Author: Ophelia Benson

The Andrew Brown discussion, or wrangle, raises an interesting issue – interesting and pervasive yet obscure. Much of the wrangle has been about whether Dawkins actually said or meant or both that parents who impose harmful beliefs on their children (what is meant by ‘harmful’ is of course part of the wrangle, I’ll get to that, be patient) should be forcibly removed by the state. Brown didn’t even bother to wrangle, he simply said that Dawkins had simply said that, which was and is not the case. Commenters have been wrangling about whether he meant it and if so how strongly (and about what beliefs are ‘harmful’). A strong claim that several people have made is that it’s mere evasion to claim that Dawkins did not say that and did not necessarily mean it either; that he presented a problem but did not say what the solution is. The strong claim is that to state the problem is to say what the solution is – that if the problem is as bad as Dawkins says it is then active intervention is required.

My claim is that that’s wrong. I think what’s going on here is that Dawkins is pointing out a very serious, even terrible, problem, but one that of its nature is very difficult if not impossible to solve without an unacceptable amount and kind of intrusion on people’s lives.

I put it this way in a comment over there: I think it’s fair to say that the really bad stuff is not universal and that it may well not be very common. But I think what Dawkins is saying in that chapter is that the really bad stuff is indeed that bad – and I think he’s right. One child (or adult) in agony because she believes a loved friend is in hell is very bad. It does not follow that the police should be called to arrest the child’s parents, nor does it follow that I’m claiming that. But that kind of agony is very bad – and I think Dawkins is absolutely right that people should worry about it as opposed to ignoring it or brushing it off as unimportant.

Since saying that I’ve looked for some stats, and I’m not so sure it is fair to say that belief in hell (which I consider the really bad stuff) may well not be very common. Unfortunately it is very common. This survey reports that 74.6% in the US believe in hell, and 58.3% in the UK. Maybe they all think that only other people go to hell, and maybe they’re cheerful or indifferent to that thought – but that is no help, is it, because that is still very bad stuff.

And that’s before we even get to other religious indoctrination, such as telling girls that they’re inferior, telling boys that girls are inferior, telling children that homosexuality is a ‘sin,’ telling children that they are ‘sinners,’ telling children that ‘sinners’ go to hell, and the like. That’s what I mean by ‘harmful’ – beliefs that poison children’s minds and make them afraid or cruel or both.

And, obviously enough, there is no quick and easy solution to this, because pretty much no one wants to run around listening in on what all parents tell their children, and no one would be able to even if lots of people did want to. It’s not the case that we think belief in hell is harmful and therefore the police should be called. I for one, and I imagine lots of other people too, think that belief in hell is harmful and there is very little that can be done about that.

The one thing that can be done is education – and that’s what Dawkins was doing on page 326. ‘Consciousness raising,’ he called it; same thing. That can be done without violating anyone’s rights, without installing bugs in every living room, without filling the prisons with naughty parents. It can’t always be done without a lot of argument and brawling, as in the Kitzmiller case, but it can be done without sending out the Gestapo.

If Wikipedia has it right there are currently around forty thousand madrassas in Pakistan. If they’re all full-time pseudo-schools as opposed to an hour or two in the afternoon, that’s an appalling figure, because they don’t teach anything, they just inject the Koran in Arabic, which is useless for anything except doing the same thing to the next generation of doomed children. And that’s before we even get to the political and, shall we say, combustion-related aspect.

A 14-year-old who was trained to kill by radicals in the tribal regions of Pakistan now sits in a crowded classroom at a detention facility in Kabul. His only wish is to see his parents again…”I didn’t want to do it but he forced me to go,” he says of his recruiter. Rubbing his face with his hand, he says he now spends his time dreaming of his life back home in rural Pakistan. His eyes begin to water and his voice becomes softer when he talks about missing his mother. Asked what he misses most about her, he says simply, “A mother is a mother.” His was a life of farming and tranquility in Pakistan, he says. It was also a life that took a drastic turn when his father decided to send Shakirullah for studies at a madrassa. He says his [father] wanted him to learn more about Islam and the Quran, something he could not do himself. He says his father didn’t know radicals ran the school. In the madrassa, Shakirullah learned to recite the Quran in Arabic, not his native language. He relied solely on the fanatical interpretations the mullahs were giving him. “When I finished reciting the Quran, a mullah then came to me and told me, ‘Now that you have finished the Quran, you need to go and commit a suicide attack.’ That I should go to Afghanistan to commit a suicide attack,” he says.

So – lucky parents of rural Pakistan – they send a child to what they think is a place where he’ll learn more about Islam and the Quran but is in fact a place where adult men send children out to kill themselves and others. How nice.

Andrew Brown is still at it – still being shameless. It’s been pretty thoroughly shown by now that he misrepresented what Dawkins said on the infamous page 326. So what is his response? A frank apology at last? No.

Richard Dawkins himself has been in this thread a few times. If he had wanted to, he could have stated quite clearly that he does not believe the state should have the right to intervene to remove children from their parents simply because of their theological beliefs.

Interesting. Brown misrepresents what Dawkins wrote. Several commenters point that out, and at least one pastes in the whole passage by way of evidence. Brown simply reiterates his misrepresentation. Commenters go on pointing out that the misrepresentation is a misrepresentation. Brown says it’s up to Dawkins to set the record straight.

The guy is a journalist. Journalists are expected to get their facts right in the first place, and to correct them if they make a mistake. The guy is also a member of society and an adult. Adult members of society are expected not to misrepresent people and to apologize and clear things up if they make a mistake. Brown is making a complete horse’s ass of himself on both counts.

And for another clever-stupid ‘joke’ there is Dieudonné cutting up again. He’s such a card.

Dieudonné, who is known for making anti-Semitic remarks in his shows, handed the spoof award for “social unacceptability and insolence” to Robert Faurisson, an academic with a string of convictions for denying the existence of Nazi death camps in the Second World War. Among the audience of 5,000 at Le Zénith theatre in Paris were the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, several figures of the far left…A stagehand dressed as a Jewish deportee with a yellow star on his chest gave M. Faurisson the award.

Wow, that does sound like a real thigh-slapper, doesn’t it.

[I]n the past five years, his shows have come to symbolise – some say foment – a new strain of anti-Semitism in France among Arab and black youths and on the “white” far left. Dieudonné said: “I don’t agree with all [M. Faurisson’s] ideas. But for me, what counts most of all is freedom of expression.”

Bullshit. Would he make a joke of that kind about an apartheid-denier? Does he make jokes of that kind about apartheid-deniers? Is it really freedom of expression that counts most of all for him? I don’t believe it, and I don’t suppose anyone does.

Imagine someone commenting on a philosophy blog, ‘Black people understand a good story and only get confused by the minutiae of history.’ Or for ‘black people’ substitute ‘Jews’ or ‘women’ or ‘foreigners.’ You’d blink, right? You’d be a little surprised, and a little repelled. But substitute ‘Americans’ – and apparently that’s no longer a gratuitous insult, it’s some kind of sophisticated bit of ‘irony.’

There’s this guy called Michael Reidy who comments regularly at Talking Philosophy, a blog run by the editors of The Philosophers’ Magazine; he seems very clever and well-informed, though often snide, but he also likes to amuse himself periodically with a random, magisterial announcement about the stupidity of Americans. That was the latest one – ‘Americans understand a good story and only get confused by the minutiae of history.’ It’s all the odder because it’s the last line of his comment and it has nothing to do with the rest.

What’s that about? Just the usual? I have American friends in the UK who are frequently driven to distraction by the breezy way people who would never disparage other groups will snicker at the stupidity, cluelessness, childishness and general hopelessness of ‘Americans.’ I suppose Michael Reidy is just one of those? It’s odd though – it just seems so…well, clueless and childish.

I re-read the chapter of The God Delusion which contains page 326, this morning, in order to find out (having forgotten since I first read it) what the context is in which Dawkins quotes that passage by Nicholas Humphrey. In reading it I became more angry with Brown than ever, for the simple reason that he completely leaves out the context which is one of angry compassion for the mental suffering religion can cause to children and their parents. The chapter starts with the 19th century case of a six-year-old Jewish boy in Bologna who was forcibly removed from his weeping parents by officers of the Catholic Inquisition, to be raised by the church. His parents never saw him again except on occasional brief supervised visits. Why was he removed? Because his nursemaid (age 14 at the time) had ‘baptized’ him.

Dawkins then goes on to compare sexual abuse with mental abuse, and to make the interesting and (I think) important point that sexual abuse in some cases is trivial compared to the mental torture of the fear of hell. He quotes a heart-rending letter from a woman who was told at age 7 that her Protestant friend who had died was in hell – this thought was agony for the child.

That is what leads up to Humphrey’s lecture. It’s impossible (in my view) to read it unmoved – yet Brown presents the basic idea as if it were nothing but the fantasy of a sadistic atheist meddler. It’s an utter distortion and grossly unfair – to Dawkins but even more to children who are tortured with fears of hell and eternal punishment.

This is all the more deranged because it’s not as if there are no reasonable criticisms that could be made. One could for instance argue that Dawkins fails to balance this worry with the ways religion can console children and parents; one could claim that the problem is not religion as such but religion that threatens and punishes instead of promising and consoling (or religion that threatens and punishes as a condition of promising and consoling). One could object to many specifics of tone, choice of examples, and so on – yet Brown didn’t do any of that; instead he chose to flail away at a straw man instead of engaging with the actual book. Whatever for? And why do so many other critics do the same thing? Is it just easier, to invent a bogey-atheist and then keep recycling the same complaints about it? Are they just lazy? Or are they a mix of lazy and malevolent?

I don’t know. I’m just asking.

(I posted a slightly different and shorter version of this on Brown’s piece a couple of hours ago.)