Author: Ophelia Benson

Tina Beattie in Open Democracy.

If we are to understand [the upsurge in various forms of religious extremism] and its social and political implications, then we must go beyond the headline-grabbing confrontations between religious and atheist extremists.

She says, contributing her own mite to the headline-grabbing confrontations between religious and atheist ‘extremists,’ in particular by using the phrase ‘atheist extremists’ at all. What are atheist extremists? And in what sense of the word are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens – Beattie’s chosen examples – extremists? Do they advocate violence against believers? Suppression of believers? Forcible silencing of believers? No. They disagree with them, that’s all; they think believers are wrong, and they say so. In what sense is that extreme?

The attempt to stage a war between religion and science – whether fuelled by religious or scientific fundamentalists – is part of the problem and not part of the solution with regard to the times we are living in.

She says, attempting to do her bit to stage a war between religion and science by using the phrase ‘scientific fundamentalists,’ as if unaware of how oxymoronic that phrase is, and how tiresomely overused it also is. Really, she’s doing quite a job here of saying tut tut, let’s not do this, and doing exactly what she is saying let’s not do.

If we seek to preserve our liberal western values, then we need to resist the spirit of aggression and confrontation which is becoming increasingly characteristic of public debate – in Britain and the United States especially – concerning the role of religion in society.

Do we? But who says it is a spirit of aggression and confrontation? Why is it not instead a spirit of honest inquiry and forthright criticism? Honest inquiry and forthright criticism are very much part of liberal values (not just western ones – why did she specify that?), aren’t they? And I would say that attempts to shut those activities down by using inflammatory and inaccurate words like ‘extremist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘aggression’ to characterize mere written and spoken analysis and criticism is very illiberal indeed.

Also lurking within the media treatment of religion today is a masked anti-Catholicism, for that too has been a feature of modern societies such as Britain and America whose values have been largely shaped by Protestantism.

Oh, it’s not masked in my case. I hate Catholicism. But that’s allowed – that’s part of liberal values. We can hate libertarianism, we can hate socialism, we can hate Catholicism.

The recent confrontation between religion and science is in this context a smokescreen which is distracting us from much more urgent political and intellectual issues. It allows the secular intelligentsia to hide behind a convenient and inflated – where not fabricated – myth of religious extremism…

So it’s the secular intelligentsia that is fabricating a myth of religious extremism. What about those myths of atheist extremism then? Who is fabricating those?

I see on Tina Beattie’s page at Roehampton that one of her teaching interests is Religion and Human Rights. That’s a strange pairing, I thought – even stranger than those pairings of ‘Religion and Ethics’ that we see everywhere (such as at the BBC). Why religion and human rights? It is so often bishops or priests or mullahs who oppose human rights rather than supporting them – it seems odd to link them. The pairing of religion and ethics gives religion the credit for ideas and views that are often entirely secular; pairing religion with human rights would seem to do the same thing.

Human Rights Watch is aware of the tension.

Is there a schism between the human rights movement and religious communities? Essential disagreements appear increasingly to pit secular human rights activists against individuals and groups acting from religious motives. The list of contentious issues is growing: on issues such as reproductive rights, gay marriage, the fight against HIV/AIDS, and blasphemy laws, human rights activists and religious groups often find themselves on opposing sides.

Yes we do, and on the human rights side we find ourselves dealing with bad or no arguments from the religious groups. ‘We want to block these suggested rights, and we don’t have a real reason, we just know that God wants us to, so we’re more devout than you are, so we have the moral high ground, so you should give in to us.’

The controversy that hit the EU in October 2004 around…conservative Catholic Rocco Buttiglione illustrates some of the issues at stake. Unperturbed by the furor he was arousing, the candidate for Commissioner on Justice, Freedom, and Security—who in that function would have been in charge of fighting discrimination—affirmed in front of bewildered members of the European Parliament that “homosexuality is a sin” and that “the family exists to allow women to have children and be protected by their husbands.”

Well…maybe what we mean is ‘Liberal Religion and Human Rights.’ But that’s not what it says – and the sad fact is that most religion isn’t liberal. It’s a comfortable illusion of the safe middle-class in the safe developed countries that most religion is liberal and getting more so all the time – hence perhaps the bewilderment of the members of the European Parliament – but it is indeed an illusion. One of the perks of religion is being able to be dogmatically and arbitrarily opposed to lots of things you don’t happen to like, and most believers have no interest at all in giving up that perk. If it’s human rights you’re after, religion is generally the wrong place to look. (Yes there are exceptions; yes MLK was religious.)

About this exorcist guy…You know how the pope likes to put up this front of being rational and scholarly and reasonable? Well…the church he’s at the top of has exorcists. The Chief Exorcist of Rome is very emphatic on the point that Satan is for real and that anyone who says otherwise is engaged in ‘true heresy.’ Satan is not a metaphor, or an abstraction, Satan is a fella. Father Gabriele Amorth wants everyone to make no mistake about that.

Those modern theologians who identify Satan with the abstract idea of evil are completely mistaken. Theirs is true heresy; that is, it is openly in contrast with the Bible, the Fathers, and the Magisterium of the Church.

So much for all those people who keep trying to say that the ‘New Atheists’ go after crude targets that no one actually believes in. I think the Catholic church and its hierarchy count as someone? Someone with a fair amount of influence?

The other interesting point here is the question of how the exorcist knows what he is so confident that he knows. Apparently because of the Bible, the Fathers, and the Magisterium of the Church – but why does he think those are reliable sources of knowledge? Because he thinks God wrote or ‘revealed’ the Bible, presumably – but the question is why. Frankly I never really understand that – why grown-up people believe that with, apparently, no qualms. I don’t understand it because what would a Bible that wasn’t written or revealed by God look like? It would look the same. There is nothing about the Bible that makes it unmistakable that it’s a book by God rather than by humans. What is it that makes the exorcist and his friends so sure that it was? How do they know what they know? They don’t, of course, but why do they think they know?

And another thing. Why do we hear so much indignant complaining about ‘the New Atheists’ and so little about the Old Theists? Why do so many putative intellectuals treat unapologetic atheism as some kind of outrage and blithely ignore the combination of nonsense and mental torture that believers in Satan sprinkle around the landscape? Why does not Tina Beattie criticize the exorcist instead of talking stark nonsense about atheism?

The demonisation of religion that is perpetuated by a certain, very dull kind of anglo-american atheist materialism, allows us to escape our own responsibility for a burgeoning global climate of violence and confrontation.

Why does Tina Beattie say that kind of thing (and a lot more of it) instead of rebuking Father Gabriele Amorth? I’m genuinely curious. Why do people like Tina Beattie get outraged by explicit atheists and not by explicit demonologists and exorcists? Why does she think (apparently) that the former do more harm than the latter?