Author: Ophelia Benson

What I’ll bother with instead is a little musing about the subject of hell and the afterlife and heaven, and how bizarre it all is.

Hell, for instance. Imagine a child of 4 eats a cookie after her mother told her not to, and her parents sentence her to be constantly tortured for the rest of her life as punishment. That idea looks quite gentle and benign compared to the idea of hell that is in some sense orthodox (though in what sense is not altogether clear to me, but of that later). We live a few decades, and then after that, if we are ‘sinners,’ we are tortured forever. It’s sadistic enough, but along with that, it doesn’t even make sense. What’s the point? And besides what’s the point, what’s the reason? What’s the reason for the grotesque lack of proportion?

What’s god supposed to be accomplishing by this? Not teaching, not reformation, not improvement – because it’s eternal. So, what then? Nothing makes sense except sheer unadulterated revenge, but revenge that goes beyond the wildest fantasies of human sadism. And it’s an all-powerful being who is doing this, so it’s not as if it’s a fair fight.

So the truth is that people who believe in hell believe in a god that is truly bottomlessly disgusting and loathsome. A god that inflicts utterly futile pointless useless suffering on sentient thinking animals forever and ever and ever. I don’t see how they can stand it. I really don’t. I don’t see why they don’t just curdle with horror.

And then heaven, and the afterlife…They make a nonsense of for instance the fuss about Terry Schiavo. What sense did that ever make? She wasn’t having much of a life here – and when she died she would go to heaven and have a much better life – so why were the fundamentalists so outraged at the prospect of releasing her from her useless body?

And if the objection to abortion is that the embryo has an immortal soul from the moment of conception – then what’s the problem? It already has its soul, so it can just go to heaven and be happy there. The good place is not earth, it’s heaven, so why is it supposed to be such a disaster if a fetus goes to heaven instead of here?

Also, what does I Corinthians 5 mean? What does it mean to deliver someone to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved? If someone is delivered to Satan, the spirit isn’t saved, is it? Was there some interim arrangement in Paul’s day by which people went to Satan for an hour or two to have their flesh shredded so that after that their souls would be in tip-top shape? Was that later turned into Purgatory? Or what?

This stuff isn’t as well thought-out as it might be.

Heh heh. Andrew Brown answered my comments today. He said he admired my ‘rhetorical technique’ – by which of course he meant he didn’t, but anyway, I don’t think it was rhetorical technique, I think I was just pointing out his inaccuracy.

So I replied, and then he replied again.

What you are accusing me of is not getting the facts wrong. It is wrongly interpreting a passage that you read differently. I don’t think that’s such a monstrous offence in general and certainly not in this particular case where my interpretation was the plain and natural one. If bringing up children to be fundamentalists is comparable to child abuse, then the sanctions for it must be comparable too. If you shrink from such sanctions, then you should not imply that they are equivalent crimes.

Now there at last we get to grips with the thing. The trouble is that he said Dawkins said X when Dawkins didn’t say X, which is not wrongly interpreting a passage, it’s saying that Y said something when Y in fact didn’t say that. I pointed out that if he had changed just one word – if he had said Dawkins had implied or suggested – then it would have been a matter of interpretation; but he didn’t say that. I bet he wishes he had. I said that, too.

I don’t know, maybe this is an occupational hazard of journalism. It’s not exactly a secret that many journalists seem to think that an approximation is the same thing as a direct quote. But the fact that it’s common doesn’t make it good practice, or helpful, or accurate, or ethical.

And that’s especially true when one is disagreeing with someone; and all the more so when one is doing it in a polemical or irritable way. That is exactly the time to be extra careful about what one attributes to one’s opponent, 1. in order to be fair and guard against confirmation bias and 2. in order to give the opponent no extra advantage. I bet you can see that yourself. You didn’t do your argument any favours with that sloppy and tendentious approximation of what Dawkins said. I bet you’re well aware of that by now.

There’s also some depressing rationalization from underverse about why teaching children to believe in hell is not so bad, but I’m underversed out, so I’m not going to bother with it.

The Andrew Brown discussion, or wrangle, raises an interesting issue – interesting and pervasive yet obscure. Much of the wrangle has been about whether Dawkins actually said or meant or both that parents who impose harmful beliefs on their children (what is meant by ‘harmful’ is of course part of the wrangle, I’ll get to that, be patient) should be forcibly removed by the state. Brown didn’t even bother to wrangle, he simply said that Dawkins had simply said that, which was and is not the case. Commenters have been wrangling about whether he meant it and if so how strongly (and about what beliefs are ‘harmful’). A strong claim that several people have made is that it’s mere evasion to claim that Dawkins did not say that and did not necessarily mean it either; that he presented a problem but did not say what the solution is. The strong claim is that to state the problem is to say what the solution is – that if the problem is as bad as Dawkins says it is then active intervention is required.

My claim is that that’s wrong. I think what’s going on here is that Dawkins is pointing out a very serious, even terrible, problem, but one that of its nature is very difficult if not impossible to solve without an unacceptable amount and kind of intrusion on people’s lives.

I put it this way in a comment over there: I think it’s fair to say that the really bad stuff is not universal and that it may well not be very common. But I think what Dawkins is saying in that chapter is that the really bad stuff is indeed that bad – and I think he’s right. One child (or adult) in agony because she believes a loved friend is in hell is very bad. It does not follow that the police should be called to arrest the child’s parents, nor does it follow that I’m claiming that. But that kind of agony is very bad – and I think Dawkins is absolutely right that people should worry about it as opposed to ignoring it or brushing it off as unimportant.

Since saying that I’ve looked for some stats, and I’m not so sure it is fair to say that belief in hell (which I consider the really bad stuff) may well not be very common. Unfortunately it is very common. This survey reports that 74.6% in the US believe in hell, and 58.3% in the UK. Maybe they all think that only other people go to hell, and maybe they’re cheerful or indifferent to that thought – but that is no help, is it, because that is still very bad stuff.

And that’s before we even get to other religious indoctrination, such as telling girls that they’re inferior, telling boys that girls are inferior, telling children that homosexuality is a ‘sin,’ telling children that they are ‘sinners,’ telling children that ‘sinners’ go to hell, and the like. That’s what I mean by ‘harmful’ – beliefs that poison children’s minds and make them afraid or cruel or both.

And, obviously enough, there is no quick and easy solution to this, because pretty much no one wants to run around listening in on what all parents tell their children, and no one would be able to even if lots of people did want to. It’s not the case that we think belief in hell is harmful and therefore the police should be called. I for one, and I imagine lots of other people too, think that belief in hell is harmful and there is very little that can be done about that.

The one thing that can be done is education – and that’s what Dawkins was doing on page 326. ‘Consciousness raising,’ he called it; same thing. That can be done without violating anyone’s rights, without installing bugs in every living room, without filling the prisons with naughty parents. It can’t always be done without a lot of argument and brawling, as in the Kitzmiller case, but it can be done without sending out the Gestapo.

If Wikipedia has it right there are currently around forty thousand madrassas in Pakistan. If they’re all full-time pseudo-schools as opposed to an hour or two in the afternoon, that’s an appalling figure, because they don’t teach anything, they just inject the Koran in Arabic, which is useless for anything except doing the same thing to the next generation of doomed children. And that’s before we even get to the political and, shall we say, combustion-related aspect.

A 14-year-old who was trained to kill by radicals in the tribal regions of Pakistan now sits in a crowded classroom at a detention facility in Kabul. His only wish is to see his parents again…”I didn’t want to do it but he forced me to go,” he says of his recruiter. Rubbing his face with his hand, he says he now spends his time dreaming of his life back home in rural Pakistan. His eyes begin to water and his voice becomes softer when he talks about missing his mother. Asked what he misses most about her, he says simply, “A mother is a mother.” His was a life of farming and tranquility in Pakistan, he says. It was also a life that took a drastic turn when his father decided to send Shakirullah for studies at a madrassa. He says his [father] wanted him to learn more about Islam and the Quran, something he could not do himself. He says his father didn’t know radicals ran the school. In the madrassa, Shakirullah learned to recite the Quran in Arabic, not his native language. He relied solely on the fanatical interpretations the mullahs were giving him. “When I finished reciting the Quran, a mullah then came to me and told me, ‘Now that you have finished the Quran, you need to go and commit a suicide attack.’ That I should go to Afghanistan to commit a suicide attack,” he says.

So – lucky parents of rural Pakistan – they send a child to what they think is a place where he’ll learn more about Islam and the Quran but is in fact a place where adult men send children out to kill themselves and others. How nice.

Andrew Brown is still at it – still being shameless. It’s been pretty thoroughly shown by now that he misrepresented what Dawkins said on the infamous page 326. So what is his response? A frank apology at last? No.

Richard Dawkins himself has been in this thread a few times. If he had wanted to, he could have stated quite clearly that he does not believe the state should have the right to intervene to remove children from their parents simply because of their theological beliefs.

Interesting. Brown misrepresents what Dawkins wrote. Several commenters point that out, and at least one pastes in the whole passage by way of evidence. Brown simply reiterates his misrepresentation. Commenters go on pointing out that the misrepresentation is a misrepresentation. Brown says it’s up to Dawkins to set the record straight.

The guy is a journalist. Journalists are expected to get their facts right in the first place, and to correct them if they make a mistake. The guy is also a member of society and an adult. Adult members of society are expected not to misrepresent people and to apologize and clear things up if they make a mistake. Brown is making a complete horse’s ass of himself on both counts.