Author: Ophelia Benson

As an atheist, I am often told that I shouldn’t criticise religion, as it offers comfort to people in difficult situations. When you suffer every day, the faithful tell me, you need the hope and meaning that religion gives you – the implication of course being that atheism is a luxury, something that only privileged, comfortable, healthy, able-bodied people can indulge in.

These same people are often surprised to learn that I have a debilitating chronic medical condition, and in fact I do suffer every day. And yet, I have still not turned to god. I still do not believe in an afterlife, despite the fact that in my Earthly life, I will probably never feel truly healthy or ‘normal’ again. Among the community of the chronically ill and disabled, I’m by no means alone in my atheism, but I am in a minority.

The vast majority of people with my medical condition are religious, as evidenced by messages on the internet support group of which I am a member. There are hundreds of members, and messages with religious content are a daily occurrence. Often, sufferers require surgery – when this happens, emails whip round asking for ‘surgery prayers’.  When an operation is successful, god gets part or all of the credit: on one occasion, a woman wrote that she knew the surgeons had done their bit, but the real reason she survived and benefited from the surgery was that god had been watching over her.

Of course, when things go wrong, it’s a pretty safe bet that god doesn’t get the blame. As though the deity were a favourite child who can do no wrong, there is no end to people’s willingness to let god off the hook. When someone dies of the condition (deaths are thankfully rare), god is praised for taking them up to heaven to be with him. When surgery fails to help a person and they continue to suffer, again god is thanked and praised for not making things any worse. When things do get worse, it is presumed that god has a mysterious reason for allowing this, and the prayers continue to be solicited, the thanks still given. One woman wrote thanking god that she could hear the children playing outside while she was ill in bed; presumably it didn’t occur to her to blame god for the fact she was bed-bound in the first place. And so it goes.

I do not find these types of messages either comforting or inspiring, and nor have they convinced me that I must turn to god in my hour of need. I find these views irrational and distasteful, and reading them has galvanised my atheism. In fact, I have found that being an unbeliever actually helps when coming to terms with chronic illness.

If one believes in an all-powerful deity, it follows that this deity must have caused or allowed one’s illness. It follows that your suffering could be relieved, but isn’t for some reason. This raises a multitude of questions: why would god do that, have I sinned, am I a bad person, is it a test, and so on. The search for ‘why’ is made so much more complicated and anxiety-provoking if you posit a supposedly compassionate god. Whereas, I am comforted by the explanation that one of my genes is faulty, that this was a random event, and there is no further ‘why’ to be investigated. I am not being punished or tested – I have just been unlucky. Bad things do happen to good people.

One of the ways in which the religious chronically ill seem to reconcile their faith in an all-powerful, compassionate god with their own medical conditions is to subscribe to the view that their suffering is somehow beautiful or meaningful. I have a self-help book written for the chronically ill, which mostly fulfils its stated function as helpful, except for when it comes to how to find meaning in one’s condition. Then it lapses into a bit of vague blather about Jesus on the cross (surely the most potent symbol of how Christianity can fetishise suffering), before quoting a woman in very ill health, described as “a model for us of graceful endurance”, who cheerfully opined: “God never gives us more than we can bear.” [1] Which raises the question, what kind of deity is this who knows how much each individual can bear, and decides to cause or allow suffering up to that limit but only for certain people? A sadistic one? A contrary one? A psychotic one? I can’t decide, it’s just too bizarre. Likewise, why is it good to endure pain and other symptoms ‘gracefully’? What’s wrong with being pissed off? How is denying reality and real feelings supposed to help people cope?

There is perhaps one Christian figure who has done more damage than most in the ‘suffering is beautiful’ vein: Mother Theresa, who called suffering ‘a gift from God’. Many atheists, particularly Christopher Hitchens, have written extensively criticising her. Her acolytes, however, continue to spread her poisonous message: only a few months ago, on the UK television programme The Big Questions, one such acolyte spoke earnestly about Mother Theresa’s vision, how she saw meaning and beauty in the suffering of those in her care. Perhaps she was unaware that Mother Theresa also denied them medication and a proper bed to sleep in [2].

My response to this is simple: suffering is not beautiful. When you feel like crap, it is not an amazing spiritual experience: you just feel like crap, and you want the feeling to go away. The idea that there is anything positive about suffering at all is profoundly insulting, and as though it weren’t bad enough on its own, there is also the knock-on implication that if people fail to find their suffering anything other than an ultimately uplifting experience, they are somehow a deficient person (Barbara Ehrenreich confronts this issue in her book about breast cancer, Smile Or Die). Essentially, ‘suffering is beautiful/meaningful’ meme is just a dodge whereby the religious ignore the inherent contradiction in the idea of a compassionate, illness-causing deity.

So how do I find meaning in my own suffering? Basically, I don’t. My view is that meaning is essentially a human concept, so we can choose to find meaning in whatever we like, and not everything in our lives has to have it. For me, my medical conditions don’t have any meaning, they’re just there. My suffering doesn’t have any meaning, it just happens, and I would prefer that it didn’t. My life as a whole has meaning though, in that it means something to me, regardless of my medical status.

As for mentally coping with a lifetime of ill health, there are many psychological techniques that can help a chronically ill person, which do not involve maintaining an unreasonable hope that there will be an afterlife in which the pain and other symptoms will magically disappear, or the delusion that one is somehow getting brownie points from god by enduring one’s suffering ‘gracefully’. In not holding out for eternity, I direct my attention to things which give me pleasure and distract me from my illness in the here and now – my partner, my family and friends, my garden, a good film, music, and so on. When things get very difficult, I go for counselling to help work through emotions such as anger, frustration and anxiety – emotions that I am allowed to feel and express, seeing as I’m under no obligation to be grateful for my ‘gift’. It works – and there is no need to believe in anything supernatural.

Some people may argue, what if all you have is god? What if there’s no partner, no family or friends, no garden, no counsellor etc… just suffering? My response to that is, you may as well ask what if you’re stranded on a desert island and all you have for company is a volleyball with a face drawn on it? An imaginary friend is an imaginary friend, whether it’s Wilson from Castaway or Jesus, and just because comfort is derived from them when a person is desperate, it doesn’t mean that they must therefore really exist, and, more importantly, it doesn’t mean that the belief in their actual existence should be coddled and supported at the expense of real help.

Surprising as it may seem, I don’t actually blame people for grasping at straws when they are suffering chronic illness: when my first symptoms began several years ago, I did this myself by indulging in some alternative medicine. (It’s not something I would do now.) We also live in a society that encourages belief in the supernatural, that tells us faith is a virtue, that approves of the false and contradictory ‘comfort’ of religious practice. Perhaps, with more emphasis on reason in our society, people would react to and cope with their illnesses more effectively, as they realised that they weren’t being punished, or tested, or expected to find their suffering meaningful.

These days, having been accurately diagnosed, I am lucky enough to receive the help and support of excellent trained medical professionals; sadly, several years of illness have taught me that medicine is a woefully underfunded discipline, as is social care, which provides assistance for those living with ill health and disability. Real help for chronically ill people does not involve prayer and false hope, it involves money being made available for training of new doctors, for research into conditions and development of new treatments, for the provision of disability aids, for the financial support of sick people and their carers. Whenever a new research paper is published about my condition, I get a real, true sense of hope and comfort from the knowledge that people are working to help me and others like me. It is a wonderful feeling that no god could ever give me. Conversely, I get pissed off whenever I read about the church’s ‘charitable’ tax-exempt status, or the newest faith school opening, funded by public money: because religious institutions are draining money away from real-world, scientifically proven ways to help people.

It is ironic, furthermore, that in order to get to the clinic of one of my specialist consultants at UCLH in London, I have to go past the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, where patients are given publicly-funded vials of water as placebos for their ailments. Enough said, really.

Religion, and indeed anything supernatural, is not truly a comfort in hard times: in the long run it actually makes hard times harder, and often more complicated and confusing. This, added to the fact that I refuse to compromise my reason, is why I have never turned to god in all the years I’ve been ill, and I never will.  Atheism and skepticism are not luxuries: they are necessities.

[1] Paul J Donoghue & Mary E Siegel, Sick and Tired of Feeling Sick and Tired (2000), pp xvii-xviii

[2] Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position (1995), pp 39-42

In a 2003 essay for Daedalus, Christopher Hitchens wrote that, “religious absolutism makes a good match with tribal feelings and with sexual repression—two of the base ingredients of the fascistic style.”

There’s no doubt that repressed sexuality is a feature of most religions, and the cause of many an unhappy union made under god’s banner. But less often discussed is religion’s facilitative role to sexual perversions. The more fundamentalist the dogma, the sicker the stuff taking place in between the sheets.

Take the bacha baz of Afghanistan for instance. The bacha baz are men who take boys as lovers, or more accurately, as repeated rape victims. Over the years I’ve worked in Afghanistan, there has always been hushed gossip in dark corners about prominent, powerful men who keep boys, whom they literally own, as their personal sex slaves, some as young as nine years old. Or there are the late-night dancing parties where boys dressed as girls, smeared with make-up and bells jangling from their ankles, perform before their male-only audience before then being raped by one or more of the adults. The dancing boys of Afghanistan were the subject of a recent PBS documentary, which marks one of the first and only times the practice has been exposed candidly, or internationally.

Older men sleeping with younger boys is not an isolated occurrence, but an epidemic stretching so far back in time that it’s considered a widely accepted cultural practice. Joel Brinkley of The San Francisco Chronicle, in asking, “how did Afghanistan become the pedophilia capital of Asia?” reported recently that, “some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz”.

It is not a coincidence that the systemic sexual abuse of boys is most widespread in Afghanistan’s most religiously conservative areas, where contact between unrelated men and women is extremely restricted. Brinkley notes, “sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law.”

Women and girls are put strictly off limits to unrelated men until they are good and married- usually when they are still technically children (the average marriage age for girls in Afghanistan is 15 years), while the men are usually well into adulthood. In this waiting period, sexual activity nonetheless inevitably occurs among the bachelors, including sex with other men, incest, rape and abuse, visits to prostitutes and according to popular anecdote, bestiality.

An interpreter of mine once laughingly told me about his bed-ridden friend who was kicked in the shins by an annoyed donkey while in mid-zoophile coitus. He told the women of his family he had been in a car accident, but admitted to his close friends, unembarrassed, what had really happened. They all had a good laugh over it.

Let me pre-empt those who will accuse me of making Afghans out to be primitive and backward. This doesn’t only happen in Afghanistan, though it is happening there and let’s face that instead of being polite about it. Of course, not all or even most Afghans partake in such behaviour, nor sanction it. In any culture or place where you have excessive and bizarre rules dictating the kinds of relationships that humans can have with each other, you will find perversions beneath the thin front of sexual purity. You will find people acting out sexually in the cramped, seedy spaces left to them by the excessive rules of their culture.

The defenders of such systems will say that their society is organized in such a way as to protect women, to keep the society “pure”; or to stop the spread of sinful behaviour, defined as sexual relations outside of marriage.

This is nonsense. The systems exist for the sexual gratification of the abuser. The statutory rape of under-age girls in ‘celestial’ marriages in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for instance, allows aging men to do as they please to their child victims. Their church sanctions their behaviour, which would otherwise be considered abusive and abnormal. The Catholic Church, for all its blind obsession with sin and sexuality, gave clerics utter impunity for centuries to molest and rape children. And in many of Pakistan’s madrassahs, religious seminary boarding schools which served as dumping grounds for children from hungry, poverty-stricken families, boys were kept deprived of any female contact while they memorized a religious text in a language they didn’t understand, learned how to use small arms and rockets, and were routinely raped. All of this amounts to a very effective machine for churning out violent, unstable young killers. Cheryl Benard, in her 2001 book Veiled Courage, wrote of the devastating impact on these young rape victims whose untreated trauma and rage was easily channeled into the violence they were then sent out to commit as jihadists.

An environment overrun by religious extremism helps sanctions forms of sexual abuse like bacha baz. Sex is taboo, so victims find nowhere to turn after their traumatic experience. The dictates of the religious establishment keep the adherents strictly divided into grossly unequal categories of the hunter and the prey. Sexual violence spreads from generation to generation, as a whole society becomes complicit in the rot, by the silence that surrounds, and ultimately endorses it. It all amounts to a dynasty created and managed by perverts, whereby they’ve ingeniously preserved the unchallenged right to act out their every wacko fantasy on the otherwise unwilling, all under the guise of something sanctioned by god. Decrepit, horny men need not earn the attraction of their object of desire; they can simply take it.

Religious fundamentalists are not god-fearing, devoted or sacrosanct. They’re just perverts.