Author: Ophelia Benson

And for another clever-stupid ‘joke’ there is Dieudonné cutting up again. He’s such a card.

Dieudonné, who is known for making anti-Semitic remarks in his shows, handed the spoof award for “social unacceptability and insolence” to Robert Faurisson, an academic with a string of convictions for denying the existence of Nazi death camps in the Second World War. Among the audience of 5,000 at Le Zénith theatre in Paris were the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, several figures of the far left…A stagehand dressed as a Jewish deportee with a yellow star on his chest gave M. Faurisson the award.

Wow, that does sound like a real thigh-slapper, doesn’t it.

[I]n the past five years, his shows have come to symbolise – some say foment – a new strain of anti-Semitism in France among Arab and black youths and on the “white” far left. Dieudonné said: “I don’t agree with all [M. Faurisson’s] ideas. But for me, what counts most of all is freedom of expression.”

Bullshit. Would he make a joke of that kind about an apartheid-denier? Does he make jokes of that kind about apartheid-deniers? Is it really freedom of expression that counts most of all for him? I don’t believe it, and I don’t suppose anyone does.

Imagine someone commenting on a philosophy blog, ‘Black people understand a good story and only get confused by the minutiae of history.’ Or for ‘black people’ substitute ‘Jews’ or ‘women’ or ‘foreigners.’ You’d blink, right? You’d be a little surprised, and a little repelled. But substitute ‘Americans’ – and apparently that’s no longer a gratuitous insult, it’s some kind of sophisticated bit of ‘irony.’

There’s this guy called Michael Reidy who comments regularly at Talking Philosophy, a blog run by the editors of The Philosophers’ Magazine; he seems very clever and well-informed, though often snide, but he also likes to amuse himself periodically with a random, magisterial announcement about the stupidity of Americans. That was the latest one – ‘Americans understand a good story and only get confused by the minutiae of history.’ It’s all the odder because it’s the last line of his comment and it has nothing to do with the rest.

What’s that about? Just the usual? I have American friends in the UK who are frequently driven to distraction by the breezy way people who would never disparage other groups will snicker at the stupidity, cluelessness, childishness and general hopelessness of ‘Americans.’ I suppose Michael Reidy is just one of those? It’s odd though – it just seems so…well, clueless and childish.

I re-read the chapter of The God Delusion which contains page 326, this morning, in order to find out (having forgotten since I first read it) what the context is in which Dawkins quotes that passage by Nicholas Humphrey. In reading it I became more angry with Brown than ever, for the simple reason that he completely leaves out the context which is one of angry compassion for the mental suffering religion can cause to children and their parents. The chapter starts with the 19th century case of a six-year-old Jewish boy in Bologna who was forcibly removed from his weeping parents by officers of the Catholic Inquisition, to be raised by the church. His parents never saw him again except on occasional brief supervised visits. Why was he removed? Because his nursemaid (age 14 at the time) had ‘baptized’ him.

Dawkins then goes on to compare sexual abuse with mental abuse, and to make the interesting and (I think) important point that sexual abuse in some cases is trivial compared to the mental torture of the fear of hell. He quotes a heart-rending letter from a woman who was told at age 7 that her Protestant friend who had died was in hell – this thought was agony for the child.

That is what leads up to Humphrey’s lecture. It’s impossible (in my view) to read it unmoved – yet Brown presents the basic idea as if it were nothing but the fantasy of a sadistic atheist meddler. It’s an utter distortion and grossly unfair – to Dawkins but even more to children who are tortured with fears of hell and eternal punishment.

This is all the more deranged because it’s not as if there are no reasonable criticisms that could be made. One could for instance argue that Dawkins fails to balance this worry with the ways religion can console children and parents; one could claim that the problem is not religion as such but religion that threatens and punishes instead of promising and consoling (or religion that threatens and punishes as a condition of promising and consoling). One could object to many specifics of tone, choice of examples, and so on – yet Brown didn’t do any of that; instead he chose to flail away at a straw man instead of engaging with the actual book. Whatever for? And why do so many other critics do the same thing? Is it just easier, to invent a bogey-atheist and then keep recycling the same complaints about it? Are they just lazy? Or are they a mix of lazy and malevolent?

I don’t know. I’m just asking.

(I posted a slightly different and shorter version of this on Brown’s piece a couple of hours ago.)