Author: Ophelia Benson

How exciting: a new fresh original unexpected take on theNewAtheism. (Illustrated, I have to add, by a staggeringly banal sculpture called “the Hand of God” which is…a big hand, with a Man perched on it. Wo!!!!!!! Mind-blowing, huh?)

It’s James Wood who has the excitingly new fresh original unexpected take. He breakes the mold in the very first sentence.

In the last 10 years or so, the rise of American evangelicalism and the menace of Islamist fundamentalism, along with developments in physics and in theories of evolution and cosmogony, have encouraged a certain style of aggressive, often strident atheistic critique.

And everything that follows is equally challenging and paradigm-exploding.

I can’t be the only reader who finds himself in broad agreement with the conclusions of the New Atheists, while disliking some of the ways they reach them.

No, you certainly can’t. Couldn’t you have checked? Google is your friend.

Along with this curious parochialism about the varieties of religious belief comes a simplistic reading of how people actually hold those beliefs. Terry Eagleton and others have rightly argued that, for millions of people, religious “belief” is not a matter of just totting up stable, creedal propositions…

The New Atheism is locked into a similar kind of literalism. It parasitically lives off its enemy. Just as evangelical Christianity is characterised by scriptural literalism and an uncomplicated belief in a “personal God”, so the New Atheism often seems engaged only in doing battle with scriptural literalism; but the only way to combat such literalism is with rival literalism. The God of the New Atheism and the God of religious fundamentalism turn out to be remarkably similar entities…Since militant atheism interprets religious faith, again on the evangelical or Islamist model, as blind – a blind leap of faith that hurls the believer into an infinite idiocy – so no understanding or even interest can be extended to why or how people believe the religious narratives they follow…

So let’s talk about literature instead. Ok, but why start with theNewAtheism?

Your guess is as good as mine. Possibly.

A wives-submit type explained to Kathryn Joyce.

“Man is ultimately responsible, when he stands up before God in heaven, for how he ran and managed his family. We women are responsible for how we were as helpmeets. We’re not supposed to be wearing the pants to the elbows, like a lot of women do. We’re equally intelligent and capable of doing the things theat men do, but that doesn’t mean we have to or that we should.” This is a common rejoinder of biblical womanhood advocates…they acknowledge women’s equal capacity, but they suggest that women lay their abilities aside with their pride as a living sacrifice fit for their Savior. [Quiverfull p 71]

But why? That’s what I want to know. Why a sacrifice? What for, what is the reason, what is the point?

Why would their “Savior” want such a sacrifice?

It’s an incredibly primitive idea, frankly. “Lay aside” good useful things as a “sacrifice” for a hidden god. Why? To mollify it so that it doesn’t eat you? No, Jesus is supposed to be better than that, but if he wants women to stifle their own abilities as a “living sacrifice” (what a horrible notion) then he’s not better than that.

And why is it only women who are supposed to lay aside their abilities? Because it’s in the bible. Yes but why is it in the bible? Oh we’re not allowed to ask that.

It’s tragic when people so totally lose their grip on the real and the human and waste their only lives for the sake of an old story.

Frank Schaeffer points out that Michele Bachmann is not telling the truth about whether or not she submits to her husband. He knows what he’s talking about, too: his father was one of the sources of the anti-feminist Dominionist movement.

Bachmann understands just how extreme her part of the evangelical movement is. She also understands that a certain amount of godly lying will be needed to mask that. She understood that the question she was asked the other day was about a biblical teaching that is misogynistic to the core and advocates total submission of a wife to a husband. It is teaching she’s signed on to long ago.

The people, churches and groups that shaped Bachmann’s thinking are far more anti-woman than most Americans fully comprehend.

Yes they are. We’ve been reading up on them in the last few days, and there’s a lot more where that came from.

The issue of wifely submission is at the heart of the entire anti-feminist agenda that shaped Bachmann. I should know. As I describe in my book Sex, Mom and God, the current crop of religious right leaders — including Michele Bachamnn — got their ideas and inspiration from my family’s work, books and film series.

…

Besides my father, Bachmann signed on as a follower of other leading “Reconstructionists” teaching “dominion.” And out of that movement came the big family, home-school movement that included a push to restore “traditional” roles of women…In fact, the whole conservative evangelical movement Bachmann is part of is distinguished by its hatred of the feminist movement top to bottom.

Just what this country needs.

Thanks to Salty Current for the link.

And here is Ladies Against Feminism. Yes really.

It too says submission is misunderstood and a wonderful thing if only you know how.

This post makes no attempt to argue the case for servanthood with those of you outside the Christian faith. However, for modern women who consider themselves a part of the Christian faith, this all too common reaction should be alarming. Are we really so prideful that the very suggestion that we take a humble and serving attitude towards our husbands instantly unbridles our tongues and sets our anger blazing?

“Prideful” – is that what it is? But aren’t we always being told that it was Christianity that introduced the idea of human equality to a brutal pagan world? If Christianity is big on equality, why is it supposed to be Christian to think women who have husbands should take a humble and serving attitude towards them? Why isn’t it Christian to take an egalitarian attitude towards them? Why is that called prideful?

I don’t know the answers.

Do we not realize that Sarah called Abraham “master?”  That Eve was created specifically as Adam’s “helper?” That man was not made for woman, but that woman was made for man? That the Bible specifically calls us the “weaker partner?”

If we don’t, then we are either not reading our Bibles, or we have let culture influence us to the point where we would rather explain away these “pesky woman passages” by casting aside Biblical inerrancy so we can maintain our pride and sense of entitlement.

So if you’re weaker you’re supposed to be submissive and obedient, is that it? So stronger people should always have the upper hand? So might makes right? So stronger people should just take whatever they want, and if weaker people can’t stop them, that’s how god meant things to be, is that it?

Nasty people they are.

Doug Phillips, the founder of Vision Forum and a big noise in the Christian patriarchy movement, told the audience at a convention about watching his wife counsel young women who are thinking about marriage. She always asks them “Are you willing to call your husband ‘Lord’?” The answer tends to be shocked silence followed by No. He goes on:

We’re not talking about Lord as in the Creator, but your earthly head. And one that you have to follow, even when he makes bad judgments. Are you ready to do the most vulnerable thing that a woman ever can do and submit yourself to a man, who you are going to have to follow in his faith, who is incredibly imperfect and is going to make mistakes? Can you do that? Can you call your husband ‘Lord’? If the answer is no, you shouldn’t get married. [Quiverfull p 3]

Harsh, isn’t it. You have to follow him even when he’s wrong. It doesn’t matter that he’s wrong, it matters that you submit.

That’s not just harsh, it’s immoral. It’s wicked. Not just because of the arbitrariness and the official subordination of the woman, but because it mandates obedience no matter what is being obeyed. That’s anti-moral; it’s the opposite of moral. If someone tells you to gas this room full of people, it is immoral to obey.