Author: Ophelia Benson

Katha Pollitt rocks.

So it’s 2005 and this is the academic question that has driven the Daily News and the right-wing New York Sun into apoplectic fits, and caused heartburn all over CUNY: Should Tim Shortell, an atheist, be allowed to assume the chair of the sociology department of Brooklyn College? You know, an atheist–someone who doesn’t believe in God. An anticleric. A disrespecter of religion. A mocker of Christianity.

This is what I’m saying. This is why atheists sometimes use noneuphemistic language. It’s because atheism is viewed and treated and spoken of as a crime and an outrage and something that ought not to be allowed. And that’s why the habit of just bashfully not mentioning the fact that theism is about truth claims that are not true, gets a little tiresome. There is a real problem here. I’ve said it before (so those who are tired of hearing it should leave now and go get an ice-cream soda or something), but I’ll just restate it again. There’s a real problem when the people who don’t say there are invisible supernatural entities (or entity) operating the cosmos are considered reprehensible, while people who do, are considered virtuous. That’s backwards. It’s the wrong way around. It reverses the terms. One might as well give prizes to bullies and sadists and throw kind helpful people in prison (which is exactly what happens in some places, and let’s not go live there).

You might as well say no Southern Baptist should be chair, since someone who believes that women should be subject to their husbands, homosexuality is evil and Jews are doomed to hell won’t be fair to female, gay or Jewish job candidates. Or no Orthodox Jew or Muslim should be chair because religious restrictions on contact with the opposite sex would privilege some job candidates over others. But nobody ever does say that. As long as a believer ascribes his views to his faith, he can say anything he wants and if you don’t like it, you’re the bigot.

Sad to say, she’s right. I’ve been seeing a certain well-known atheist (and self-proclaimed anti-theist) called a ‘bigot’ lately myself. The benefit of the doubt is always with the people of ‘faith’ (despicable word) and always against the people of reason. Well, enough of that. (Though I’m still not going to start calling myself a Bright. There are limits.)

My colleague didn’t get lost yesterday, and I did manage to figure out which square Starbucks in a square outside the entrance to Westlake Mall he meant (it was kind of unmistakable, in fact, a freestanding little glass mansion of Starbucks all on its own), so we did meet up as opposed to standing around stupidly in the wrong place. They wanted to go someplace pretty and not too far away as they had to get bus back to the airport quite soon, so we went to a park on the water about a mile north of downtown. Then we argued about whether this park beat Nonsuch or not – I said no!!, they said yes!! – but then we agreed: Nonsuch is better as a park, Elliott Bay Park has a far more spectacular location and view. It’s too bad there was a good deal of cloud draping the horizons yesterday, because it meant Mt Rainier was entirely invisible (as it usually is) and the Olympics nearly so – we could just make out the foothills, and I had to inform them that in fact there are spectacular mountains rising just behind those. Never mind – they’ll familiarize themselves with the look of the Pacific Northwest over time. And there was plenty to look at – water, islands (which they refused to believe were islands – but they are, it’s just that the ends aren’t always easy to make out), peninsulas, ferries, sailboats. It’s true – the actual view from Nonsuch doesn’t compare. (The view from Richmond Hill, on the other hand, is another matter, and the one from the lawn east of Kenwood is not so dusty either.)

Now, back to unfinished business. Or not so much business as pontificating. But hey, if the pontiff can pontificate, so can the rest of us. So back to unfinished pontificating then. We were discussing this question of whether religion can motivate people to be good – not in the sense of motivation through fear, which as James Mill pointed out is a revolting selfish motivation, but in the sense of externalizing and personalizing an idea of goodness and then deriving motivation from that external personification. I think that is one – only one, mind you – way religion can work.

But of course one of the problems with that is that the result is only as good as the conception of goodness is – and all too often people’s conception of goodness is absolutely crappy; is in fact worse than common or garden badness would be. All too often, people’s conception of goodness boils down to making other people submit and obey and be under rigid control. All too often it hasn’t got a damn thing to do with kindness or generosity or compassion or mercy, and in fact looks far more like cruelty and lust for domination. As Mary McCarthy famously said, religion is only good for good people; for bad people it’s terrible.

And then there’s the larger problem, which has to do with the role of religion in public morality and public debate; with the fact that religion is wrongly but widely thought to have some kind of expertise in moral issues, and therefore public debate is cluttered up with bishops and priests and mullahs, who in fact have no expertise at all, but rather a deep knowledge of Authority, which is no help. Religion may at times with the right people under the right circumstances motivate goodness – benevolence, courage, altruism – in individuals, but religion is not a useful contributor to public discussion of morality. Either it has nothing whatever to add that is not available to secular thinkers, or what it adds is the wrong thing to add. In other words – sure, sometimes religious talking heads manage to say something sane, but that’s because they’ve done some thinking, the kind of thinking we can all do, and because they’ve been influenced by various humane ideas in the culture (that racism is bad, that capital punishment is not the way to go, that justice and equality have something to be said for them), not because they have some special religous wisdom. And other times they say things that are absurd or downright hateful, because they think their deity hates contraception or women who are not enslaved. So what is it that they add? Nothing.

Public discussion of morality has to be secular and rational, because the other thing just doesn’t work, and can’t work, and shouldn’t work. If you tell me your God thinks the babies should have their heads dashed against the walls of the city – I’m not going to be impressed, am I. ‘God says so’ just doesn’t cut it in public discussion, any more than ‘my gut says so’ does. But there are people of the ‘God says so’ party on every ethics panel and many chat shows. That’s a bad situation. That’s one reason there is a need for energetic resistance, and even, at times, rudeness.

Norm has a post on religion and Hitchens and the vexed subject of ‘contempt for religious believers and what they believe’ that I have – however reluctantly! however ashen with misgivings, trembling with nerves, tottering with distress, quaking with anxiety, keening with regret – disagreed with him about in the past.

It might be suggested on Hitch’s behalf that, whether it meets such needs or not, because religious belief isn’t substantively true, all it merits is contempt from atheists and humanists; and its adherents, likewise, only deserve disrespect in one or another mode. But that religion isn’t true cannot be a sufficient reason for this; it is quite standard in democratic and pluralist societies to disagree in a tolerant and non-contemptuous way with beliefs and opinions we hold, or even sometimes know, to be false.

Yes – up to a point. Or maybe not so much up to a point, as depending on how you define contempt. In fact that’s what I disagreed about last time I disagreed – I didn’t, and still don’t, think that what Polly Toynbee expressed was contempt. What she expressed was something more like outrage, and it was directed primarily at the Vatican, the news media’s sycophantic coverage of the Vatican, and Blair’s knee-bending to the Vatican. Now, given the Vatican’s murderous condom policy, I think that outrage is highly appropriate.

But this time it’s a fair cop. Hitchens does express contempt – and – I find what he says bracing and welcome in contrast to the endless diet of whining and reproof directed at atheists – but at the same time, I can see what Norm means. I’m not sure I agree with it – because of that endless diet – but I can see what he means.

At the same time, it is a straightforward empirical fact that countless numbers of people – and I use ‘countless’ here advisedly and literally, not just loosely to convey the sense of very many – have been moved by their religion to do good in the world, to behave well…Think of a person who has illusions about the character of someone he loves – his mother, his children – and has those illusions because he loves them and so is unable to face certain unwelcome truths about them. That he has such illusions may certainly end by doing him, or them, harm. But so may it lead him to do a lot of good things he otherwise might not do.

True. I think that is one way – one of the few ways – religion can work in a kindly as opposed to brutal way. I think the analogy is more literal than Norm means it in this argument – I think many people do think of God that way, and that that thought is what inspires them to do good things. I think that God serves as a sort of Platonic idea of what a completely good, kind, loving, benevolent, compassionate being ought to be (it may be Mary or Jesus instead, because God-God is a god of wrath). Once you have that idea – of an entity that is all about kindness and goodness – then you want to please it by being kind yourself, and not pain it by being cruel. That’s a crude way of putting it, but I think that is how it works. Unfortunately not nearly often enough – unfortunately all too often it is the punitive, vengeful aspects that loom largest – but sometimes.

But that’s only one aspect of the problem. There are others that have to do with secularism, democracy, rational discussion, education, the media – with the extent to which ‘democratic and pluralist societies’ can survive in a world of theocracies. But that’s a large subject, and I have to go. My colleague is briefly in town, and if he doesn’t get lost, we’re supposed to meet up for a chat. I’ll tell him you said hello.