Author: Ophelia Benson

Yet more astonishingly illiberal bilge, this time from the “rabbinical adviser” of the Jewish Society at Yale – at Yale, generally considered a liberal university in all senses of the word. Yet here is what he has to say:

The president of the United States, like all citizens of this great country, has the right to follow the religion of his or her heart and conscience. As long as our leader pursues peace and justice through faith in the one G-d of us all, a believing president should not only be tolerated but welcomed.

Oh. So if “our leader” fails to have “faith in the one G-d of us all” then an unbelieving president should not be tolerated, let alone welcomed; is that it? Well obviously that is it; that’s the logic of the sentence. So Shmully Hecht really does think we do and should live in a theocracy.

Faithlessness and nihilism are the greatest threats to humanity, and a leader who believes in nothing, or establishes a religion to serve himself or his state, becomes Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot; who together murdered and starved over one hundred million human beings.

That’s an extraordinarily outrageous thing to say. The guy is simply asserting that any head of state who does not believe in “God” inevitably becomes a Hitler or Pol Pot – inevitably becomes the kind of person who murders and starves people by the millions. And this revolting, sinister crap is published by the Washington Post – not the Washington Times, but the Post.

Freedom of religion…was not established to advance secularism, as is sometimes implied, but rather to allow diverse faith to flourish unhindered.

That’s a slightly more elevated way of saying “freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion,” a favorite of Joe Lieberman’s among others, and it is of course complete crap. Freedom of religion decidedly does include the freedom to have no religion, and secularism is precisely the medium in which diverse religions can flourish.

In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower, who was born a Jehovah’s Witness and baptized as a Presbyterian, reaffirmed the importance of faith in this country when he oversaw the addition to our Pledge of Allegiance the crucial words “under G-d.”

Well, no, the words were “under God”; but anyway, so the fuck what? It was 1954, the height of brainless anti-communism and reactive patriotheism, so there was a surge of state-sponsored theism which should have been ruled unconstitutional. We’re not required to collapse in awe at the idea now.

And people wonder why gnu atheists are so gnu. It’s because of guys like this one.

Guest post by Eric MacDonald

Take the point that he makes just at the end, where he speaks of Jeremiah’s idea of god making constant adaptations. He speaks of the vessel broken in the potter’s hands, and then he says this:

This is the story of Israel: the vessel was broken, the covenant was spoiled, and God made something beautiful by fashioning it into a pot shaped around the Jew named Jesus.

Notice how he simply runs the Jewish scriptures and the Christian Jesus together, without acknowledging the theft, without even acknowledging that Jesus has nothing to do with Jeremiah’s potter, nor with the story of Israel. That was a Christian structure built on Jewish foundations, a clear act of plagiarism.

But then he goes on in the same arrogant vein to say:

This is your story. Your life was spoiled, your pot was cracked, your hopes were broken, your plans were ruined; and God the potter made something that could never have been out of something that should never have been.

No, I can tell Dr. Wells my story. My story is of a life that was spoiled and hopes that were broken and plans ruined, not by acts of sinfulness, but by the capriciousness of life, the contigency of our brief and uncertain stay. And if a god is in charge of this, then he made something that should never have been out of something that could have been.

Just one more quote:

In science Christians can find a pattern, and a logic, with analogies and parallels to the very purpose of God. They can see depth, and complexity, and diversity, and simplicity, that together reflect the activity and character of God.

This is all fantasy, of course. But let me respond to these words with the anguished words of C.S. Lewis. Not many people quote these words, because they believe that Lewis took them all back at the end of the book. But you can’t take words like these back. Of course, he does wave his magic wand around, and supposes that he has solved the problem, but you can’t solve problems like this with magic wands. There is no magic, and Lewis was not a magician, despite The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

The book is A Grief Observed. Lewis’ wife had just died in great pain. She had cancer of the bone. He asks himself the question:

Why should the separation [of lover and beloved] … which so agonizes the lover who is left behind be painless to the lover who departs? ¶ ‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God.

It’s Epicurus’ old conundrum, of course. But Lewis doesn’t solve it. He makes it clearer. If pain here is consistent with God’s love, then there can be no guarantee that, if we go to be with God, there will be no more pain there. God’s goodness is consistent with it after all. That’s the way that evidence works. That’s the way that science uses evidence. Dr. Wells doesn’t get to use it in a different way. If the character of God is shown, as Wells says, in the world that science reveals to us, then God is as cruel and capricious as the world is. It’s just that simple, and if he can’t see that, then he doesn’t understand it either.

In fact, the world without science is crueller and much more uncertain. It was not God’s intervention that made things better. Things only started to get better, and then, of course, only relatively better, when science began to unlock the secrets of the natural world. To suppose that there is any useful relationship between religion and science is a simple dream, a theological fantasy.

That’s why Wells’ comment about the arts and philosophy is so silly. Whereas theology certainly has no foundation, philosophy and literature and the arts do. Wells simply misunderstands the scientific critique of religion. Science doesn’t dismiss the arts or philosophy or so many other things that enrich human life. These things can be dealt with critically. We can seek to understand how and why music or literature or poetry moves us and makes us more fully human, and there are critical disciplines which address themselves to these questions. But religion is the one thing that has no critical basis, nothing that we can point to, nothing that we can use to give it determinate shape and meaning. Religious literature or music or architecture can be enjoyed. We can analyse it and assess its value and profundity. But religion itself is mere froth on the surface of the beautiful things that religious people have created. They are human things, like novels and poems, plays and movies, symphonies and concertos, and they play a part in the cultural life of human beings.

But the religious part of religion is empty. There is no god, and no gods. These were just imaginary beings created to account for the wonder of being alive in the flesh and conscious. So, Wells is right. We do want to expose religion’s pretences and its follies. It has no place at the university, except in so far as it can be studied scientifically, as a comparative anthropological or historical study, or in so much as it can be explained by psychology and cognitive science. Anyone who preaches such nonsense at a university should expect to be exposed for the charlatan that he so obviously is.

A guest post by Peter Beattie

Alom Shaha, of Why Science is Important fame, has a new piece in the Guardian, arguing that “angry atheists” are too quick to hurt the feelings of believers by implying they are stupid and should be more aware that they are capable of holding irrational beliefs too. Empathy, and how we say things, may be more important than what we say.

Superficially, it would be very hard to disagree with all this, and in fact none of the usual suspects in the “‘angry atheist’ brigade“–and I won’t even go there, nor into the tired “fanatical atheism can be as ugly as religious fanaticism” bit–to my knowledge ever have disagreed with it. Of course no one advocates calling people stupid, hurting their feelings, or being oblivious to one’s own fallibility. It’s just not as simple as Alom paints it.

First, the implication of stupidity. Two things: calling an idea stupid does not equal calling a person stupid; and even with the assertion that ‘Person A is stupid’, in most cases there is the clear implication that Person A is stupid for doing/saying/believing a specific thing, quite analogously to the Forrest Gump principle of ‘stupid is as stupid does’. All of us violate that principle at least once a day, but we still recognise that this doesn’t define us as a person.

Second, the hurt feelings. Again, two things: some people will be offended, no matter how mildly the opposition to their ideas is worded; and of course nobody offends  gratuitously, but it may serve a purpose if it is complemented by an explanation, i.e. an opportunity for an audience, and an invitation to them, to raise their intellectual game, in Richard Dawkins’s phrase. Say about PZ Myers, for example, what you will, but he always builds that bridge and extends that hand.

Third, the fallibility. A fair look at the most high-profile outspoken atheists will show you that one of the things that defines them (in this role) is their honest questioning: in his documentaries, Richard Dawkins tries to be understanding to a fault; Jerry Coyne’s discussions of other people’s arguments are as fair-minded and scrupulous as they come; Dan Dennett has taken the ‘principle of charity’ to new heights; and PZ, too, is open to have his mind changed—but only, and of course only, with good reason.

What this issue boils down to, I think, is that we’re looking at the problem the wrong side up. Granting people the right to be offended because they had their feelings hurt by an attack on their ideas opens the door to all manner of infringements upon free speech. If we actually want to raise our (and other people’s) intellectual game—and in a progressive society, how can we not want that?—we will have to show, educate people about, and advocate a different approach towards contentious issues. PZ just now put it best when he said that such issues would simply go away “if a few people learned to shrug their shoulders and react rationally instead”.

So let’s try and be teachers about this instead of potential self-censors. And by all means, make the message as nice as you can while keeping it effective. But also keep this in mind: “Good experiences aren’t necessarily pleasant.”

I lifted this sermon preached at Duke last Sunday from Jerry. I’m always lifting items from Jerry. What can I tell you? He finds interesting stuff. There’s a lot of irritating nonsense in the sermon, so there are leftovers for me to work on.

It’s nice to have an actual sermon, as opposed to something written for a media outlet. It’s nice to get confirmation that clerics really do talk nonsense in their sermons without having to go to church to listen to them do it.

The last six years have witnessed the publication of a series of books, from a variety of authors, attacking religion with a virulence not seen for a long time. This movement has been called “The New Atheism.” It believes religion should no longer be tolerated but should be exposed, challenged and refuted at every opportunity, with a conviction founded on scientific certainty.

That’s not a leftover, but I have a couple of things to say about it. One, it’s offensively obtuse and partial and entitled. This “virulent” “series of books” amounts to about ten on a generous counting; the number of books attacking atheism with “virulence” is much much much greater than ten, yet this Reverend Sam Wells thinks the atheist books are an outrage while the anti-atheist books aren’t even worth noticing. In other words he has a blatant double standard (as do pretty much all the gnu atheist-haters). He simply assumes that a flood of religious and anti-secular books is perfectly routine and acceptable, while a tiny (though popular) blip of atheist books is something he gets to complain about.

Two, he is wrong and stupid and illiberal to claim that tolerance of religion excludes exposing and challenging it. He is wrong and stupid and illiberal to imply that tolerance of religion rules out exposing and challenging it. He is illiberal and rather bad to try to persuade other people of that.

The prophet Jeremiah describes God as a potter, handling and cherishing the clay, and making something beautiful out of clay that has been deformed or damaged. The Christian life begins when we realize that we are that clay.

But we aren’t that clay. We can’t “realize” we are that clay, because we aren’t. We aren’t clay at all, and we have no reason to think we are something that was handled and cherished by someone named “God.” That’s clearly supposed to pass as some kind of quasi-metaphoric claim but also as a quasi-factual one – otherwise the bit about the “Christian life” just makes no sense. We’re always being told that liberal believers don’t believe in the goddy version of “God” – but what else is God as a potter making us? It’s more literal than it sounds to people who have been trained to hear such things with an indulgent ear.

 The relationship between science and theology is like clay: it’s moist and full of potential, and if cherished should become something beautiful. But currently this clay is spoiled in our hands.

How could a (much less “the”) relationship between science and theology become something beautiful? What kind of something? They always say things like that, but they never spell out what they mean. What can theology offer to science?

It’s fascinating to ask, “Where do we come from?” – but isn’t it at least as interesting, and perhaps more urgent, to ask, “Where are we going?” Theologians at this point hold no naïve optimism that as a species or as a universe we’re intrinsically heading for candyland. We’re sinners, as much as we’ve ever been, and we’re no better or worse than our forebears or descendants. But Christian theology is committed to the notion of sudden, final intervention of God in history that brings time to an end and inaugurates an era of glory and fulfilment.

And candyland.

So, that’s what theology can offer to science, and that’s why science manages to curb its enthusiasm.

Paula Kirby says she was, at first, impressed by the pope’s letter to the Irish about the child-rape problem.

How many politicians or corporations have been able to bring themselves to say, ‘You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry’? I was impressed. (On reflection, perhaps more impressed than I should have been, given that statements of contrition trip lightly off the tongues of those who repeat them daily in Mass or in the Confessional, and are told that repentance is all that is required to release them from guilt.)

Exact, as they say in Sweden. The contrition sounded entirely empty and in fact insulting, to me, for that very reason, but then I’ve been soaked in the malfeasance of the Irish Catholic church for a few years now. Anyway Paula got over it as soon as she read further.

Yet this was offset by what followed, a bewildering ramble blaming the problem on the growing secularisation of Irish society and the resulting failure of Catholics to observe practices such as frequent confession, daily prayer and annual retreats. It tried to suggest that the sense of betrayal should be directed towards the church authorities in Ireland – creating the entirely misleading impression that those authorities had somehow acted off their own bat and had not simply been following instructions from the Vatican itself.

Didn’t it though. In sort it did what it always does; it failed to admit that the church itself as an institution had behaved criminally and sadistically, full stop. Reading Geoffrey Robertson QC’s The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse made sense of all that for Paula:

The answer, it turns out, is simple. The Vatican is not interested in crime. The Vatican is only interested in sin.

Sin is an offence against God: the victims are God, the church, and the soul of the sinner.

Just so, and this is why Karen Armstrong’s claim that compassion is at the heart of every great religion is such nonsense. No it isn’t. God is at the heart of every “great” religion (making Hinduism and Buddhism something other than “great,” which in this case is probably a compliment). God is at the heart, not compassion, and that means that what humans are supposed to be is above all obedient, not compassionate. It’s not an accident that “islam” means submission; it’s just surprising that it took so long.

This fixation on matters ‘spiritual’, this obsession with religious dogma and ‘sin’ rather than suffering and crime, and with ‘penance’ and ‘redemption’ rather than justice and concern for the victims, is deeply, inherently immoral. For how can there be morality without empathy? How can there be justice without redress for the victim? Under canon law, the law of the Vatican, which the Pope still insists is the only law that may be applied to his child-rapists, the perceived abuse of a wafer counts for more than the actual abuse of real, human, flesh and blood.

And they mean it. This isn’t some aberration, some temporary bit of reaction; this is what the Catholic church is.