Author: Ophelia Benson

So pointless obsessive punitive hostility and meanness can repel religious believers. Close-up acquaintance with the strenuously devout causes people to back away. That’s good to know.

Writing from New Orleans, where he was covering the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, [Stephen Bates] said: “Writing this story has been too corrosive of what faith I had left: indeed watching the way the gay row has played out in the Anglican Communion has cost me my belief in the essential benignity of too many Christians. For the good of my soul, I need to do something else.” Bates, who says he still regards himself as a Catholic, said he was turned off by the intolerance he saw towards gays and the self-righteousness of Christians who “pick and choose the sins that are acceptable and condemn those – always committed by other, lesser people – that are not.”

Interesting – Desmond Tutu has just been saying much the same thing.

“Our world is facing problems – poverty, HIV and Aids – a devastating pandemic, and conflict,” said Archbishop Tutu, 76. “God must be weeping looking at some of the atrocities that we commit against one another. In the face of all of that, our Church, especially the Anglican Church, at this time is almost obsessed with questions of human sexuality.”…Archbishop Tutu referred to the debate about whether Gene Robinson, who is openly gay, could serve as the bishop of New Hampshire. He said the Anglican Church had seemed “extraordinarily homophobic” in its handling of the issue, and that he had felt “saddened” and “ashamed” of his church at the time. Asked if he still felt ashamed, he said: “If we are going to not welcome or invite people because of sexual orientation, yes. If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn’t worship that God.”

Indeed. The thought has crossed my mind once or twice, that surely even Anglicans have better things to worry about than The Great Homosexual Menace.

Stephen Bates elaborates in the New Humanist:

The vehemence even in the mainstream denominations could be quite startling and bizarrely tunnel-visioned. Graham Dow, the Bishop of Carlisle, has come to public notice for suggesting that the recent floods were God’s judgement on a sinful nation, but not only is he not alone…but they are not his weirdest views. An earlier book he wrote on demonic possession shows he believes devils enter up the anus…and the signs of possession include wearing black, inappropriate laughter, inexplicable knowledge, Scottish ancestry or relatives who have been miners. You may laugh – inappropriately – but Dow used to be an Oxford college chaplain, indeed once prepared Tony Blair for confirmation, and has risen to be a diocesan bishop.

Blimey. This is the Anglican church. I’m…surprised.

What really surprised me was the mendacity and sheer nastiness with which the feuds were conducted and, of course, the certainty with which such people knew that God was speaking directly to them and – funnily enough – endorsing whatever action they had decided to take. It is a hermetically sealed, deeply insecure view of the outside world and it does not just infect Anglicans, but many denominations…The Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, believe that those outside their inner circle will be ground to dust on the last day (remember this the next time you open your front door to them) and will only cooperate with the police in child abuse cases if the molestation has been independently and simultaneously witnessed by two elders, which may be setting the bar a little high.

The certainty is the thing I keep barking my shins on. The two-step. The carefree move directly from belief that God exists to confidence that the believer knows all about this God and what it wants the believer and everyone else to do – the complete failure to notice the rather obvious fact that even if there is a ‘God’ we know nothing whatever about it – that absence of evidence may (to the determined) be no bar to belief but is certainly an obstacle to pretensions of detailed and coercive knowledge. So what do you end up with? The combination of mendacity and nastiness with self-righteous certainty. You get a toxic brew, that’s what you get. Ask a religion reporter.

Check out the comments on Richard Francks’s Descartes and God. They’re all terrific but especially the one by gfelis, which is to say, our friend G.

Even if Descartes was right about our ability to doubt the existence of the material world when we really, really try very hard to doubt it, his insight merely reveals that absolute proof is a very stringent standard for knowledge (an ultimately unrealistic standard, sensible epistemologists now agree). It does not mean there is “no good reason to believe” in the existence of the material world, it merely means that even the very existence of the material world – as obvious as it is to us – cannot be proven absolutely beyond any shadow of a doubt…Whereas there are many good reasons to believe in the existence of the material world, albeit not conclusive proof beyond any shadow of a doubt, there are no good reasons to believe in the existence of God…It isn’t simply a matter of the existence of God lacking some absolute and irrefutable proof: It lacks any convincing arguments or solid evidence whatsoever. Believing in the existence of God really is very much like believing in that invisible, intangible, never observed no matter how often it’s looked for porcupine under Professor Franck’s bed.

What about the waterfall? This gfelis fella must be forgetting the waterfall. The waterfall is one knock-down argument; everyone knows that.

Yet another plea – or more like demand – that atheists shut up. Dave Hill foolishly comes right out and admits that’s what he’s demanding, in the very first sentence.

Even by writing this piece I risk perpetuating what I seek to end: arguments about religion that generate more heat than light.

He seeks to end arguments about religion – well at least we know where we are for a change. And where we are is (as so often) with someone who doesn’t think very clearly. He claims that ‘the critiques [AC Grayling and Polly Toynbee] offer, at least on this site, never develop beyond assertions that all religion should be got rid of because it’s always a bad thing,’ which is absurd (apart from anything else, that would make a one-sentence post, and Grayling and Toynbee don’t write one-sentence posts). Then he gets even more wild. He quotes Grayling on the influence of Catholicism:

Women enslaved to child-bearing, over-large families perpetuating ignorance and poverty, backward social policies and the iron grip of a clergy acting like the Stasi in controlling the minutiae of private lives.

Then he announces that he takes that personally because he ‘married into an Irish Catholic family,’ then he announces that he doesn’t ‘care for privileged British academics informing them that they were so supine as to have had their personal lives “controlled”,’ and then he ends with a flourish by saying ‘Such jeering at Irish Catholics has, of course, a long and ugly history.’

‘Such’ as what? What is that ‘such’ doing there? What jeering at Irish Catholics? There isn’t any, except in Dave Hill’s head! If he thinks the quoted passage about the influence of Catholicism is ‘jeering at Irish Catholics’ then he’s suffering from delusions of reference. That’s a cheap trick – doing a strained and highly subjective interpretation of a chosen passage so that it says something wounding to the self or the self’s relatives or ‘community,’ then moving instantly to treating the strained and self-centered interpretation as well-founded fact. (Then whining about the putative jeering or insult or offense or attack or sneer or abuse or other crime of reference.)

So, Dave Hill wants to end arguments about religion that he doesn’t like, and his method of choice is to accuse AC Grayling and Polly Toynbee of doing things they don’t do. And he calls himself liberal.