Author: Ophelia Benson

From David Lodge’s novel Paradise News. The protagonist is a theologian who was once a believer but is not any more.

‘He sat at his desk and took out his notes on a book about process theology he was reviewing for Eschatological Review. The God of process theology, he read, is the cosmic lover. “His transcendence is in His sheer faithfulness to Himself in love, in His inexhaustibility as lover, and in his capacity for endless adaptation to circumstances in which his Love may be active.” Really? Who says? The theologian says. And who cares, apart from other theologians? Not the people choosing their holidays from the travel agent’s brochures…It often seemed to Bernard that the discourse of much modern radical theology was just as implausible and unfounded as the orthodxy it had replaced, but nobody had noticed because nobody had read it except those with a professional stake in its continuation.’ [p 29]

That’s good, isn’t it? The quoted bit sounds exactly like Terry Eagleton drivelling away about his left foot and Chekhov and toasters, and the commentary sounds exactly like – well, me, asking how the hell Terry Eagleton knows all that about ‘God’ and what it’s supposed to mean anyway.

And the good news is that now somebody has noticed, lots of people have, because Terry Eagleton and Karen Armstrong and Madeleine Bunting and other windbags have been telling us about it.

A bit more, later on. He’s musing on the Penny Catechism and reciting it to himself then gets creative.

‘When did you cease to believe in this God?

Perhaps when I was still training for the priesthood. Certainly when I was teaching at St Ethelbert’s. I can’t remember, exactly.

You can’t remember?

Who remembers when they stopped believing in Father Christmas? It’s not usually a specific moment – catching a parent in the act of putting your presents at the end of the bed. It’s an intuition, a conclusion you draw at a certain age, or stage of growth, and you don’t immediately admit it, or force the question, is there a Father Christmas? into the open, because secretly you shrink from the negative answer – in a way, you would prefer to go on believing in Father Christmas…

Are you equating belief in God with belief in Father Christmas?

No, of course not. It’s just an analogy. We lose faith in a cherished idea long before we admit it to ourselves. Some people never admit it.’ [p 47]

Quite.

Michael Rosch at Examiner suggest that Mooney and Kirshenbaum suffer from a problem he calls ‘the paradox of paradise’:

They call for a non-confrontational approach to things and desire an ideal world where everyone just gets along, but they themselves create conflict with their own critics because they realize their ideal world can’t co-exist with dissenting views. So those most advocating non-confrontationalism pick fights with those who disagree with their philosophy and see merit in certain conflicts. Hence the fact that in addition to criticizing Dawkins, M&K go after their other favorite targets, PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne, each of whom wrote scathing reviews of M&K’s book. So they gave your book bad reviews because they found your conclusions superficial and naive? Get over it already.

Actually in their case I think it’s not so much a paradox as just not noticing their own inconsistency. As several people have been pointing out, they’re saying something along the lines of ‘God damn it be nice and get along you miserable piece of crap!’ They’re talking about peace and harmony but they’re performing combativeness and truculence. But anyway, it’s the part about the ideal world being unable to co-exist with dissenting views that’s the kicker, I think. It’s sad and alarming that they don’t know this, but that really is the fascist dream. But it’s the liberal nightmare.

Thanks to Jerry Coyne for the link.

And here we go again.

Cowing under pressure from the Hindu Janjagruti Samiti (HJS), the police on Monday served notice on reputed Goan artist Subodh Kerkar to “desist from getting involved in such activities which may insult religious feelings or religious beliefs”. SP (North) Bosco George said Kerkar “should keep in mind the sentiments of the community and avoid creating a law and order problem. We will soon take a decision on whether or not the artist’s graphics hurt sentiments. If it is found to hurt religious sentiments, we will initiate legal action against him,” he said. HJS had petitioned the police last week alleging that Kerkar had published “drawings of Lord Ganesh in various positions”, thereby insulting religious beliefs.

So that’s how it is in India – it is, in practice if not in law, illegal to ‘insult religious feelings or religious beliefs,’ and the police can order people to ‘keep in mind the sentiments of the community’ and can make it their responsibility to ‘avoid creating a law and order problem’ meaning not do anything which religious zealots might take amiss and might get violent about. If somebody draws something, ‘thereby insulting religious beliefs,’ then you call the cops.

What more is there to say?

Oh look, people are reading Does God Hate Women? in the rest of Europe. Someone in Sweden and someone in the Netherlands – in Trouw no less.

I can kind of tell that Elma Drayer in Trouw likes it – she calls it a hilarious pamphlet, which in my book means she likes it. If I’m not mistaken she likes the point we make about the Vatican’s justification for saying all clergy have to be male, which is that all Jesus’s disciples were male; we point out that they all spoke Aramaic, too, but that’s not a requirement for being a priest, and it’s not obvious why maleness should be either, apart of course from the fact that clerical males want to retain their monopoly. I see Jesus and all men and disciples and something about speaking Aramaic in there, so that must be what she’s referring to. But I know some of you out there are Dutch-speakers, so if you would like to translate for me, do go right ahead!

Are any of you Swedish-speakers? I’m not sure – I know there are some readers in Norway, and some Danish-speakers, but I’m not sure about Swedish. I have no idea what the Swedish review says – it probably hates it. Luther’s revenge.

Sound familiar?

The capitulation of Yale University Press to threats that hadn’t even been made yet is the latest and perhaps the worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism—particularly Muslim religious extremism—that is spreading across our culture.

Oh yes the capitulation to threats that haven’t even been made yet – that’s what happened with The Jewel of Medina, and it’s what seemed to be about to happen (but, happily, and to the credit of our publisher, didn’t) with Does God Hate Women?.

A book called The Cartoons That Shook the World, by Danish-born Jytte Klausen, who is a professor of politics at Brandeis University, tells the story of the lurid and preplanned campaign of “protest” and boycott that was orchestrated in late 2005 after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a competition for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. (The competition was itself a response to the sudden refusal of a Danish publisher to release a book for children about the life of Mohammed, lest it, too, give offense.) By the time the hysteria had been called off by those who incited it, perhaps as many as 200 people around the world had been pointlessly killed.

And Yale UP has decided not to publish the cartoons in the book, or any other images of Mohammed either. I have a high opinion of Yale University Press, but this is unfortunate, as is the explanation Hitchens quotes – ‘[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.’ No – as he points out, ‘all’ have lost track of the meaning of ‘instigate.’

If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it’s a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it’s a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it…After all, there are people who argue that women who won’t wear the veil have “provoked” those who rape or disfigure them … and now Yale has adopted that “logic” as its own.

In a turnabout which in other contexts is robustly condemned as blaming the victim, but in this context – well it depends on who is talking.

This is all rather like the witch-hunt against the “New” atheists, and the meta-witch-hunt against people who resist the witch-hunt against the “New” atheists. First the “New” atheists are called all sorts of names merely for doing something that ought to be perfectly legitimate and unremarkable, then when the “New” atheists retort, they get accused of a whole new round of crimes for having the audacity to retort to an unprovoked (uninstigated) attack. Heads I win tails you lose. Ho hum.

Would anyone be interested in volunteering to do a little webmastering for B&W? The reward would be B&W’s continued existence. Drop me a line if so.