Author: Ophelia Benson

Norm commented on Julian’s atheism piece a couple of days ago, and when I read it my attention snagged on another claim in Julian’s article.

For me, atheism’s roots are in a sober and modest assessment of where reason and evidence lead us. That means the real enemy is not religion as such, but any kind of system of belief that does not respect these limits on our thinking. For that reason, I want to engage with thoughtful, intelligent believers…

Hmm. I’m not sure what that means. Are thoughtful, intelligent believers ones who respect the limits on our thinking set by soberly assessing where reason and evidence lead us? But if they are, then are they really believers? If they’re not, are they really thoughtful and intelligent?

I think there’s a lurking and unacknowledged oxymoron there – or maybe it’s an elision. Believers can be thoughtful and intelligent but with an exception carved out for their belief. Believers, as such, aren’t thoughtful and intelligent all the way down. That’s in the nature of the word. It would sound odd to say ‘I want to engage with thoughtful, intelligent, credulous people,’ but believers are by definition credulous. To the extent that they are credulous – they’re not thoughtful and intelligent enough.

This is perhaps another case where the special status of religion confuses things. It would sound odd to say ‘I want to engage with thoughtful, intelligent astrologers’ – or homeopaths or Wiccans or Holocaust deniers. In those cases we would recognize from the outset that there had to be a big hole in the thoughtfulness and intelligence in question, but we’re more reluctant to see it in the case of religion.

The background idea seems to be that the two are in balance – that thoughtful intelligent believers and unbelievers are much the same, they just happen to differ on this one point. But that’s wrong. Believers are making a mistake that non-believers don’t make. They’re making a mistake even if there is a god, because we have no real evidence that there is a god, so it’s a mistake to take anyone’s word for it on the basis of nothing.

Irshad Manji is an example of the thoughtful intelligent believer who is nonetheless not thoughtful enough, because she says proudly that her faith in Allah is unshakeable. That’s not thoughtful, it’s the reverse of thoughtful. I think Manji is terrific in a lot of ways – but that does nothing to patch over the hole in her thinking.

Not to worry – sharia is lovely once you get used to it.

“Swat is the start and it is a test of the religion and the system and the law. It is a step forward. Give it time and you will see this is what people want,” Muslim Khan, a charismatic English-speaking Taleban leader tells me.

Will you? How much time? And which people? Does he really mean people? Or just men.

In return for peace the Taleban can administer the region, run Sharia courts, ban women from marketplaces, outlaw music shops and stop girls older than 13 going to school.

And ‘people’ will like that as long as you give it enough time. Let’s say about five centuries; by then all memory of freedom and rights will be stone dead, and ‘like’ will mean the same thing as ‘know no alternative to’ and then the prediction will be true.

It is hard to gauge support for the movement in Swat. Dissent has been suppressed but a population disillusioned by years of fighting and ineffectual government can at least get on with their lives.

No, they can’t. Not if they’re girls over the age of 13 they can’t. Not if they’re women they can’t – unless you think it’s possible to get on with one’s life when one is not allowed to go to the market or much of anywhere else. They can (perhaps) get on with small impoverished parts of their lives, but they certainly can’t ‘get on with their lives’ in any sense we would recognize.

Not good.

For the first four decades of Israel’s existence, the army — like many of the country’s institutions — was dominated by kibbutz members who saw themselves as secular, Western and educated. In the past decade or two, religious nationalists, including many from the settler movement in the West Bank, have moved into more and more positions of military responsibility…“The officer corps of the elite Golani Brigade is now heavily populated by religious right-wing graduates of the preparatory academies,” noted Moshe Halbertal, a Jewish philosophy professor…Those who oppose the religious right have been especially concerned about the influence of the military’s chief rabbi, Brig. Gen. Avichai Rontzki, who is himself a West Bank settler…He took a quotation from a classical Hebrew text and turned it into a slogan during the war: “He who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful.”

Well that’s an interesting bit of casuistry. To more rational people it seems more likely that people who are cruel to the cruel will end up being cruel in general.

Rabbi Rontzki’s numerous sayings and writings have been making the rounds among leftist intellectuals. He has written, for example, that what others call “humanistic values” are simply subjective feelings that should be subordinate to following the law of the Torah. He has also said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath, when work is prohibited but treating the sick and injured is expected, is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred.

Pretty stuff.

Mr. Halbertal, the Jewish philosopher who opposes the attitude of Rabbi Rontzki, said the divide that is growing in Israel is not only between religious and secular Jews but among the religious themselves…The religious left also rejects the messianic nature of the right’s Zionist discourse, and it argues that Jewish tradition values all life, not primarily Jewish life. “The right tends to make an equation between authenticity and brutality, as if the idea of humanism were a Western and alien implant to Judaism,” he said. “They seem not to know that nationalism and fascism are also Western ideas and that hypernationalism is not Jewish at all.”

Sounds unpleasantly familiar, doesn’t it – as if Hamas and Rontzki deserve each other.

Right so the French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat has won ‘the Templeton Prize’ which is awarded annually to someone who contributes to something called ‘affirming life’s spiritual dimension.’ What does that mean? I haven’t the slightest fucking clue. I don’t think anyone has. I think it just means something like ‘not being mean and boring like those horrible atheists’ – or ‘not saying people are made entirely of metal’ – or ‘liking the pretty rainbows.’ But that of course still doesn’t mean I have a clue what it means, because meaning something like something isn’t the same as actually meaning something, and I don’t suppose the Templeton Foundation stands up in all its pomp and hands a prize worth many dollars to someone actually for liking the pretty rainbows, in so many words – so I still don’t know what it actually, really, when you nail it down, means by it.

Neither, it would appear, does Mark Vernon. He’s remarkably careful to avoid saying anything precise about it.

The bizarre nature of quantum physics has attracted some speculations that are wacky but the theory suggests to some serious scientists that reality, at its most basic, is perfectly compatible with what might be called a spiritual view of things…For [D’Espagnat], quantum physics shows us that reality is ultimately “veiled” from us. The equations and predictions of the science, super-accurate though they are, offer us only a glimpse behind that veil. Moreover, that hidden reality is, in some sense, divine.

See what I mean? Not exactly anything you can hold him to. The theory suggests to some serious scientists that reality, at its most basic, is perfectly compatible with what might be called a spiritual view of things. That’s a lot of hedges – five in one clause, and then ending up with the perfectly meaningless ‘a spiritual view of things.’ Oooooooooh, really? The theory suggests that reality might be compatible with what might be called a spiritual view of things? Ooooooh, wow, that changes my whole view of everything, which has been turned upside down and inside out and every which way and is now unrecognizable. Or to put it another way, big woop – anything might be compatible with ‘a spiritual view of things.’ Unless of course Mark Vernon really does mean something precise and (say) falsifiable by ‘a spiritual view of things,’ but I think if he had he would have said so.

But no matter, because after some more pious waffle about a veil and a glimpse, we get to the nub of the thing, which is that ‘that hidden reality is, in some sense, divine.’ Ah. Ah yes. Quite. But – in what sense, exactly? ‘In some sense, divine’ really covers an awful lot of territory. It covers rum raisin ice cream, just for one thing. But surely the Templeton Foundation wouldn’t go giving some French physicist large amounts of dollars just for saying rum raisin (or cassis or abricot or noisette) ice cream is divine. Would it? But it would give them to him for saying something that boils down to ‘that hidden reality is, in some sense, divine,’ only with equations. Do you sense a certain amount of obscurantism here? A whiff of the old hocus pocus? Because I do. I think they’re conning us – or themselves, or both. I think they think d’Espagnat said something really deep, and spiritual, without having any idea what it is. But that’s okay, because whatever it is, it’s compatible with something else, so no worries.