Author: Ophelia Benson

Greta Christina points out what I’m always noticing – that there’s a mob of people out there calling atheists every kind of name and it’s pretty much always just for existing. The mob says it’s for being shrill strident mean fundamentalist rude zealous you can finish the song, but in fact by “shrill strident mean fundamentalist rude zealous” they really just mean atheist, period. Don’t ask don’t tell, know what I mean? The only decent atheist is a secret atheist.

And if these op-ed pieces and whatnot were all you knew about the atheist movement and the critiques of it, you might think that atheists were simply being asked to be reasonable, civil, and polite.But if you follow atheism in the news, you begin to see a very different story.

You begin to see that atheists are regularly criticized — vilified, even — simply for existing.

Or, to be more accurate, for existing in the open. For declining to hide our atheism. For coming out.

Quite. Mind you, some of the people who go in for this here vilification like to say that they have masses of examples of atheist evilness, but also that they don’t want to provide it, because the ferret ate their homework. But their lack of desire to provide examples doesn’t make them at all shy about smearing people. I find this fascinating.

What about Paul Sims’s question? Should atheists be talking to believers? Well sure. But should atheists be talking to Catholic Voices? That’s a different question.

Around the time of the Pope’s visit to the UK, I wrote a couple of posts on here (notably this and this) in which  I questioned the tone of the Protest the Pope campaign and the debate around Catholicism and the Pope…An unexpected outcome of my posts was an invitation from the Central London Humanist Group to take part in a small round table discussion with representatives of Catholic Voices, an organisation set up to argue the Catholic case during the Papal Visit.

I had a look at Catholic Voices. Until I looked, I was thinking it was just another friendly woolly group o’ believers and reacher-outers, and thus quite a reasonable outfit to have a nice chat with. But it’s not.

CATHOLIC VOICES is a bureau of Catholic speakers able to articulate with conviction the Church’s positions on major contentious issues in the media.

It’s a self-appointed PR outfit for the Vatican. Its mission is to defend existing positions. That means it’s pretty much exactly the kind of group or grouplet it is entirely pointless to have a nice chat with if what you want from a nice chat is some kind of rapprochement or ecumenical understanding or outreach or can’t we all get alonging. That’s a group that’s in the business of peddling dogma, so it’s hardly going to sit down with the editor of the New Humanist for the sake of genuine dialogue.

Paul Sims thought there might be some common ground.

There is agreement among secularists that change in the Catholic Church must come from within, and there can be no doubt that many moderate Catholics share secularist concerns on condoms, gay rights and child abuse (see the contributions of liberal Catholics Conor Gearty and Tina Beattie to our “An audience with the Pope” feature). If the Pope’s recent pronouncement on condom use was prompted by any kind of pressure, it seems more likely that it was from his own flock rather than his secular opponents. Is it not, therefore, useful to cultivate any common ground we might share with believers?

Yes, probably, but Catholic Voices isn’t “believers”; Catholic Voices is dogma-defenders, which is quite a different thing. I also don’t really think we should let people get away with claiming to be liberal Catholics. The term is an oxymoron. The Catholicism diminishes the liberalism, necessarily. The Catholic church is an emphatic, energetic, active enemy of liberalism, so liberals who stick with it are thereby compromising their liberalism. The Catholic church is an active enemy of secularism, of women’s rights, of gay rights, of non-theocratic morality, so liberals have no business supporting it.

Bishop Thomas Olmsted is helpfully forthright. He’s up front about the fact that the Catholic church is adamant that women must die rather than terminate their pregnancies. He’s also up front about his absolute rule over Catholic hospitals.

St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Ariz., will be stripped of its Catholic status on Friday unless Catholic Healthcare West meets several demands outlined in a Nov. 22 letter from Bishop Thomas Olmsted…The issue stems from the 2009 decision by the hospital to authorize an abortion to save the life of a pregnant woman.

Catholics are not allowed to save a woman’s life at the expense of an 11-week-old fetus. They have to say No, and let her die. That is the Catholic way.

Olmsted wrote that St. Joseph’s hospital would need to meet several demands before the hospital could regain his support, including submitting to a diocesan review and certification “to ensure full compliance” with the Catholic Church’s moral teachings…CHW also must agree to provide its medical staff with ongoing training on the church’s ethical and religious directives regarding indirect abortions…

Olmsted wrote that CHW’s “actions communicate to me that [the hospital does] not respect my authority to authentically teach and interpret moral law in this diocese.”

How dare they. How dare they not respect a bishop’s authority to tell them to let a woman die instead of saving her life. How dare they not let a bishop run their hospital.

He added, “Because of this, I must act now” to ensure that “no further such violations” take place at the hospital and to “repair the grave scandal to the Christian faithful that has resulted from the procedure.”

The grave scandal to the Christian faithful is that a woman was not prevented from having a life-saving procedure. The grave scandal to the Christian faithful is that her four children still have a mother, which they wouldn’t have if the bishop had had his way. Grave scandal indeed.

Don’t forget: all faiths insist that compassion is the test of true spirituality.

From Paul Berman’s The Flight of the Intellectuals, p. 146:

Qutb, in launching his anarchistic odes to freedom, means to say that, under his proposed resurrected Islamic Caliphate, human beings will no longer be tyrannously ruled by other human beings, but only by God, as interpreted by God’s representatives.

As interpreted by God’s representatives, who of course are other human beings, but free of the restraints and accountability that secular politicians are subject to.

I was amused to see that former bishop Richard Holloway has the same objection to Karen Armstrong’s book on compassion that I do.

The bishop:

The second plank in her platform is that compassion is, as it were, the distilled essence of the world’s great religions…

But is she correct in suggesting that, au fond, the essence of the main religions boils down to compassion? It is probably correct where Buddhism is concerned and it is from Buddhism that her best insights and examples come. I think she is on shakier ground when she applies it to Christianity and Islam. Christianity and Islam are redemption religions, not wisdom religions. They exist to secure life in the world to come for their followers and any guidance they offer on living in this world is always with a view to its impact on the next.

Yer humble servant:

The categorical assertion of the Charter for Compassion is very strong: “The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical, and spiritual traditions.” The problem with that should be obvious: it is not true. The principle of obedience to God lies at the heart of many religious traditions, and it is a modern illusion to think that is identical to compassion.

See? Same thing. Redemption religions; obedience to God. The important (really very important indeed) point is that there is something in religions of that type that trumps (earthly) compassion. That means it’s just a mistake, and a dangerous one, to pretend otherwise.

Meanwhile, comment on the New Humanist review, so that Caspar will think I’m wildly popular and ask me to do more reviews.

To expand on the point about the difference between checking the world and not checking the world – to repeat –

Science has to check itself against the way the world is, and religion doesn’t. Science is about what is there whether humans can figure it out or not, and religion isn’t. (It claims to be, but it isn’t.)

What you get with an institution that doesn’t require itself to check against the world, is authority. You get the fiat, the Bull, the decree, the encyclical, the Index, the excommunication, the anathema, the charge of blasphemy or apostasy. You get the arbitrary.

Science has to show its work, and religion doesn’t.

This difference certainly doesn’t cash out as the first always making everyone happier and the second never doing so. On the contrary. But it does cash out as accountability in the first case and no accountability in the second. It is the difference between reasons on the one hand and arbitrary authority on the other.

It’s the fifth anniversary of the Kitzmiller decision, so perhaps you would like to celebrate the day by re-reading the contemporaneous comments of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Paul Kurtz, Steve Jones, Matt Ridley, Barbara Forrest (an expert witness at the trial itself, of course), and Susan Haack.

Enjoy.