Author: Ophelia Benson

Tariq Ramadan explains things.

My position on homosexuality is quite clear…Islam, as Christianity, as Judaism, as even the Dalai Lama…[are] not accepting of homosexuality, saying that this is forbidden according to the principles of our religion…My position, with homosexuals, is to say, “We don’t agree with what you are doing, but we respect who you are,” which I think is the only true liberal position that you can have.

Why no, actually, that’s not the only true liberal position you can have. On the contrary. The true liberal position would be to look carefully at those ‘principles of our religion’ and ask whether they are good principles or not, in secular, human, this-world terms. The true liberal position would be to know that the fact that something is ‘forbidden according to the principles of our religion’ is not necessarily a good reason to disapprove of it, much less to punish or ostracize or threaten it. According to the principles of some (and not a few) religions it is ‘forbidden’ for women to work, or travel without permission, or leave the house. Such ‘principles’ are bad principles and should not be obeyed. The true liberal position would be to realize that no one has managed to offer any real reason for homosexuality to be ‘forbidden’ or for Tariq Ramadan to be telling gay people that he doesn’t agree with what they are doing.

My position on the death penalty, stoning and corporal punishment is once again quite clear. There are texts in the Koran and in the prophetic tradition referring to this. But I have three questions to ask Muslim scholars around the world: What do the texts say, what are the conditions to implement [the punishment], and in which context? As long as you don’t come with a clear answer to this, it’s un-implementable, because what we are doing now is betraying Islam by targeting poor people and women.

Great, isn’t it? ‘There are texts’ – so he can’t (that is, won’t) just say it’s shit and we must have nothing to do with it. No. He has to palter and equivocate and do a little dance. He has to offer a delaying tactic as if it were some bravely defiant stance. Maybe for him in his situation it is, but substantively, it isn’t. Frankly he and his situation aren’t all that important. He may have his reasons for being reluctant to say that stoning is barbaric and should be rejected entirely everywhere in the world – but I don’t care whether he has reasons or not – the important thing is that he didn’t say it. He’s not helpful. He’s certainly not any kind of liberal.

Okay, so life is shit for women in Poland.

When Alicja Tysiac became pregnant in February 2000, three eye specialists told her having another baby could put her eyesight at serious risk. But neither the specialists nor her GP would authorise an abortion. After giving birth later that year, Ms Tysiac suffered a retinal haemorrhage and feared she [might] go blind. She now wears glasses with thick powerful lenses but she cannot see objects more than a metre and a half (5ft) away.

Yeah, so? If she didn’t want to go blind she shouldn’t have gotten pregnant! Not in Poland anyway.

Susan Haack makes a very interesting point in ‘Irreconcilable Differences? The Troubled Marriage of Science and Law. She makes many such points, but one in particular grabbed my attention.

Because of its adversarial character, the legal system tends to draw in as
witnesses scientists who are in a sense marginal – more willing than most of their
colleagues to give an opinion on the basis of less-than-overwhelming evidence;
moreover, the more often he serves as an expert witness, the more unbudgeably
confident a scientist may become in his opinion. An attorney obligated to make
the best possible case for his client will have an incentive to call on those
scientists who are ready to accept an answer to some scientific question as
warranted when others in the field still remain agnostic; and sometimes on
scientists whose involvement in litigation has hardened their initially morecautious
attitudes into unwarranted certainty.

That indicates that good working scientists must form habits of not forming beliefs in general when the evidence is inadequate. Most of us probably don’t form such habits. We’re more used to thinking we’re supposed to choose one way or another. Forming the habit of remaining agnositc when there isn’t enough evidence to decide is quite a good thing. Of course there are some forced choices – but there are also plenty of optional ones.

The archbishop of Canterbury has (not for the first time) joined hands with people like Madeleine Bunting by telling the world how despicable reason is.

We understand ‘reason’ as a way of arguing and testing propositions – usually so as to become better at manipulating the world round us. Because religious faith is not a matter of argument in this way, it is then easy to conclude that faith and reason are enemies, or at least operating in different territory.

See that? The way he casually informs us that reason is usually understood as a way ‘to become better at manipulating the world’? It looks as if he’s been studying his feminist epistemology – science and reason are just about raping nature tra la la.

Bernard himself held to an older and richer understanding of reason as the way in which we shared in God’s vision of an ordered and connected world. You could not say that God was rational because he was good at arguing and came to well-supported conclusions: when theologians said that God was rational, they meant that he was consistent with himself and that out of his own understanding of the richness of his being he created a world of astonishing and beautiful diversity which still had a deep consistency about it.

That sounds pretty, as one would expect from an archbishop, but it doesn’t mean anything unless you already think there is someone called ‘God’ who fits that lavish description, and why would you think that?

The traditional Christian account of ‘rationality’ was bound up with becoming properly attuned to the patterns and rhythms of reality, as I put it a moment ago. And for St Bernard and the tradition he represents, the ultimate test of being reasonable was whether you understood what your place was in the universe. A reasonable person would grasp how humanity stood between the angel and the animal, how humanity was called to a very specific way of exercising the mind in relation to the will of God.

So in other words a reasonable person would be thoroughly confused by belief in all kinds of non-existent entities and meaningless concepts and arbitrary rules. So that’s why ‘the traditional Christian account of “rationality’” is such crap and why reasonable people prefer a better one.

Andrew Sullivan justifies the ways of god to human beings (though decidedly not to other animals) – by which I mean he says things about the ways of god to human beings (but definitely not to animals).

For me, the unique human capacity to somehow rise above such suffering, while experiencing it as vividly as any animal, is evidence of God’s love for us (and the divine spark within us), while it cannot, of course, resolve the ultimate mystery of why we are here at all in a fallen, mortal world. This Christian response to suffering merely offers a way in which to transcend this veil of tears a little. No one is saying this is easy or should not provoke bouts of Job-like anger or despair or isn’t at some level incomprehensible.

There’s a certain amount of caution there – ‘for me,’ ‘somehow,’ ‘offers a way.’ But the caution doesn’t make much difference to the fact that he’s just saying things.There’s some priestly vocabulary that’s supposed to make the things sound deep – unique human capacity; somehow rise above; divine spark within us; ultimate mystery; fallen, mortal world; Christian response to suffering; transcend this [vale] of tears – but priestly vocabulary is just that, and the sonorities remain just sonorities.

It’s interesting to wonder if even Sullivan would find it so convincing in the demotic. ‘The way I look at it, people’s knack for getting on top of all that stress, even though it’s still a huge pain in the ass, is evidence of God’s love for us (and the twinkle in our eye), even though of course it can’t tell us what we’re doing here in this shit-hole.’ My guess is that he wouldn’t, and that he wouldn’t write it that way because he would suspect that other people wouldn’t either. So out comes the sub-Wordsworthian jargon.

I was brought at one point to total collapse and a moment of such profound doubt in the goodness of God that it makes me shudder still. But God lifted me into a new life in a way I still do not understand but that I know as deeply and as irrevocably as I know anything. If this testimony is infuriating to anyone with a brain, then I am sorry. It is the truth as I experienced it. It is the truth as I experience it still.

But he doesn’t know it, because he doesn’t know it was God that lifted him. He knows that something did – he knows that he had an experience that felt like being lifted into a new life – and I can easily accept that that would be a hugely powerful and meaningful experience. But I can’t accept the claim that he knows the experience was God’s doing. Maybe he thinks he’s helping people by putting it that way. But doesn’t it occur to him that he might help more people by describing the experience as an experience without attributing it to a god? Leaving people free to think it was god if they wanted to and free to think it was human resilience if they wanted to. It might not sound as poetic, or even as consoling, but it would sound more possible.