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.