Author: Ophelia Benson

I wish I’d been in New York last Monday. I wish I could have dropped in on the UN. I’d have liked to attend (if they were open to the public) the press conference or the seminar or both. All the more since two of the participants have contributed articles to B&W.

The main global humanist organisation and a group of former Muslims on Monday accused European countries of ignoring violations of human rights in their Islamic communities to preserve “multi-culturalism”…”Yet in Europe many women find themselves subject to domestic violence, undergo forced marriages or are even killed by family members because of some belief that they have tarnished the family honour,” Brown declared. That view was echoed later by three ex-Muslims and self-described atheists — Somali-born Dutch member of parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Iranian exile rights activist Azam Kamguian and historian of Islam Ibn Warraq — and French sociologist Caroline Fourest.

How I wish I’d been there. In the front row, taking notes, with a video camera, and a tape recorder, and a stenographer.

Hirsi Ali, who fled to the Netherlands in 1992 to escape an arranged marriage, told the news conference she condemned “the moral relativism in Europe whereby women from Third World countries do not enjoy the same freedoms as native European women enjoy”…Kamguian, a former political prisoner and women’s activist in Iran, who now lives in London, said this “cultural relativism” in Europe and Canada “was upside-down racism” which denied the universality of human rights, especially for women….Fourest, author of several books on religious extremism, told the seminar on the fringes of the commission that sexism and oppression of women “are the main values shared by fundamentalists of all three monotheist religions.”

Exactly. As the dear Vatican made so unambiguous the other day.

She told the news conference a resolution from Islamic states on “defamation of religion” passed by the commission last week was in line with efforts by the Catholic Church and other faiths to protect religion from criticism.

Oh, perfect – just what the world needs. UN resolutions protecting religion from criticism. For every Azam Kamguian and Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq there are whole football stadiums full of religion-protecters and multiculturalists telling them to shut up or else. This story didn’t exactly receive blanket coverage, one can’t help noticing.

So now we find we don’t even know what theology is. Or that maybe we don’t. Or that maybe we know what it is in some places but not in others, and that it may depend on whether the department has changed its name or not.

Names have a lot to do with it, in fact. I’ve always assumed that theology was a different sort of discipline from comparative religion, history of religion, sociology of religion and the like. Atheists and secularists can perfectly well study the latter items, but I’ve always taken it for granted that the first would be something of a bad fit. By definition. That only theists can be theologians. But apparently that’s not a universally accepted fact.

But theology does apparently start from the assumption that there are good reasons for believing in God, for instance the evidence of the natural world. That’s why I say names have a lot to do with it. Because I can see thinking there is at least a question about how the natural world got here, and why there is something rather than nothing; and I can see thinking there must be or should be an X that caused it all (though of course I would then wonder what created the X, and get stuck, as I always do – but never mind that for now). But I have serious difficulties with calling it God. God is a person. God is a guy’s name, and the guy is a character with specific qualities and a particular history. God is a proper name the way Allah is a name and Jhwh is a name and Zeus is a name. God is a local, parochial, familiar kind of fella, quite human but more powerful. He’s not the kind of thing that could create the cosmos – any more than Huckleberry Finn could have created it, or than Emma Woodhouse, or M. Homais, or Werther, or Hedda Gabler could have. We might as well all think our cats created the cosmos. It’s just too local, and too human, and too literary.

But that’s not what’s meant by God, God is the First Cause, or the Unmoved Mover, or another name for the Big Bang. But, one, no he isn’t. You can’t use the same name for two completely different things like that – it causes hopeless confusion. Like an underground map with all the stations put in wrong. You’d be getting out at Turnham Green when you wanted Belsize Park. And, two, if that is what God means, why name it God, why not just stick with the Big Bang, or with ‘whatever made all this happen’? Or X? Since nobody knows the answer to those questions – since whatever explanation is given we can always say something like ‘yes but what about just before that?’ or ‘yes but where did all this happen?’ – what is gained by labeling it God? I really don’t see it.

Especially if there is an X that made it all happen (as in some sense there is, though what that sense is, God only knows – well not him, but X, or gravity, or something) then it’s a pretty, well, exotic X. It’s not our kind of thing. Not friendly, or consoling, or helpful, or something to sing hymns to. Write poetry about, possibly, but sing to, no. It could be just…a lot of code. Probably is. We are, so maybe it is. Just code. Not Mind, not Conscious, certainly not feeling. It doesn’t love us, or anything else. Or it’s just something like gravity or energy. It’s not…a guy. Not even a very very big very very clever one. It just isn’t. And what people think when they hear the word ‘God’ is definitely a person. Not some code. Am I right? Theology doesn’t mean codeology. Theologians don’t think of themselves as students of code or of the Big Bang. So why call it God? So as not to have to make a whole lot of new name tapes, I suppose.