Author: Ophelia Benson

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.

Speaking of Saudi Arabia…

“The essence of Wahhabism is purity,” says Lawrence Wright, author of a Pulitzer-prize-winning book about al-Qaeda. “They are only interested in purification – and that’s what makes them so repressive.”

So if you get a nineteen-year-old girl who gets herself raped fourteen times by seven men, that’s a lot of dirt that needs purifying. It takes 90 lashes, and if she yips about it, it takes 200.

I looked at the role of Wahhabi literature – used in Saudi schools and exported round the world – in promoting suspicion and hatred of non-believers. The Saudi ambassador in Washington, Adel Jubeir, assured me a series of steps had been taken to reform the country’s educational system to instil values of tolerance. Saudi educationalist Hassan al-Maliki remains to be convinced. “They are teaching the students,” he told me, “that whoever disagrees with Wahhabism is either an infidel or a deviant – and should repent or be killed.”

That’s purification for you. You have just two choices: agree with us (by agreeing with us in the first place or else by repenting and agreeing with us) or be killed. Thus pure societies come into existence: by killing everyone who refuses to agree with the locally-prevailing system of purity. Kind of makes you fond of dirt, doesn’t it.

Well that’s nice. Reasonable; fair; compassionate; useful; sensible; impressive.

An appeal court in Saudi Arabia has doubled the number of lashes and added a jail sentence as punishment for a woman who was gang-raped. The victim was initially punished for violating laws on segregation of the sexes – she was in an unrelated man’s car at the time of the attack.

She was raped fourteen times. The seven men who were convicted got prison sentences but

the victim was also punished for violating Saudi Arabia’s laws on segregation that forbid unrelated men and women from associating with each other. She was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being in the car of a strange man. On appeal, the Arab News reported that the punishment was not reduced but increased to 200 lashes and a six-month prison sentence.

Two. hundred. lashes. For being raped fourteen times. What’s the punishment for being mugged? Being put in an acid bath full of piranhas?

Why does Ruth Gledhill call Bari ‘leader of Britain’s Muslims’? Why would anyone (apart from aspiring MCB aparatchiks at least) call him that? Britain’s Muslims don’t have a leader, as I imagine most of them would agree. Britain’s Christians (for instance) don’t have a leader, so why say Britain’s Muslims do? In fact why even talk about ‘leaders’ at all? Think of who else liked to bandy about the word – there was the dear Duce, and the dear Führer – but anyone else? It’s not really a very exact term, so why use it? (Because it’s not an exact term. Yes I know, but that’s what I’m complaining of.) We don’t even call heads of state ‘leader of X’s Ys’ – we call them presidents or prime ministers or juntas, as the case may be.

I’m tempted to think it’s sinister and infantilizing, but when I grab my elbow and tell myself to think more carefully, I have to conclude that it’s just an artifact of the excess deference that was paid to the MCB for a long time. The head of the MCB has to be called something, and since everyone seemed to think the MCB was in some way representative (even though it wasn’t), it doubtless seemed to make sense to call him (it always is a man, of course; one of many strikes against the ‘representative’ delusion) ‘the leader.’ But the whole idea has been getting a second look lately, so let’s pull our socks up and not flatter the head of the MCB any more.