Author: Ophelia Benson

The post on fictional characters has spawned a lot of offspring – Norm’s, George Szirtes’s, Mick Hartley’s, Tom Freeman’s.

The subject is related to one that Jean and I talked about a little today – when you’ve been in the blogosphere, have you been to a real place? When you interact via a blog, is that really interacting? Jean has a related post at Talking Philosophy.

I think Internet interaction is decidedly real interaction, but only for the people for whom it is so; that could be everyone, for all I know, but I don’t think it necessarily is. But I think it is so, at least, for people for whom language, thinking, writing, talking are important – or perhaps not so much important as essential. Jean points out in the post that blogging is addictive; so it is, and why? Maybe partly for the same sort of reason we get involved in fictions. Distance in one case, fictionality in the other; either way it’s not about real, fleshy, breathing people in the room with us, and yet it yanks us in just the same. George’s ‘guess is that the imagination does not distinguish carefully between the real and the imagined.’ It may be – in fact there’s evidence to suggest that it is – that the mind does not distinguish carefully between the imagination and memory, either. When you think about someone who is ten miles away at the moment, is that a memory or an imagining? A lot of both, usually, isn’t it? And are we always sharply aware of the boundary between the two? More like never, I would think.

We haven’t had a round of spot-the-community in a long time, so let’s have one now. Let’s look at the way the peculiar insistence on describing everything as a ‘community’ and everyone as a member of a ‘community’ can cause reporters to write what ends up being just plain inaccurate.

There’s a piece in the Independent about an Evangelical Chistian reverend who has been appointed to a human rights outfit.

Secular groups have asked for the removal of the Rev Joel Edwards, a vocal campaigner against legislation banning discrimination against the gay community, from the post of commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

But the legislation doesn’t ban discrimination against ‘the gay community,’ it bans discrimination against gay people; particular, individual, gay people, in particular individual situations. Why say ‘the gay community’ instead of just ‘gays’ or ‘gay people’? Is the need to say ‘community’ so ingrained now that journalists think it’s somehow rude to refer to people in any other way? But if so, why?

And there’s the piece in the Times telling us that Jehovah’s Witnesses say Emma Gough did the right thing.

To agree to a transfusion would have been a transgression comparable to adultery or sexual immorality, a spokesman from the central office of the British community of Jehovah’s Witnesses told The Times yesterday.

The…wot? The central office of the British community of Jehovah’s Witnesses? There’s a central office of something called the British community of Jehovah’s Witnesses? It’s not just the central office of Jehovah’s Witnesses UK or British Jehovah’s Witnesses? But then why isn’t ‘community’ capitalized? Probably because it isn’t called that; the word ‘community’ is just some kind of bizarre honourific now, applied to everyone with a lavish hand.

Terry Lovejoy, a member of the Jehovah’s Witness community in Telford, said: “We are trying to help them through an intense period of grief and mourning.”

What we are not doing, of course, is re-thinking the ‘community’s position on blood transfusion.

At the central office for Jehovah’s Witnesses in London, Paul Gillies, its spokesman, said: “If someone did [have a blood transfusion] they would be saying they don’t really believe in one of the central tenets of the faith…It says to abstain from adultery, to abstain from blood, to abstain from immorality,” he said…“If someone said, ‘Don’t drink alcohol’ and I injected it into my arms instead, that would just be a way round the law’.”

Yes but did someone say ‘Don’t drink alcohol even if a drink of alcohol would save your life?’ Do you recognize any kind of hierarchy of commands and laws and duties? Do you see any difference between, say, ‘please don’t leave your dirty dishes on the table for me to clean up’ and ‘don’t commit mass murder’? Do you see any difference between ‘don’t cross the street in the middle of the block’ and ‘don’t cross the street in the middle of the block even if you’re running away from a tsunami’?

I gotta go, I have a pile of old ‘Watchtowers’ that needs reading.

I trust you enjoyed Greta Christina’s ‘Atheists and Anger’. I know I did.

I’m angry that atheist soldiers – in the U.S. armed forces – have had prayer ceremonies pressured on them and atheist meetings broken up by Christian superior officers, in direct violation of the First Amendment…I’m angry that atheist soldiers who are complaining about this are being harassed and are even getting death threats from Christian soldiers and superior officers…I’m angry that the 41st President of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush, said of atheists, in my lifetime, “No, I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.”…I’m angry that women are dying of AIDS in Africa and South America because the Catholic Church has convinced them that using condoms makes baby Jesus cry…I get angry when advice columnists tell their troubled letter-writers to talk to their priest or minister or rabbi…when there is absolutely no legal requirement that a religious leader have any sort of training in counseling or therapy…I’m angry at preachers who tell women in their flock to submit to their husbands because it’s the will of God, even when their husbands are beating them within an inch of their lives…I get angry when other believers insist that the cosmic shopping list isn’t what religion and prayer are really about; that their own sophisticated theology is the true understanding of God. I get angry when believers insist that the shopping list is a straw man, an outmoded form of religion and prayer that nobody takes seriously, and it’s absurd for atheists to criticize it.

That’s just a small sample. Later there’s a long series of epistemic anger-sources, many of which we’ve discussed here (not surprisingly, all this stuff being in our faces, so to speak). One of my favourites (but I like them all) is:

I get angry when believers say at the beginning of an argument that their belief is based on reason and evidence, and at the end of the argument say things like, “It just seems that way to me,” or, “I feel it in my heart”… as if that were a clincher. I mean, couldn’t they have said that at the beginning of the argument, and not wasted my fucking time?

And then it winds up by pointing out that anger is necessary for reform and change, also something we’ve discussed here. Angry atheists unite.

Religion. Respect. Gotta respect it – religion. Religion, respect, they go together.

A young Jehovah’s Witness has died just hours after giving birth to twins. She had signed a form refusing blood transfusions, and her family would not overrule her. Couldn’t doctors have intervened? If they had, they [might] well have been charged with a criminal offence, and would not have had a legal leg to stand on in court. The UK places great emphasis on respecting the religious convictions of patients – and increasingly the doctors who treat them too. There is nothing medics can do when an adult refuses treatment on religious grounds, says Vivienne Nathanson, head of ethics at the British Medical Association.

Is there anything patients can do when an adult doctor refuses treatment on religious grounds? Sometimes. That dentist who refused treatment to a woman because she wasn’t wearing a hijab got a mild rebuke. But maybe in a few years that will be seen as insensitive – to the dentist. Or maybe not; who knows.

Jehovah’s Witness liaison committees, who advise both doctors and patients on alternative treatments, are now firmly established in many UK hospitals. “We are ever more favourably received – doctors are increasingly sympathetic to needs of the community,” says David Jones, a member of the committee for North Bristol NHS Trust. “We have drawn up detailed care plans for everything from heart surgery to giving birth, including ways to stem postpartum haemorrhage. All hospitals should have access to these.”

Isn’t that heart-warming? Doctors are increasingly sympathetic – isn’t that kind? They’re are increasingly sympathetic to the ‘needs’ of the ‘community’ – the needs of the community to adhere to a ridiculous meaningless arbitrary outmoded pettifogging bit of nonsense from Leviticus. And in order to exercise all this extra and increasing sympathy, doctors and nurses have to absorb piles of detailed care plans that wouldn’t be necessary if the ‘community’ didn’t ‘need’ to adhere to its outmoded bit of nonsense. What a pathetic waste of time and resources, which could be used in better ways. It’s revolting – that smug self-centered self-congratulation on the ability of the ‘community’ to force (by moral pressure) busy doctors and hospitals to pay lots and lots and lots of pointless extra attention to them. I might as well go drop in at the local primary school and demand that everyone there pitch in to make me a ten-course dinner but make sure it’s kosher and haram and vegan and Scientology-appropriate. I’m special, I deserve to usurp everyone’s time and attention, right?

[O]ther countries are not quite as tolerant of mothers’ religious convictions…A young woman in Dublin lost a lot of blood after giving birth to a healthy baby a year ago. A Jehovah’s Witness, she too refused a transfusion. But an emergency ruling permitted the hospital to carry out the procedure, arguing that the right of the newborn baby to have a family life overruled the mother’s right to refuse treatment.

Well, what about that? Why don’t UK hospitals take that into account? Why doesn’t the baby’s need for a mother have to be at least weighed against the mother’s ‘religious convictions’? (Yes, I know, I’m always talking about women’s autonomy, and that’s why I think women should be able to decide not to bear a child they don’t want, but I also think that if they do decide to bear the child, they take on certain responsibilities. That in fact is one reason I think they should be able to decide not to – the responsibilities are very large and potentially very intrusive. Frankly I think they make ‘religious convictions’ look horribly trivial and selfish.)