Author: Ophelia Benson

Speaking of the combination of bullshit and bullying – consider the way the word ‘faith’ is everywhere used as a tool of that combination. It’s a bully-word precisely because it’s about bullshit; it gets to bully people on the grounds that it is about unwarranted belief. What an odd arrangement.

Look at Deborah Solomon talking to Ian McEwan for instance.

It seems to me that the impulse to atone is a religious one, and yet you are a self-declared atheist. Yes, I am an atheist, and probably Briony is, too. Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It’s a little easier if you’ve got a god to forgive you.

Not necessarily. Faith in itself is not easy to sustain. Well, we won’t get into that.

‘Faith in itself is not easy to sustain.’ And why is that? Because it’s ‘faith’ – it’s not based on evidence or probability or plausibility, it’s just a choice, an act of will; naturally it’s ‘not easy to sustain’ when there are so many ways it can seem wrong. Yet Solomon turns it into a smug boast combined with a reproof. ‘Faith’ is not easy to sustain therefore people who sustain it are brave or loyal or dedicated or athletic, or some such thing. Faith-people are the brave strong tightrope-walking ones, atheists are the pale weak cowards who stay at home and suck on their pacifiers. That’s sheer intellectual bullying, that is, and McEwan, politer than Solomon, allowed her to get away with it. But faith-people really ought not to play that card, because it’s not a legitimate card to play; it gives them an unfair advantage based on other people’s civil reluctance to embarrass them; it’s tawdry and passive-aggressive to take advantage of that politeness.

The Texas Education commissioner used the same tawdry weapon in discussing the firing of Christine Comer.

The Texas Education commissioner, Robert Scott, told The Dallas Morning News that Ms. Comer was not forced out over the message, adding, “You can be in favor of science without bashing people’s faith.” He did not return phone calls to his office.

‘You can be in favor of science without bashing people’s faith.’ What does that mean? You can be in favor of science without forwarding a message saying that Barbara Forrest was going to be giving a talk in Austin? You can be in favor of science without thinking and saying that science classes ought to teach science and not religion? You can be in favor of science without saying that Creationism and ID are not science but religion? Is that what that means? (In the context, it sort of has to mean that; there’s not really anything else it can mean.) Well, if it is, it’s nonsense. You can’t be ‘in favor of science’ while raising no objection to the replacement of science by religion in the science classroom. That’s not ‘being in favor of science,’ it’s being in favor of religion in place of science. But, of course, calling such a view ‘bashing people’s faith’ is just the way to prevent a fair and open discussion of the question and to substitute a sweaty atmosphere of guilt and shame and apology – if people buy it, that is. Chris Comer didn’t buy it; good; no one should buy it. Everyone should be highly sensitized to the deployment of the ‘faith’ guilt-trip, and should ward it off with contumely and scorn.

Some ideas are dangerous any way you look at them. This is one.

Over the past decade, thousands of people, from top politicians to ordinary voters, have been murdered by Islamists in Muslim countries that have held reasonably free elections (Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia). Islamist opposition to democracy is based on the claim that allowing men to legislate would be a form of sherk, that is to say associating Man with God, who is the “sole and ultimate legislator”. Man-made law cannot rival God-made Shariah.

Humans can’t and mustn’t (especially mustn’t, because in fact of course they can, so they have to be stopped) correct or review or displace or act for or contradict or just plain ignore ‘God’; God always trumps humans, humans have to do what God says, never the other way around; yet (here’s where things get scary) ‘God’ of course is not around, not available for consultation or plea, not at the bench to commute sentences or pardon mistakes or hear about extenuating circumstances. All that’s around is a very very old and tedious book, and various interpretations of and commentaries on that book, along with a great many self-appointed interpreters of that book, who are pleased to kill you if you don’t do what they say, armed with the self-righteous claim that they are killing you in the name of this absent ‘God.’ You could hardly come up with a better recipe for that miserable combination of bullshit with tyranny which torments so much of the world. The sole and ultimate legislator is some sky-dweller whom no one ever sees or talks to, so all six-plus billion of us down here on this lumpy little planet are helpless to say anything about our laws or leaders or lives (unless we’re mullahs, of course). Heads they win tails we lose.

So…I was driving around in San Francisco yesterday afternoon, I had dropped Jeremy and Cheryl at the SF airport and then gone on into the city to have fun looking around for a couple of hours until it was time for me to go back to the airport. I turned the radio on and found some okay music and drove up 19th and through the park and through the Avenues a little and over to Arguello, and then the music changed so I looked for another station and hit a news one – and then I found myself repeatedly shouting a bad word as loudly as I could possibly shout it, and kind of thrashing back and forth in rage. It took me awhile to calm down, and all I calmed down into was despair and only slightly quieter rage. I was upset, and I went on being upset all afternoon.

Because…well, perfect. Great. There’s a glimmer of hope that Pakistan might get to be able to have a secular democracy after all, and thus be an example to other majority Muslim countries; and one with a woman at the head of it besides, and thus even more of an example; well of course we can’t have that, so Bang. And I admired Bhutto, while being unsure how justified the corruption charges were or were not. And – you know how it is – I hate it when women who get some power, whether political or intellectual, are killed because they got some power. I hate it. It makes me feel threatened and furious. I hate being reminded that people can prevent each other from doing things any time they feel like it, just by finding a gun or a bomb, and that lots of people do feel like it. It’s the truth, it’s reality, and it stinks.