Author: Ophelia Benson

Remember how the pope let us know how simply terrible he felt about what happened to those poor dear innocent children in Ireland? Remember how the Vatican said he shared the outrage, betrayal and shame felt by so many of the faithful in Ireland? Well, if that’s true, how does he explain an order he issued in 2001?

…an order ensuring the church’s investigations into child sex abuse claims be carried out in secret. The order was made in a confidential letter, obtained by The Observer, which was sent to every Catholic bishop in May 2001. It asserted the church’s right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood. The letter was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger…Lawyers acting for abuse victims claim it was designed to prevent the allegations from becoming public knowledge or being investigated by the police. They accuse Ratzinger of committing a ‘clear obstruction of justice’.

That’s the same fella, you see. The very same guy. In 2001 Ratzinger sent a secret letter to every Catholic bishop ordering them to keep the investigation of criminal activity against children secret until as much as ten years after the children were old enough to fend for themselves. The same guy. So in what sense can it possibly be true that he shares the outrage, betrayal and shame felt by so many of the faithful in Ireland? What’s he doing, dancing around the Vatican whacking himself on the bum shouting ‘who’s a naughty boy?!’ in the manner of Basil Fawlty?

I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s doing that or anything like it. I think he’s worrying about how to go on protecting the Vatican’s reputation, and pretty much nothing else. Why do I think that? Because it’s what he did in 2001, so why should we think he’s doing anything different now?

Ratzinger’s letter states that the church can claim jurisdiction in cases where abuse has been ‘perpetrated with a minor by a cleric’. The letter states that the church’s jurisdiction ‘begins to run from the day when the minor has completed the 18th year of age’ and lasts for 10 years. It orders that ‘preliminary investigations’ into any claims of abuse should be sent to Ratzinger’s office, which has the option of referring them back to private tribunals in which the ‘functions of judge, promoter of justice, notary and legal representative can validly be performed for these cases only by priests. Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret,’ Ratzinger’s letter concludes. Breaching the pontifical secret at any time while the 10-year jurisdiction order is operating carries penalties, including the threat of excommunication.

In other words Ratzinger simply declares that the church has jurisdiction over a serious crime and has the option of exercising that jurisdiction all by itself and in secret. Who knew churches had the power to do that?! Even the Vatican, which is a ‘state’ – but a state with, apparently, citizens anywhere on the globe in the form of priests. So priests have sovereign immunity and can molest children with impunity from secular law enforcement? I don’t think that’s actually legal doctrine – yet apparently Ratzinger can do that and get away with it. So far, anyway.

The letter is referred to in documents relating to a lawsuit filed earlier this year against a church in Texas and Ratzinger on behalf of two alleged abuse victims. By sending the letter, lawyers acting for the alleged victims claim the cardinal conspired to obstruct justice. Daniel Shea, the lawyer for the two alleged victims who discovered the letter, said: ‘It speaks for itself. You have to ask: why do you not start the clock ticking until the kid turns 18? It’s an obstruction of justice.’

And it is entirely inconsistent with the pope’s now pretending he gives a shit about the children who were the alleged victims. The pope is simply another self-protective boss-man shielding his organization. Crocodile tears simply add insult to injury.

I’m reading Decoding the Language of God: Can a Scientist Really Be a Believer? by George Cunningham, a retired geneticist. It’s an extended response to Francis Collins’s The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. It’s good stuff.

Cunningham asks some telling questions on page 65:

Collins finally gives up any claim of being a reasonable scientist when he says, “we may never fully understand the reasons” for suffering as part of God’s plan. What kind of God expects us to live according to a plan that makes no sense to us and is beyond our comprehension? What kind of God would give us a brain that can reason and follow logic then expect us to believe in and worship an irrational, unintelligible, or evil God?

Quite – that’s just about exactly what I said in my essay for 50 Voices of Disbelief. I said it at more length, because I think it’s absolutely crucial, and central.

God shouldn’t be testing our faith. If it wants to test something it should be testing our ability to detect frauds and cheats and liars – not our gormless credulity and docility and willingness to be conned. God should know the difference between good qualities and bad ones, and not be encouraging the latter at the expense of the former.

But then (we are told) “faith” would be too easy; in fact, it would be compelled, and that won’t do. Faith is a kind of heroic discipline, like yoga or playing the violin. Faith has to overcome resistance, or it doesn’t count. If God just comes right out and tells us, beyond possibility of doubt, that God exists, that’s an unworthy shortcut, like a sprinter taking steroids. No, we have to earn faith by our own efforts, which means by believing God exists despite all the evidence indicating it doesn’t and the complete lack of evidence indicating it does.

In other words, God wants us to veto all our best reasoning faculties and methods of inquiry, and to believe in God for no real reason. God wants us not to do what we do in all the rest of life when we really do want to find something out – where the food is, when the storm is going to hit, whether the water is safe to drink, what medication to take for our illness – and simply decide God exists, like tossing a coin.

I refuse. I refuse to consider a God “good” that expects us to ignore our own best judgment and reasoning faculties. That’s a deal-breaker. That’s nothing but a nasty trick. This God is supposed to have made us, after all, so it made us with these reasoning faculties, which, when functioning properly, can detect mistakes and obvious lies – so what business would it have expecting us to contradict all that for no good reason? As a test? None. It would have no business doing that.

A God that permanently hides, and gives us no real evidence of its existence – yet considers it a virtue to have faith that it does exist despite the lack of evidence – is a God that’s just plain cheating, and I want nothing to do with it. It has no right to blame us for not believing it exists, given the evidence and our reasoning capacities, so if it did exist and did blame us, it would be a nasty piece of work.

The tone is somewhat jokey, and I do think the whole idea is funny, but I’m also dead serious. That is exactly what I think and I also think it’s a killer objection – in the sense that a decent God just can’t be rescued from that observation. The whole set-up really is a cheat, and it can’t be seen as anything else. We do have faculties that work, and it is beneficial for us that they work, yet when it comes to God we are supposed to do the opposite of what we do the rest of the time. We are supposed to veto our own cognitive abilities and just believe things for no good reason. That’s backward. A decent God shouldn’t expect that kind of reversal. It’s a cheat and it’s also an insult – which is probably why we argumentative atheists get so riled at people like Collins. He’s a scientist himself, yet he endorses this reversal – this cheat and insult.

If you checked News today you may have noticed that I did a Q&A at Science and Religion. This is faintly interesting or amusing or both because back at the beginning of the month, a mere couple of weeks ago, I was pointing out the different language used there for three men on the one hand and one woman on the other hand. Well they’re good sports at Science and Religion; Heather Wax thanked me for my comments and invited me to do this Q and A. So I did.

I enjoyed doing it, because this question interests me. I’m interested in social pressure and expectations and how they can become internalized and taken for granted so that we don’t know they’re operating and we think we’re making up our own minds when in fact we’re influenced by what other people think we should be doing and saying and wearing, along with a thousand other things. Don’t go thinking I think I’m immune to that kind of thing, because I don’t at all. I know very well I’m not.

I also don’t object to that, given that the alternative is just to be completely random, and what good would that be? We’re all influenced by a million things, and most of that we wouldn’t be without – that’s why we read books and talk to each other, after all. We operate in a context and at a particular time, we admire some things and despise others, we do things and say things for reasons. It all has to come from somewhere. But – it’s as well to be aware that influence is influence, as opposed to thinking it’s just How Things Are and How They Have to Be.

The thing about women and aggression is that it may or may not be the case that women as such are averse to aggression, but it’s pretty obvious that a lot of people want women to be averse to aggression, in the sense of compliant, complaisant, not argumentative. That level of aversion to perceived aggression would be a huge handicap for women, so if we are in fact by nature that turned off by argument and disagreement, we should train ourselves to get over it. We shouldn’t embrace claims that we are so ‘nice’ and conflict-averse that we react to a few brisk words from Dawkins or Hitchens with squeals of horror. We should be tougher than that. That doesn’t mean we should be brutal or sadistic, it just means we should be able to play with the big kids without bursting into tears all the time. It means we should be grown ups.

I despise Joe Lieberman. I always have, but every time I hear about him again, I despise him more. Treacherous, self-satisfied, self-aggrandizing, self-admiring – happy to make millions of fellow-citizens worse off than they would otherwise be, just for the sake of his own preening smirking ego. What a sack of shit.