Author: Ophelia Benson

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.

Just for the sake of keeping track of the twins’ escalating malice and finger-pointing and vindictiveness, let’s have a look at something they teasingly call ‘A Call for Peace in the Science/Faith Battle’ (hahahaha that’s a good one when you see how they go about it). They wrote it in late July, touchingly, for a column at Beliefnet called ‘Science and the Sacred’ which is normally reserved for the boffins at BioLogos.

They start off by saying ‘the supposed “conflict” between science and religion’ is so unnecessary, but they don’t waste much time on saying that because they’d so much rather get down to saying how awful the “New” atheists are yet again. The latest ‘incarnation’ of the conflict is ‘particularly bitter and nasty,’ they say, mopping their streaming eyes. Then it’s down to business.

Today, the conflict pits the so-called “New Atheists”–Richard Dawkins, the science blogger PZ Myers, and many others–against not just conservative religious believers, but many others as well. For the New Atheists are willing to mix it up with anyone, even fellow atheists and agnostics, who question the need to repeatedly challenge the beliefs of the faithful, or to have an ongoing conflict over science and religion.

Who question the need? Hmmmmmmno – I don’t think most “New” atheists feel any need to ‘mix it up’ with people who just question things. Questioning is what the twins don’t do – the twins announce, and then when their announcements are themselves questioned, they ignore the questions and just repeat the announcement about ten more times. It’s at that point that the “New” atheists start to feel like ‘mixing it up,’ or at least, like pointing out how unwilling the twins are to back up their claims when asked.

There is so much important work to do, and in this context, how can it possibly help to have leading scientists and science defenders busy assaulting religious beliefs?

Let’s see…by making some alternatives to religious beliefs more widely and readily available, which would itself do some of that work that needs to be done? That’s how; one how, anyway.

Put simply, it can’t. So we decided to take a stand. It has cost us with some former allies…

Yes you see that’s just it – put simply, you don’t know whether it can or not, and you haven’t made a case, and just saying it – even simply – doesn’t make it so. And what you decided to take a stand on was the legitimacy of atheists saying atheist things, which you want to undermine and do away with, so your stand is a shitty stand, so it’s just too damn bad that it has ‘cost you’ with former allies. Anyway how did you expect former allies to react when you keep pointing your quivering fingers and calling us names in the mass media? With hugs and cups of hot chocolate?

[W]e said it strongly: The New Atheism has become a counterproductive movement, dividing us when we ought to be united…Atheism is a philosophy that goes beyond mere science–a philosophy that its adherents have every right to hold, but that will never serve as a common ground that we can all stand upon.

Note the fascism – we ought to be united. All of us, on everything, so dissident ideas – which divide us – must be stamped out. We have every right to hold the philosophy of atheism but we can’t all stand upon it so despite the every right thing we the all-knowing twins got busy trying to stamp it out just the same because we all have to stand on the same ground god damn it.

The common ground, instead, must be science in its broadest sense–a shared body of facts we can all agree about…

Ah yes – none of that pesky inquiring mind business, none of that testing and re-testing and peer review and trying to falsify and checking for bias – fuck no – science is a shared body of facts and we can all agree about it – in the wonderful Gleichschaltung to come.

The New Atheists, although loud, don’t represent all scientists or even all atheists–much less all of the country.

Indeed not – the “New” atheists, the loudmouth bastards, are a tiny minority, so let’s all get together and bully them. We hate minorities! We hate those god damn dissenting minorities that have the gall to not stand on the same ground with the rest of us! Start collecting your stones.

So all we need is for the “silent majority”–often diffident, often drowned out by the extremes on either side–to get louder.

And then we can drown those horrible dissenting monsters out. Hooray!

Next time you see the news media cover “science versus religion” as if it’s a battle, write or call in and say why that’s simplistic. The next time you find a scientist criticizing religious belief, email or call up and ask why it isn’t enough for us all to agree about the facts of science.

Yup – that’s the ticket – next time you find some atheist scientist talking sciencey atheism, get busy and harass that atheist scientist. Pretty soon they’ll all get tired of it and give up and we’ll have universal religious harmony from sea to shining sea. Doesn’t that sound peaceful?

Russell checks in on the twins.

I join with Jason and others in objecting to the metaphors of violence that the twins have taken to using whenever they characterise the actions or speech of the people they have constructed as opponents – all those horrible “New Atheists”, such as Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins. More specifically still, I object to the over-the-top language that has been used to describe the views of the small number of people who have, relatively recently, protested the more religion-friendly statements made on behalf of the the National Center for Science Education (NCSE).

Quite. I think the metaphors of violence have been steadily increasing in the twins’ articles lately; my guess is that that’s a reaction to the strong (but not violent) criticism they’ve been getting. It would be better if their reaction to criticism had been to try to make better arguments, or to admit that their arguments were feeble and take the whole thing back, or even to admit that their arguments were feeble and make more limited and tentative claims. But no. Instead they have simply repeated their claims more insistently and with even more pointing and naming (Dawkins! Coyne! Myers! Myers! Coyne! Dawkins!), and with the addition of increasingly violent metaphors. Let this be a lesson to us all. If we make large claims, and sensible people line up around the block to tell us why the claims are too large and too free of support, the thing for us to do is not, repeat not, just increase the volume or ratchet up the rhetoric or both.

They didn’t do enough thinking while they wrote the book. That’s their problem right there. It’s all too obvious when you read it – you think as you read, ‘Jeez, this is just thrown together, it’s like some sloppy piece of homework a kid does last thing on Sunday night and expects to get a crappy grade on.’ There is no thinking here. It’s very odd that they didn’t notice that – and that their editor didn’t notice it either.

Russell explains what Coyne and he and others have been soberly arguing about the NCSE and then adds:

Regardless whether we are right or wrong about this, we are entitled to express such a view, and it is in the public interest that we do so. The Colgate Twins have – and should continue to have – every legal right to exhort us to self-censorship, but such self-censorship is not in the public interest, and it is morally reprehensible for them to urge it … rather than simply addressing our arguments on their merits. The twins have moved the debate to a meta-level where our actual arguments are not addressed and we are forced to defend our very right to put them. This is a time-wasting distraction. Worse, we are presented as vicious and violent; we are demonised, rather than being treated as reasonable, peaceful people with a valuable role to play in public debate on serious issues.

When faced by this, we quite properly respond with anger and contempt. There is an appropriate time for those emotions – a time when they are healthy – and this is one of them. The twins have shown that they are not just reasonable people who happen to disagree with us on important issues. That would be fine. But they have no rational arguments relating to the issues of substance; instead, they are purveyors of hatred and bigotry who choose to demonise opponents. They choose to treat us as beyond the pale of substantive discussion of our ideas. Well, we are entitled to say what we think of them; we are also entitled to go on making our substantive points, patiently, civilly, and reasonably, as we have done throughout.

It will take more than these two privileged nitwits with bright, toothy smiles to get us to shut up.

Yeah.