Author: Ophelia Benson

May the god of the atheists shine its everlasting light on Polly Toynbee. Wait. May the – oh never mind, you know what I mean.

At least she hasn’t swapped her brain for a fleece.

It would be entirely reasonable for secular Labour MPs to plead conscience on this, just as the religious are excused the whip on matters that trespass on their faith. This touches on freedom of thought and ideas, with far-reaching consequences for the values of the Enlightenment that are under growing threat from a collective softening of the brain on faith and superstitions of all kinds.

Yep. And you need to watch out for that collective softening of the brain stuff. It can creep up on you and before you know where you are or can say ‘Look at that tortilla, doesn’t that look like St Aloysius the Uninteresting?’ you’ve got religious zealots running the place. It can happen. Don’t you think it can’t. Listen, the US was not such a god-ridden place thirty years ago – not nearly. Then people absent-mindedly voted a ‘born-again’ Christian into the White House, and things have been getting worse ever since. So don’t let down your guard just because Tony Blair doesn’t keep saying ‘God bless you’ during question time – yet.

it is now illegal to describe an ethnic group as feeble-minded. But under this law I couldn’t call Christian believers similarly intellectually challenged without risk of prosecution. This crystallises the difference between racial and religious abuse. Race is something people cannot choose and it defines nothing about them as people. But beliefs are what people choose to identify with: in the rough and tumble of argument to call people stupid for their beliefs is legitimate (if perhaps unwise), but to brand them stupid on account of their race is a mortal insult. The two cannot be blurred into one – which is why the word Islamophobia is a nonsense. And now the Vatican wants the UN to include Christianophobia in its monitoring of discriminations.

Just so. ‘Race’ can’t possibly be stupid, because it doesn’t have any cognitive content anyway. It’s a complete category mistake. One might as well call a pineapple loyal or a Prada bag dyslexic. But beliefs are all about cognitive content – that’s what they are. Believers are always trying to disguise that, trying to pretend that belief is something else – virtue, or a disposition to kindness, or a talent for keeping your pants on, or marital stability combined with fecundity combined with the ability to hang on to a job – but that’s not what it is. It’s inane and meaningless to call red hair stupid (unless it’s the product of a packet of dye, but that’s a special case, and not relevant), it’s not inane and meaningless to call belief in heaven and hell stupid. Rude, possibly, but not meaningless.

…the religious are already getting their way in more insidious ways. For the chilling effect of this law is here now. There is a new nervousness about criticising, let alone mocking, any religious belief, a jumpiness about challenging Islam or Roman Catholicism. This most secular state in the world, with fewest worshippers at any altars, should be a beacon of secularism in a world beset by religious bloodshed. Instead, our politicians twitch nervously in a lily-livered capitulation to unreason. Why? Because this clever blending between race and faith has tied all tongues. This law springs from a cult of phoney racial/religious respect that makes it harder than it ever was to dare to criticise, let alone mock. There is a new caution about “causing offence”. What kind of offence? Not to people’s race but to ideas in their head.

Remember what Stephen Fry said at Hay about the two words that have taken on creepy overtones lately? Remember what the words were? I knew, I knew before he said them – I said the second one aloud before he got it out of his mouth. Everyone knows; it’s obvious. Respect and offence. ‘I’m offended,’ Fry said in a mincing voice. ‘Well so fucking what?!” Exactly. May the god of the atheists shine its everlasting light on Fry and Toynbee – and Atkinson and Rushdie and Hitchens. Bless all articulate atheists, amen.

I’ve been reading a little Orwell lately – prompted partly by my offhand comment in an email to Norm that Orwell was good but Hitchens is better – which itself was prompted by Philip Dodd’s introduction of Hitchens on ‘Night Waves’ in which he quoted someone (someone unnamed, I think) as writing in a review that Hitchens is as good as Orwell, or almost as good as Orwell, or some such. That annoyed me. It is my considered opinion – despite the offhandedness of the comment alluded to above – that Orwell is over-rated as a writer. Really quite seriously over-rated. That his language is very often decidedly tired and uninspired, even banal, and that there is a lot of commonplace thought in it. Phrases like ‘dirty little scoundrel’ come to mind.

But when Harry at Crooked Timber did a post about Fascinating Hitchens in which he quoted Norm quoting me there was a lot of disagreement (along with some agreement) with my relative estimation of the two – which is why I got Orwell off the shelf to check my impression again. And – I still agree with myself. He’s good, he’s interesting, he’s definitely worth reading, but he is not a great writer or stylist or thinker. He’s not as good as Dwight Macdonald, for instance.

That’s just a flat assertion, obviously. It would take extensive quotation to make my case – because he is good, so I can’t just quote a terrible sentence and leave it at that. But if you read a good chunk of him, the flatness and uninspiredness become increasingly noticeable.

But! As I say – he is good. I’m just saying he’s not the best; but he is good. On religion, for example…

It also appears from my correspondent’s letter that even the most central doctrines of the Christian religion don’t have to be accepted in a literal sense. It doesn’t matter, for instance, whether Jesus Christ ever existed…So we arrive at this position: Tribune must not poke fun at the Christian religion, but the existence of Christ, which innumberable people have been burnt for denying, is a matter of indifference.

Now, is this orthodox Catholic doctrine? My impression is that it is not. I can think of passages in the writings of popular Catholic apologists such as Father Woodlock and Father Ronald Knox in which it is stated in the clearest terms that Christian doctrine means what it appears to mean, and is not to be accepted in some wishy-washy metaphorical sense.

There. So yaboosucks. Exactly what I’m always saying – when people start with that ‘Oh but religion doesn’t mean, you know, literally believing in [trailing off vaguely] – it just means a way of feeling, a way of looking at the world, a framework.’ No it doesn’t! A feeling, a way of looking at the world, a framework, is not a religion, it’s something else. Christian doctrine means what it appears to mean, it doesn’t just mean a fondness for daffodils and clouds. Religions do make truth claims about the real world, so don’t tell me they don’t. It ain’t honest.

If you talk to a thoughtful Christian, Catholic or Anglican, you often find yourself laughed at for being so ignorant as to suppose that anyone ever took the doctrines of the Church literally. These doctrines have, you are told, a quite other meaning which you are too crude to understand…Thus the Catholic intellectual is able, for controversial purposes, to play a sort of handy-pandy game, repeating the articles of the Creed in exactly the same terms as his forefathers, while defending himself from the charge of superstition by explaining that he is speaking in parables.

Bingo. Exactly. A handy-pandy game for controversial purposes. Parable, nothing. If it’s all just a parable, then what is all the fuss about? If it’s all a parable, atheists and theists are the same thing and can stop arguing – and all those people rioting at theatres, and threatening MPs and writers and BBC producers, and sticking knives in people – they’re all just confused, they’re taking literally what everyone else means metaphorically. Yeah right.

So – I still say Orwell is way down the list of best essayists I know of, but he’s nowhere near the bottom.

That by the way was an As I Please, from 3 March 1944.

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.)