Author: Ophelia Benson

For some reason I feel like giving you another dose of Chris Hedges. It’s a morbid interest, because really his book (I Don’t Believe in Atheists) is so bad it makes more sense to ignore it than to spend time saying what’s bad about it. Its badness isn’t what you’d call subtle or hidden. But I’m interested in these displays of determined stupidity, for some reason.

Page 6.

Hitchens and Harris describe the Muslim world, where I spent seven years…in language that is as racist, crude and intolerant as that used by Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell.

No they don’t. That’s such an absurd claim that it’s stupid to make it, when it’s so easy to check just by googling. You don’t have to agree with Hitchens and Harris to find that statement laughable. Also, what does Hedges mean by saying he spent seven years in ‘the Muslim world’? Where is that exactly? He means he spent seven years in some countries where Islam is the majority religion, not that he spent those years in all such countries, much less that he spent them on some other ‘Muslim’ planet. His language is (in this book at least) considerably cruder and sloppier than anything Hitchens would write even on a bad day.

Continuing from the previous quotation, or rather, hail of abuse.

They are a secular version of the religious right. They misuse the teachings of Charles Darwin and evolutionary biology just as the Christian fundamentalists misuse the Bible. They are anti-intellectual.

What the hell does that mean? Other than that Chris Hedges is really pissed off. And what ‘teachings’ of Darwin? He seems to be confusing him with a church; clerics like to talk about ‘the church’s teachings,’ especially when they are trying to justify some mildewed old bit of irrational hatred like rules against HoMoSekShuality; but Darwin doesn’t have ‘teachings,’ he’s not a dang priest. And as for anti-intellectual – that’s just imbecilic. It ignores most of what they say, or simply turns it on its head.

Pages 6-7 – the new atheists don’t have the power of the Christian Right but

they do engage in the same chauvinism and call for the same violent utopianism. They sell this under secular banners. They believe, like the Christian Right, that we are moving forward to a paradise, a state of human perfection, this time made possible by human reason.

It’s very noticeable that Hedges never offers any evidence for this kind of crap (which continues for page after page, and recurs throughout the book). He repeats it ad nauseam and offers zero quotations to back it up – which is not surprising, since there aren’t any, since they don’t believe any such fucking thing. This is grossly irresponsible unwarranted garbage, and it’s a sign of something or other that a reputable publisher failed to throw it back in his face. I don’t think the Times would have let him publish this dreck in the paper – except possibly on the Op-ed page; it’s somewhat shocking that a division of Simon and Schuster published it.

There’s a great deal more of this kind of thing, but you get the idea. He’s beside himself with rage, he makes no effort to be accurate, he considers himself entitled to make wildly exaggerated claims, he can’t think, he can’t read carefully, and he’s overflowing with malevolence. (Which is funny in a way, because one of his chief claims is that religion is somehow necessary for or intimately connected to goodness, compassion, generosity, that kind of thing – yet he himself displays a remarkably unpleasant belligerence coupled with carelessness with the truth.) I looked for scathing reviews but didn’t find any – if anyone sees any, point them out to me.

The mediums have been taken by surprise, poor dears.

Today, representatives of British mediums will march up Downing Street to deliver a petition containing some 10,000 signatories demanding that the Government change its decision to repeal the 1951 Fraudulent Mediums Act in favour of a new EU directive…”What we have here is a fundamental attack on our right to practise our religion…,” said David McEntee-Taylor, head of the Spiritual Workers Association (SWA).

Yes…except that ‘fundamental right’ has limits, dalling. It doesn’t have enough limits, but it has some. You can’t kill people and eat them with horseradish and call that practicing your religion and go on your way rejoicing.

However, by treating spiritualism as merely a consumer service, mediums believe they risk being sued if customers are dissatisfied with advice brought from the other side – advice they say they always point out should always be treated with care. The solution to the present impasse, according to lawyers advising the crystal-ball fraternity, is via the prosaic expedient of a pre-consultation disclaimer, describing any dialogue with the deceased in terms of either entertainment or scientific experiment. It does not sit comfortably with purist believers.

So what they’re protesting is having to mention at the outset that there is no actual reason to think that whatever mediums talk to when they talk to whatever they talk to is in fact actually the spirit of a dead person. They want to be able to take money for talking to whatever it is they talk to without having to admit to the people who are giving them money that in fact whatever it is they talk to might be…well, unreliable, or confused, or made up. Yes one can see why they don’t want to have to admit that and why they would prefer to take the money without having to admit anything, but I’m not absolutely sure that desire is rightly called ‘our right to practice our religion.’ It looks more like their claimed right to practice their commercial enterprise which is based on customer credulity. It’s rather as if from Monday to Friday priests and ministers took large fees for chatting to God and then telling their customers what God said. The line between religion and commerce would seem rather blurred in that case, I think.

Psychic mailings netted £40m from the British public last year and the number of telephone and internet services are soaring – an unsurprising fact considering some 50 per cent of the public claims to believe in the phenomenon, according to Professor Richard Wiseman, a stalwart critic of the religion. A further third claim to have had a psychic experience. “The problem is that there is no repeatable scientific evidence to back this up,” he said.

Good grief, so 80% of you are bat-loony? At that rate you’re just as crazy as we are.

While few dispute that there are some con men operating big money schemes, supporters say there is a genuine need to liaise with dead friends and relatives. Lyn Guest de Swarte, editor of The Spiritual News, said for most practitioners it is a “sacred calling”. “A labourer is worth their hire. But if people don’t feel they have been best served they should refuse to pay.”

Okay – and the mediums will be fine with that, will they? They’ll just allow the customers to say ‘Sorry, no good’ and walk out? No shouts of ‘Hey, you owe me £50!’? And then there’s this claim that there’s a genuine need to liaise with dead friends and relatives. Well of course there fucking is – and it’s a need that cannot be satisfied and that’s the great tragedy of all sentient life, isn’t it! But pretending some chump in a paisley shawl can fix that right up is no solution. There is no solution, and that’s that.

I can’t help noticing that clerics say odd things sometimes. I suppose it’s their job, but it surprises me anyway. I suppose it surprises me that they don’t try to cover up more.

The Bishop of Oxford (again), for instance. He said something very droll.

I am sure the Roman Catholic bishops are intelligent, rational people, but their starting point on embryo research is mistaken. They believe that the newly fertilised egg, the tiny bundle of multiplying cells smaller than a pin head, has the same right to life as an adult. But more than two-thirds of fertilised eggs are lost in nature anyway. If each of these really is a person, that is, an eternal soul, it would lead to the absurd conclusion that heaven is mainly populated by people who have never been born.

Ah yes, how absurd – but is it any more absurd than the conclusion that heaven exists and that it is mainly populated by people who have been born? Not a lot. The whole idea of a heaven populated by dead people is absurd, yet here is this grown man treating it as a matter of fact.

The other day Gene Robinson, the gay bishop of New Hampshire (the one who has made life so difficult for the archbishop and his friends) was on Fresh Air. Terri Gross asked for his views on abortion, and he gave a both-and reply, the first part of which was that ‘all life is sacred’ and the second of which is that it’s for the woman to decide. It’s odd that churchy people keep saying that, and that no one takes them up for it. They don’t believe all life is sacred! Nobody does, and they’re no exception. Bacteria, viruses, mosquitoes, weeds, parasites, vegetables, fruits, grains – churchy people don’t think those kinds of life are sacred. It’s pompous rhetoric, and they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it, because it can’t possibly be true. Yet get away with it they do.

The other other day Desmond Tutu was on the local public radio station. I admire Tutu, as most people do; from what I know he’s a sterling fella. But he did say this one thing…that the universe is a moral place, and that truth and justice always ultimately prevail. No – it isn’t and they don’t. Especially the universe is not a moral place – I think that’s such a mistake. The universe is a bunch of gas and rock; it’s no more moral than my kettle is when I put it on to boil water. We’re here and the universe is there and the universe couldn’t possibly care less about us or about morality. If there’s going to be any morality it has to come from us. That’s sad, because we’re not much good at it, but we’re all there is. And, alas, truth and justice don’t ultimately prevail, not least because there is no ulitmately, there’s only a series of nows, all of which are shot through with truth and justice not prevailing.