Author: Ophelia Benson

Good old religion, well-known source of every virtue.

Since a Ugandan MP proposed the death penalty for some gay people, homophobia has been on the rise in other parts of Africa…Monica Mbaru, from the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, describes these crackdowns as a ripple effect from the Uganda situation. She says many African leaders and communities remain hostile to gay people because of pressure from religious leaders. “Our politicians have great respect for religious leaders and are careful not to disagree with them, especially not on homosexuality,” she says.

So a bloc of people is tormented and hounded and persecuted for no good reason, on the say-so of ‘religious leaders.’

One of the most extreme examples of religious leaders advocating repression of gay people is Ugandan Pastor Martin Ssempa…In Kenya, too, religious leaders have been at the heart of anti-gay campaigns. In a statement last week, US-based Human Rights Watch quoted witnesses as saying Christian and Muslim leaders had joined together to call for communities to “flush out gays”.

Oh dear – well maybe the Templeton Foundation could set up an Institute to promote the intersection between religion and not persecuting people for no good reason, and then everything would get better.

Or perhaps there’s no need for that, perhaps it’s enough for the Catholic church to do more to lecture everyone on how to be good.

The Church says society will rediscover its ability to trust by practising virtue. It outlines the importance of marriage for couples, and says the country has had “an expansion of regulation”…The report goes on to say that trust has been “severely eroded”. It added: “Few need reminding of how major institutions have failed to live up to their calling.

It cites MPs and banks and even (belatedly) itself – but its own rather spectacular and protracted failure to live up to its ‘calling’ does not give it the slightest pause – it goes right on assuming it has possession of the moral high ground and the duty to lay down the law from that elevation. It doesn’t seem to grasp that among people who pay attention, it has no moral standing whatsoever. The Catholic church saying ‘Be good’ is exactly like the Mafia saying ‘Be good’ – it’s a harsh and horrible joke. The Catholic church has no grounds for claiming that it even knows what ‘being good’ is – the Catholic church is a hideously confused institution that officially considers homosexuality a terrible ‘sin’ and energetic abuse of children a mere byproduct not worth mentioning. It is not the place to go for lectures on morality.

There is a view, however minority, that Chris Mooney is a man more sinned against than sinning – that he is a victim, the object of an unfair onslaught of criticism from a bunch of internet bullies. His co-author (not very surprisingly) takes that view.

Needless to say, while I was not surprised at the response to Chris’ announcement, I am extremely dismayed. Discussion of each post is anticipated, but baseless personal attacks demonstrate the trouble with blogging…In just the past few years, we’ve watched the number of science bloggers swell, while the tone of much of the commentary changed. Most disheartening, the relationships between bloggers fractured across once cohesive networks as small friendly communities chose sides in a growing culture war.

I’ve taken a robust (to put it one way) position on this particular war, so I am subject to the usual confirmation bias, so keep that in mind, but my view is that Chris is not a victim here. Here’s why.

It is because Chris picked a fight, and he picked it not just on The Intersection but also in Unscientific America and in many mainstream media outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, and National Public Radio. He said some very harsh things, and some of them were incomplete or exaggerated or both. This by itself is enough to show that he is not a victim – the fact that he initiated the ‘culture war’ and the fact that he has access to major media, or at least he did for a few months after the book was released. It’s not really convincing to claim that he is a victim when he has far more access to major media than his putative victimizers do, and when he’s been using that access to say harsh and not entirely accurate things about his putative victimizers, in some cases before any of them had done any of this putative victimizing.

Now, he comes by the access honestly – he has it because he wrote a best-seller, and a good one. That’s fine. I don’t in the least begrudge him the access as such (I know, big of me); I begrudge the use he’s been making of it lately.

Sheril complains of ‘baseless personal attacks’ – but then she should address herself to Chris first of all, and indeed to herself, since she co-wrote Unscientific America. Or to put it another way, she should consider the possibility that the personal attacks are actually not baseless – that people accuse Chris of saying things that he really has been saying. She complains of a ‘culture war’ – but then she should ask herself why she and Chris elected to set one off. The ‘new’ atheists are not the Gavrilo Princip here – we didn’t shoot no Archduke.

And then, once the Archduke was shot, we’re not the ones who refused to discuss anything. We’re not the ones who kept just issuing unilateral declarations while steadily refusing to let the ambassadors come in and discuss. We’re not the ones who told some ambassadors they couldn’t even set foot across the frontier. So…all in all, I just don’t believe that Chris and Sheril are victims; I think they’re agents.

A little more on Monsieur Poisson. I know – it’s silly – it’s a waste of time – it’s just ol’ Stash – who cares. But it’s also the New York Times, albeit only its blog, and ol’ Stash is a Name, and it’s interesting to notice how pervasive his tricksiness is. There is tricksiness in every paragraph, and often in every sentence. It’s interesting that a reputable academic allows himself to be so…disingenuous. He sets up a strawman version of ‘secular reasons’ in the first sentence and then gives variations on it throughout the rest of the article – thus vitiating the whole piece.

A somewhat less stringent version of the argument permits religious reasons to be voiced in contexts of public decision-making so long as they have a secular counterpart: thus, citing the prohibition against stealing in the Ten Commandments is all right because there is a secular version of the prohibition rooted in the law of property rights rather than in a biblical command.

It’s interesting that he chooses stealing – when the more obvious choice would of course be murder. But with stealing he gets to frame it as a matter of property rights, whereas if he chose murder he would be forced to admit that there are secular reasons that do not boil down to economics. He doesn’t want to admit that, and by god he never does admit it.

Whether the argument appears in its softer or harder versions, behind it is a form of intellectual/political apartheid known as the private/public distinction: matters that pertain to the spirit and to salvation are the province of religion and are to be settled by religious reasons; matters that pertain to the good order and prosperity of civil society are the province of democratically elected representatives and are to be settled by secular reasons.

‘Secular reasons’ pertain just to ‘good order and prosperity’ – nothing more ambitious than that. No equality, no freedom, no rights, just useful but minimalist order and prosperity.

And that is how he gets himself to the all-important claim:

This picture is routinely challenged by those who contend that secular reasons and secular discourse in general don’t tell the whole story; they leave out too much of what we know to be important to human life.

Well naturally – if secular reasons and secular discourse were as Fish described them, I too would contend that they leave out too much of what we know to be important to human life. But secular reasons and secular discourse are not as Fish describes them! His description is grotesque – he seems to have secular reasons and secular discourse confused with the most autistic kind of economics. Or rather, he seems to be pretending he does – I doubt that he is really as confused as he pretends to be.

He goes on doing the same thing until the end, naturally, but I won’t bother quoting every place he does it; it’s obvious enough.