Author: Ophelia Benson

The Telegraph, with slightly cruel mockery, has poor Sebastian Faulkes saying in the headline that he really can’t put down the Koran – giving us the irresistible impression that he can’t put it down because he has been wired to explode if he does.

While we Judaeo-Christians can take a lot of verbal rough-and-tumble about our human-written scriptures, I know that to Muslims the Koran is different; it is by definition beyond criticism. And if anything I said or was quoted as saying (not always the same thing) offended any Muslim sensibility, I do apologise – and without reservation.

Well there you go. Some people (though not all ‘Judaeo-Christians,’ whatever the hell they are) can put up with criticism and joking about their ‘scriptures’ but Muslims have defined the Koran as beyond criticism and so everyone else has to defer to the way Muslims have defined the Koran, or else. Or else what? Faulks of course is careful not to say, but we know he has it in mind, poor bastard. Anyway – however obvious it is, it’s still worth pointing out that the fact that People X have defined something as beyond criticism does not impose an obligation on all people in the world to agree with People X and not ever criticize the thing that has been defined as beyond criticism. It’s also worth pointing out that the whole idea is pathetically childishly stupid and a hindrance to reasonable thinking.

One of the books I read as background to my novel was Islam: A Short History, by Karen Armstrong. She writes movingly of how Arabs in the Peninsula longed for a voice-hearing prophet of their own to match the many Jewish prophets, famed for hearing the voice of God over many generations…

Yeah, that’s very moving – but can we move on now? Fourteen centuries later? We have other forms of entertainment now – we can even hear voices! Arabs in the peninsula have other things to do, we have other things to do, everyone has other things to do – so can we get over it already?

I find this quite funny – The Smiling Ones, apparently pleased by the reception of that LA Times article, have offered it up all over again, this time at Comment is Free. What’s funny about it is that the comments are scathing. This line is not working for them.

Just one sample out of many:

I’m amazed by the sheer hostility shown by the Guardian to the “New Atheists”. I don’t agree with everything Dawkins says but I would rate him well above pseudo- intellectuals such as Karen Armstrong and her laughable thesis that religion is about practice rather than belief (contradicted by the Nicene Creed). However the Guardian prefers the “spiritual” Armstrong over the rational Dawkins. Now we are being told that the best way to persuade people of the truth of evolution is for the “New Atheists” to shut up.

Why shouldn’t Atheists pronounce their beliefs in the marketplace of ideas? Dawkins, Dennett & co. have some very powerful ideas and some very powerful arguments. Their arguments have won on the internet because their opponents arguments are quite often rubbish. Why should we sustain rubbish arguments just for the sake of appeasing the religious types?

Why indeed? Your guess is as good as mine.

Karen Armstrong says God is like a melody.

Every day, music confronts us with a mode of knowledge that defies logical analysis and empirical proof…Hence all art constantly aspires to the condition of music; so too, at its best, does theology.

If you say so (and of course ‘at its best’ covers a multitude of sins – at my best I am a paragon of wit and virtue, but my best is oddly elusive). But that is (I can’t help assuming) because the ‘the’ in ‘theology’ is so flexible, so adaptable, so shape-shifting, so all things to all people, that it makes just as much sense to say that theology at its best aspires to the condition of poetry, or rock climbing, or cookery, or sex, or being drunk. In any case theology at its less than best seems to aspire to the condition of a strange combination of story-telling and scholarship. It makes stuff up but uses scholarly-looking language to talk about the stuff it makes up. If Armstrong wants to think that’s a kind of art form…I’m not going to send her a telegram urging her to stop.

A modern sceptic will find it impossible to accept Steiner’s conclusion that “what lies beyond Man’s word is eloquent of God”. But perhaps that is because we have too limited an idea of God.

Right…because God is neither this nor that, neither here nor there, neither short nor tall, neither immanent nor transcendent, neither animal nor vegetable (I can go on like this all day) – God is not something that can be pinned down by our puny words nor grasped by our tiny little minds – God is not a toaster nor my left foot, neither is God Chekhov nor is it J K Rowling. God is not a lug wrench, nor a rainy afternoon, nor a blue whale with a headache, nor a petunia, nor a song, nor a sneeze – yet God contains elements of all those – and then again –

In other words it is always possible to spin words about God (or to be silent about God and consider that a branch of theology) – but we live in the real world, where people think God is a literal person who makes rules that we have to obey (no condoms – flog that woman for showing some hair at the edge of her hijab – kill all the infidels – no stem cell research for you – don’t do any work on Saturday and that includes flipping a light switch – slaughter that goat by cutting its throat in the approved way and no other). The world would be a much better place (which is not to say it would be perfect – no, the “new” atheists don’t think everything would be perfect if religion vanished) if the Armstrong idea of God were the only idea of God – but that’s not how it is. She seems to be telling us we’re confused about what God really is – but that’s a mug’s game. Nobody knows ‘what God really is’ – whatever anyone says is made up, so it seems futile to try to say one version is right while another is wrong.

The more recent atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris is rather different, because it has focused on the God developed by the fundamentalisms, and all three insist that fundamentalism constitutes the essence and core of all religion.

No they don’t. They insist that the God that makes rules and answers prayers and prefers one set of people to another set of people and hates atheists is the God that most people mean by the word ‘God’ and the one that the rest of us have to deal with. They insist that pretending that real religion is really something much more sophisticated and ethereal and poetic and music-like and loving and compassionate is just delusional. They insist (to the extent that they insist anything) that it is the bossy intrusive punitive kind of religion that causes problems and so it’s no good trying to pretend it out of existence.

Because “God” is infinite, nobody can have the last word.

See – there you go: how does she know God is infinite? How does she know God doesn’t expire in 357,941,826,098 years plus a week? How does she know God isn’t the size of ten universes laid end to end and not one bit bigger? How does she know God isn’t smaller than a bread box? She doesn’t – but she says things as if she does (and putting scare quotes on “God” won’t save her – we can still see that she’s saying things).

But a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred was a constant theme not only in Christianity but in the other major faith traditions until the rise of modernity in the West.

Well if Armstrong can persuage people to go back to that there deliberate and principled reticence about God – I for one will send her a big thank-you letter complete with coupon for a large pizza with 3 toppings for $8.99.