Author: Ophelia Benson

Jerry Coyne said some things about atheism and anger today, giving a few of the excellent reasons to be angry about religion.

What is the proper response to all this religiously-inspired nonsense?  Anger, of course.  No, you don’t have to be a red-faced, sputtering jerk when confronting the faithful, but controlled anger is without doubt the right response to a form of superstition that wreaks uncountable harms on humanity.  And not “transitory” anger, either—permanent anger.

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Again, the proper response to religious stupidity, as it was to segregation in the South, is anger—persistent anger.  Anger that remains until the kind of religion that forces its tenets and superstitions down humanity’s throat vanishes for good.

It’s odd that we even have to argue this. With the bishop of Phoenix and the murderer of Salman Taseer to point to, how can there be any dispute that anger is necessary? It’s as if we’ve all been sleepwalking for several decades, lulled into a stupid complacency about religion only because we never looked hard enough at its gruesome ways of carrying on.

Yes I see you there in the second row, Mr Blair. Yes I know that many people do good things in the name of religion; I do understand that many people think the way to be good is via religious institutions. But they’re laboring under a misapprehension: they could be good via secular institutions. The special ways religion is bad, on the other hand, are harder to replace with secular equivalents. What secular official would try to compel hospitals not to save the lives of women by ending their pregnancies? What secular person is not shocked to the core to learn that US bishops earnestly defend exactly that policy?

Until there are no bishops and no mullahs coming up with creative ways to oppress people, anger is not something we can afford to give up.

Via a commenter at Jerry’s, a salient remark by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker in 2002, in a Talk of the Town piece on Niceness.

The problem, of course, is that niceness is overrated as a virtue. Many cultures are nice. The Southern antebellum aristocracy was marvellously well-mannered; its members left tasteful calling cards, entertained gracefully, and conducted their personal affairs with the utmost discretion. But they had few other virtues; in fact, it was the practice of niceness that helped to keep other values, such as fairness, at bay. Fairness sometimes requires that surfaces be disturbed, that patterns of cordiality be broken, and that people, rudely and abruptly, be removed from their place. Niceness is the enemy of fairness.

He may have derived that from Mark Twain – it’s related to what Twain called Sir Walter disease. The South was rotten with delusions about chivalry and other such nonsense while it wouldn’t have recognized justice if it had bitten them on the ass.

I’m relieved to see that somebody in the UK is aware of the…….erm……..the lack of warmth in the ahem service professionals there. I wondered if it was just me.

No I didn’t really; instead I wondered if everybody there is crazy.

Surly, slapdash and dreadful. That’s how chef Michel Roux Jr sums up customer service in the UK.

“It’s not just in restaurants, you get bad service anywhere,” he says. “Even buying a newspaper you can find that you’re not even acknowledged. There’s no eye contact, no greeting or anything. Bad service is unforgivable and it’s everywhere in the UK.”

It’s true you know. It’s the surliness I can’t stand. Dignity would be all right; a polite reserve would be acceptable; but the surliness is truly awful. Buying a few harmless groceries at Waitrose leaves one feeling depressed and vaguely ashamed – as if one were an aristocrat walking on the faces of the poor merely because one wanted to buy some pasta sauce and the pasta to go underneath it.

Apparently they don’t even know they’re doing it – apparently they think that’s just how one acts.

One of the things that has shocked him most about making the show is how little some of the young people he has been working with know about basic courtesy.

“Just saying please and thank you, I was aghast that some of these kids found it very difficult even to utter those words,” he says. “There’s not much more basic in life than that, it’s simple upbringing. Whatever your background, courtesy matters.”

What a dreary picture that conjures up of their daily lives – with none of the tiny civilities that make social interaction pleasant instead of like an ugly highway to nowhere.

In Seattle it’s customary to say thanks to the bus driver when you get off. I love that.

Two of the ACLU attorneys who signed the letter to the feds did a blog post on it. The ACLU website has a whole section on Reproductive Freedom. Useful stuff.

I’ve been reading the bishop of Phoenix again. (I have my reasons. I’m doing a talk at CFI Vancouver in a couple of weeks, and I intend to draw on the bish.) I’ve been doing a close reading, as one might with a poem or a PR release. I noticed some things. Here’s one of them.

The decisions regarding life and death, morality and immorality as they relate to medical ethics are at the forefront of the Church’s mission today. As a result, the Church and her bishops have a heightened moral responsibility to remain actively engaged in these discussions and debates.

Look at what he’s saying there. He’s saying that decisions regarding life and death are at the forefront of the church’s mission, meaning, decisions that women should die are at the forefront of the church’s mission. He’s saying it’s a central and urgent matter that the church should see to it that women who could be saved should instead be made to die. He’s saying that the church and her bishops have a heightened moral responsibility to remain actively engaged in medical matters so that women who could be medically rescued will not be medically rescued. He’s saying his outfit and its hired guns have a moral responsibility to interfere with hospitals and doctors in order to force them to let women die when they could be rescued. He’s saying that decisions about life and death are his business and that he gets to decide them against pregnant women.

He never says that in so many words, of course, but that is exactly what he’s saying.

I have attempted to do my part in calling CHW and your hospitals to uphold the dignity of human life, and to embrace the fullness of what the Catholic Church teaches on the immorality of those actions that are an affront to the gift of human life and its inherent goodness from God.

He has done that by trying hard to coerce CHW and its hospitals to promise in writing to let all women die if an abortion is the only way to save them, even if the fetus can’t survive anyway. He calls that “calling hospitals to uphold the dignity of human life.” He calls refusing to save a woman’s life “upholding the dignity of human life.”

He pushes very hard on the noble-sounding bullshit about moral responsibility and the dignity of human life, in aid of a concerted effort to force hospitals to stop saving women’s lives.

He repays study.