Author: Ophelia Benson

So religion makes people good, does it. Christianity makes people more kind and compassionate does it. Well, maybe sometimes it does, but all too often it (at least the extreme, narrow version of it that is so popular in the US) makes people – not just not better, but horrifying. Disgusting. So appalling it’s hard to take it in.

Patrick Henry is a Christian university where the students all (shades of Oxbridge and the Thirty Nine Articles) sign a ten-part statement of faith –

agreeing that, among other things, Hell is a place where “all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.”

Okay, I know we’re supposed to be all tolerant and respectful, we’re supposed to shut up about people’s pious ‘devout’ beliefs, we’re supposed to refrain from telling them that they’re lost in the fog. But – but there’s a limit. There’s a limit, and with the drooling sadism of the Rapture novels and with ‘statements of faith’ like the above, I reach my limit. That sentence is disgusting! It’s disgusting, disgusting, disgusting, and people who sign up to it and then go cheerily about their business, ironing their hair and not drinking alcohol and interning for Karl Rove – people like that are an abomination. I’m serious. If they sign up to that and seriously literally believe it’s true – what the fuck is the matter with them? Why aren’t they all curled up in little balls sobbing and screaming? Why doesn’t that thought blight their lives? Why doesn’t it give them nightmares? Why doesn’t it torture them so much that they look for a way out and realize it’s all a pack of lies? Why are they happy with the set-up? What is wrong with them? They seriously think that the vast majority of humans alive now and also formerly alive are now or will soon be ‘confined in conscious torment for eternity’? And they don’t mind? They in fact ‘love’ the ‘God’ that arranges this? The God that first creates us and then confines us in conscious torment for eternity?

They’re sick. I’m dead serious. They’re a population of sick bastards. And there they are trundling around thinking they’re good. It’s staggering. It’s also disgusting. It’s always disgusted me in Dante, but he had the excuse that he lived in the 13th century. There’s no excuse for it now. I can accept (up to a point) that the fact that religion is consoling is an excuse for believing it, even though there’s not much other reason. But believing that foul sentence is hardly the same kind of consolation as believing we will all be reunited and there will be no more parting then.

It’s the word ‘conscious’ that pushes me over the edge. There’s something so – oh, determined, refined, thorough about it. An anxious carefulness to nail everything down, to make absolutely sure that not only is there torment and not only is it for eternity, but the outside-of-Christers are awake for it. And along come tripping all these brighteyed fresh-faced home-schooled dimpled little darlings from Idaho and Nebraska, signing right up to that evil piece of shit. And thinking they’re virtuous for doing so – thinking they’re better than the secular crowd.

I don’t understand. I really don’t. It defeats me.

People seem to be on a mission to entertain us with stories of absurd or preening or egomaniacal men. Yesterday we had Laurie Taylor mocking his younger trendier self, today (because today is when I saw it, not when it came out) we have Kevin Jackson teasing his teenage out of date existentialist self.

If you did happen to be a swot and/or would-be intellectual, Sartre was even harder to avoid—he was one of the few modern gurus who could rival Kafka and Beckett in the bookish adolescent’s pantheon of lugubrious heroes…I look back on all this adolescent Sartreanism with relatively slight embarrassment; everyone, after all, has to start the messy job of growing up with the fodder their culture is offering at the time, and at least I wasn’t gorging my half-formed brain on Tolkien.

Well said. If he had been, his brain would have remained half-formed.

Nevertheless, today, it very nearly goes without saying that my contemporaries and I were being hopelessly old-fashioned in what we mistook for our avant-gardism…To put it mildly, though, his name no longer seems to excite the intelligent young; mainstream British philosophers continue, as they did when he was alive, to contend that what Sartre wrote had little or nothing to do with philosophy, and for every one book published on Sartre and x, there are 60, 70, 100 on Foucault and y. A widely read crib entitled Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers (1994), by John Lechte, devotes whole chapters to fauna such as Le Doeuff and Pateman—Pateman?—but mentions Sartre only in asides.

But he may be making what Hollywood watchers call a ‘comeback.’

Bookshops are laden with his works, newspapers are publishing Sartre supplements, and when I switched on the television in my hotel room, the first thing I saw was Bernard-Henry Levy, the open-shirted media intellectual, recanting his youthful rejection of Sartre and claiming that everything valuable in the maîtres penseurs of the 1960s was already present in Sartre’s thought.

Le pauvre BHL, eh – he might as well make ‘open-shirted’ his middle name.

I interviewed Simon Blackburn, professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, on Sartre the philosopher. To my surprise, since Blackburn works in a tradition that is alien or even hostile to Sartre’s, he expressed sympathy for the early work, citing Nausea as a rare example of a philosophical novel which achieves a convincing union of fiction and ideas, and commended the moments in Being and Nothingness—the famous passage about the over-attentive waiter, which Sartre uses as a parable of bad faith, is a case in point—where Sartre’s novelistic powers animate his train of thought and take imaginative flight. As a philosophical stylist, Blackburn suggested, Sartre might be compared to Kant: in both writers, pages of dry exposition suddenly give way to a flash of dazzling lyricism, wit or incongruity.

Which is interesting – the whole philosophy as a kind of writing thing, and how important style and wit are or are not. Style, wit, and open shirts.