse, which of course was the idea.

It’s not that Benson doesn’t have a point, it’s that she overstates it with such crudeness and lack of insight that I’m staggered anyone wants to publish it. Except that I know publishers with a keen eye on the bottom line will publish anything and atheism sells – it feeds a public appetite for outrage. I just think it’s profoundly intellectually dishonest to feed that kind of outrage – there is no attempt here to open people’s minds, only fuel their indignation.

Publishers will publish anything, and so will newspapers, apparently. Be that as it may – the significant point here is that we did indeed want to arouse, if not feed, public outrage. You bet we did. That was the goal. That goal is not at odds with opening people’s minds – we wanted to open people’s minds to some neglected facts and to some connections among things. Bunting perhaps means by ‘open people’s minds’ something more along the lines of ‘persuade people that all religions are kind and compassionate really and all the cruelty and injustice is just a superficial dusting on top that can easily be swept away’ – but we don’t see it that way, so we didn’t want to open people’s minds in that particular way. But then Bunting doesn’t seem to want to open people’s minds in the sense we mean it, either. We did and do want to arouse outrage, and we do not think there is anything remotely intellectually dishonest about that, and I at least would love to know why Bunting thinks there is.

I think, rather, that she is the intellectually dishonest one. I think she is intellectually dishonest for instance when she says of course religions can change, the Anglican church has begun ordinating women – when she herself is a Catholic and the Catholic church not only does not ordinate women, it treats the ordination of women as a crime deserving excommunication. That’s intellectual dishonesty if you like.

I just wanted to set the record straight. Of course Bunting distorted the record on a large forum and I’m setting it straight on a small one – but we do what we can do.

Well, the discussion was winding down (or I thought it was), and I was going to leave Bunting in peace…but then she finally posted a comment (and the discussion didn’t wind down after all), so the peace idea was premature. What did she say? Did she admit that she had quote-mined? Did she explain why she is so furious at my (our) putative stridency instead of being furious at the men who murdered a raped teenager while saying ”We will do what Allah has instructed us’? Did she explain what has happened to her since she was so shocked by the Ryan report? Did she apologize for calling me strident, preposterous, crude, lacking in insight, profoundly intellectually dishonest, hysterical, and bizarre?

No. She didn’t do any of that. On the contrary – far from apologizing for calling me a long list of bad things, she complained of ‘personal abuse’ herself. It seems it’s all right for her to call me rude names but not okay for other people to call her rude names. Why would that be, exactly?

For those who loathe my writing I suggest you don’t read it. That’s the point about a newspaper/website. You get to choose what you read… so I don’t understand the personal abuse. Of course there are plenty of people who think I write rubbish – I got that message off CiF long ago. So what.

So what…Well, so they’re right, that’s so what. ‘Plenty of people’ aren’t always right, of course, but they are about this. Bunting does write rubbish, and not only that; she writes personally vituperative, inaccurate, sloppy, careless, reckless rubbish. Bunting writes badly and behaves badly and my opinion of her sinks lower all the time. There is no floor under this opinion, it turns out; it can just keep on sinking forever.

I think outrage about injustice is entirely appropriate, and Benson and I would be completely on the same side about the despicable way patriarchal societies have treated women the world over. But I strongly argue that in a small world where we are jostling up against all kinds of different belief systems, we need to understand something of why religion is still such a powerful impulse in human nature, why it is such a major influence in many parts of the world – as John Mickelthwait’s new book, ‘God is Back’ argues. Does Benson bring insight into that urgent task? I fear not.

That’s interesting, but as I said in reply, she didn’t argue that on Night Waves or in her article, so it’s a bit late to bring it up in a comment two days later.

So that’s that. As I’ve said – I knew she was as woolly as any flock of sheep you might want to meet, but I didn’t know she was so malicious or so reckless. Now I do.