Author: Ophelia Benson

Blair doing God.

Issues of faith have clearly been consuming Mr Blair. Since leaving office, he has converted to Roman Catholicism. This requires much thought and reflection. After confessing serious sins, a convert must make the “Rite of Reception”, including saying that: “I believe and profess all that the Holy Catholic Church believes, teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God.”

And saying that requires thought and reflection? Wouldn’t you think it requires something more like the avoidance of thought, the abdication of thought? To say you believe all that the ‘Holy’ Catholic Church proclaims to be revealed by God is to say you believe something very all-encompassing, very broad, very dogmatic, and very evidence-free. What does that have to do with thought? Dogmatic belief is not the same thing as thought, and in many ways it’s the negation of it.

While Mr Blair may have changed the subject to talk about religion, he remains to his fingertips a politician. He knows that, while the fact of his religious faith is essential to making his initiative work, the content of it might get in the way.

Ah – well that would explain it. The fact of his ‘faith’ is essential while the content is a nuisance. That so often is the case, isn’t it – the word ‘faith’ is used as a self-congratulatory lapel-pin, while the actual literal things people are supposed (by clerics if no one else) to believe are tactfully not discussed. Blair’s ‘faith’ is all label and no content, at least for purposes of public discussion.

But if that’s the case – why call it faith at all? Why attempt to eat your cake and have it? What’s it all about – just having a place to go with the spouse and kids on a Sunday? If the actual content is too awkward to talk about…why hang on to the exoskeleton like grim death?

Who knows. The ways of the faithful are mysterious.

The BBC reports that what it calls the ‘next UN investigator into Israeli conduct in the occupied territories’ has defended his comparison of Israeli actions in Gaza to those of the Nazis. But a couple of paragraphs down it adds something that should be (but isn’t) decorated with little red warning flags.

Professor Falk is scheduled to take up his post for the UN Human Rights Council later in the year.

Ah – the UN Human Rights Council. How depressing it is that that sounds like a good thing and is in fact a very bad thing. The IHEU explains why.

By 2005, the Commission for Human Rights had become widely discredited…The Commission was abolished by vote of the UN General Assembly in 2006 and replaced by a shiny new Human Rights Council…Of the first four resolutions passed by the Council, three were resolutions condemning Israel. Whatever breaches of human rights law Israel may have committed, it beggars belief that these were the only violations of human rights on the planet worthy of condemnation by the Council. By way of contrast, the Council adopted a resolution which inter-alia congratulated the Sudan for its efforts to bring peace to Darfur.

The Human Rights Council is a terribly compromised body which doesn’t actually support universal human rights at all.

Professor Richard Falk said he believed that up to now Israel had been successful in avoiding the criticism that it was due.

Yet the Human Rights Council singles Israel out for censure while remaining silent on gross human rights violations in many other places, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe to name two. So has Israel really been successful in avoiding the criticism that it is due? It may have avoided it in the US; I think that’s a fair claim; but in the world at large, and at the UN? Not so much.

A spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry said that Israel wanted the UN investigator’s mandate changed, so that he could look into human rights violations by the Palestinians as well as Israel.

As well as, not instead of. The Human Rights Council, appallingly, seems to be all about instead of.

From David Littman’s article.

In an 18 February 1994 letter addressed to all delegates at the Commission on Human Rights, the Sudanese ambassador requested an immediate withdrawal of any reference – from the report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Sudan – in which certain inconsistences were indicated between the international human rights conventions and the provisions of Sudan’s Criminal Act of 1991. The ambassador alleged that the report “contained abusive, inconsiderate, blasphemous and offensive remarks about the Islamic faith.” A further Sudanese circular, entitled, “Attack on Islam,” claimed that portions of the report “represent a vicious attack on the religion of Islam and contain a call for the abolition of its Islamic Penal Legislation.”

The Rapporteur’s report indicated tensions between human rights and the UDHR, and some provisions of Sudanese law. The Sudanese ambassador to the UN demanded that this be withdrawn on the grounds that it was blasphemous. So the idea here is that it is blasphemous to say there are tensions between particular laws (if they are Islamic laws) and universal human rights – despite the fact that the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam itself says what the differences are. So the idea here is that the Cairo Declaration is allowed to announce a separate and different set of ‘rights’ or rather pseudo-rights or non-rights that are entirely subject to Shari’ah (Article 24: ‘All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’ah.’) but it is blasphemy for outsiders to point out the difference. The Cairo Declaration is allowed to declare, but the Rapporteur is not allowed to report. That’s asymmetrical. It’s bad. It’s wrong.

On that occasion the attempt failed.

In spite of death threats published in the government’s newspaper Horizon (16), Dr. Gaspar Biro continued investigations into the many human rights violations in Sudan, fully described in his later reports submitted to the UN General Assembly and to the UN Human Rights Commission. (17) He was supported by resolutions condemning the Government of Sudan.

But the next attempt didn’t.

On 18 April 1997, another “blasphemy” charge was levelled. This time the alleged offending words were from a quoted passage, contained in the report of Special Rapporteur on Racism, Mr. Maurice Glélé-Ahanhanzo from Benin (under “Islamist and Arab Anti-Semitism”). This new “blasphemy” charge succeeded after the representative of Indonesia intervened on the last day of the Commission – in the name of the OIC’s 56 Islamic States, on the initiative of Iran – claiming that Islam had been defamed and “blasphemy” committed against the holy Qur’an. This led to the 53-member-state Commission’s consensus decision 1997/125, obliging the Special Rapporteur to take a “corrective action.” Hence a very dangerous precedent: the censorship of a UN Special Rapporteur, in his capacity as an independent expert; and of his UN report on grounds of “blasphemy” – although the facts he quoted are exact.

So Islamist and Arab anti-Semitism gets a free pass because someone said it was blasphemous to mention it, even though the facts cited are correct. Terrific.

I mentioned that believers can resort to a quick and easy way with difficult questions that secular thinkers and atheists can’t, and that this lack is perhaps one reason students are always moral relativists. We can offer reasons for thinking X is better than Y, or for thinking Z is entirely unacceptable in any moral universe we can think of (executing gays for being gay, genocide, murdering women for talking to an unrelated man), but we can’t hand out anything as brisk and simple and conversation-stopping as ‘God said so.’ Believers* have a short cut which unbelievers don’t have. Believers have an answer that is both quick and easy, while unbelievers have to spend time and effort if they want to explain to skeptics why executing gays for being gay is unacceptable.

Believers have an answer that is both quick and easy, and that’s why it’s such a crap answer. Quick and easy answers are worthless for such disagreements. They’re worthless because they have no content. They’re empty. Saying ‘God said so’ is exactly the same thing as saying nothing. It’s like holding up a street sign rather than saying anything. Why shouldn’t we execute gays for being gays? Why shouldn’t we kill women for talking to an unrelated man? Because Galer Street. That tells you just as much as ‘God said so.’ Just saying a name doesn’t tell us anything. All ‘God said so’ really means is ‘it’s what I think and “God” is like an official stamp on what I think’ – which leaves us exactly where we started. ‘God’ is just the label people put on what they already think is good. They don’t put that label on what they already think is bad. They don’t punch ‘God’ into a good-bad computer they have so that they know which goes with what. They just take God to endorse what they think is right, and that absolves them from the work of testing what they think is right.

This is one of the great appeals of theism, of course, but it’s a snare and a delusion. The shortcut is a shortcut because it leaves out so much, and that’s not a good thing. It may be needed in an emergency, as ‘because I said so’ is sometimes with children, but for the long haul, it’s necessary to do better than that. The answer from authority is impoverished, and morality is not a subject that thrives on impoverished answers.

*Believers here means dogmatic believers. Not all believers are dogmatic – though even many liberal believers betray an odd certainty about certain attributes and views of God. They’re very sure God is good and benevolent and compassionate, for one thing. But they don’t use the ‘God said’ shortcut. Mostly.