Author: Ophelia Benson

I trust you enjoyed Greta Christina’s ‘Atheists and Anger’. I know I did.

I’m angry that atheist soldiers – in the U.S. armed forces – have had prayer ceremonies pressured on them and atheist meetings broken up by Christian superior officers, in direct violation of the First Amendment…I’m angry that atheist soldiers who are complaining about this are being harassed and are even getting death threats from Christian soldiers and superior officers…I’m angry that the 41st President of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush, said of atheists, in my lifetime, “No, I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.”…I’m angry that women are dying of AIDS in Africa and South America because the Catholic Church has convinced them that using condoms makes baby Jesus cry…I get angry when advice columnists tell their troubled letter-writers to talk to their priest or minister or rabbi…when there is absolutely no legal requirement that a religious leader have any sort of training in counseling or therapy…I’m angry at preachers who tell women in their flock to submit to their husbands because it’s the will of God, even when their husbands are beating them within an inch of their lives…I get angry when other believers insist that the cosmic shopping list isn’t what religion and prayer are really about; that their own sophisticated theology is the true understanding of God. I get angry when believers insist that the shopping list is a straw man, an outmoded form of religion and prayer that nobody takes seriously, and it’s absurd for atheists to criticize it.

That’s just a small sample. Later there’s a long series of epistemic anger-sources, many of which we’ve discussed here (not surprisingly, all this stuff being in our faces, so to speak). One of my favourites (but I like them all) is:

I get angry when believers say at the beginning of an argument that their belief is based on reason and evidence, and at the end of the argument say things like, “It just seems that way to me,” or, “I feel it in my heart”… as if that were a clincher. I mean, couldn’t they have said that at the beginning of the argument, and not wasted my fucking time?

And then it winds up by pointing out that anger is necessary for reform and change, also something we’ve discussed here. Angry atheists unite.

Religion. Respect. Gotta respect it – religion. Religion, respect, they go together.

A young Jehovah’s Witness has died just hours after giving birth to twins. She had signed a form refusing blood transfusions, and her family would not overrule her. Couldn’t doctors have intervened? If they had, they [might] well have been charged with a criminal offence, and would not have had a legal leg to stand on in court. The UK places great emphasis on respecting the religious convictions of patients – and increasingly the doctors who treat them too. There is nothing medics can do when an adult refuses treatment on religious grounds, says Vivienne Nathanson, head of ethics at the British Medical Association.

Is there anything patients can do when an adult doctor refuses treatment on religious grounds? Sometimes. That dentist who refused treatment to a woman because she wasn’t wearing a hijab got a mild rebuke. But maybe in a few years that will be seen as insensitive – to the dentist. Or maybe not; who knows.

Jehovah’s Witness liaison committees, who advise both doctors and patients on alternative treatments, are now firmly established in many UK hospitals. “We are ever more favourably received – doctors are increasingly sympathetic to needs of the community,” says David Jones, a member of the committee for North Bristol NHS Trust. “We have drawn up detailed care plans for everything from heart surgery to giving birth, including ways to stem postpartum haemorrhage. All hospitals should have access to these.”

Isn’t that heart-warming? Doctors are increasingly sympathetic – isn’t that kind? They’re are increasingly sympathetic to the ‘needs’ of the ‘community’ – the needs of the community to adhere to a ridiculous meaningless arbitrary outmoded pettifogging bit of nonsense from Leviticus. And in order to exercise all this extra and increasing sympathy, doctors and nurses have to absorb piles of detailed care plans that wouldn’t be necessary if the ‘community’ didn’t ‘need’ to adhere to its outmoded bit of nonsense. What a pathetic waste of time and resources, which could be used in better ways. It’s revolting – that smug self-centered self-congratulation on the ability of the ‘community’ to force (by moral pressure) busy doctors and hospitals to pay lots and lots and lots of pointless extra attention to them. I might as well go drop in at the local primary school and demand that everyone there pitch in to make me a ten-course dinner but make sure it’s kosher and haram and vegan and Scientology-appropriate. I’m special, I deserve to usurp everyone’s time and attention, right?

[O]ther countries are not quite as tolerant of mothers’ religious convictions…A young woman in Dublin lost a lot of blood after giving birth to a healthy baby a year ago. A Jehovah’s Witness, she too refused a transfusion. But an emergency ruling permitted the hospital to carry out the procedure, arguing that the right of the newborn baby to have a family life overruled the mother’s right to refuse treatment.

Well, what about that? Why don’t UK hospitals take that into account? Why doesn’t the baby’s need for a mother have to be at least weighed against the mother’s ‘religious convictions’? (Yes, I know, I’m always talking about women’s autonomy, and that’s why I think women should be able to decide not to bear a child they don’t want, but I also think that if they do decide to bear the child, they take on certain responsibilities. That in fact is one reason I think they should be able to decide not to – the responsibilities are very large and potentially very intrusive. Frankly I think they make ‘religious convictions’ look horribly trivial and selfish.)

Peter Cave has an entertaining new book of philosophical puzzles, Can a Robot be Human?. The pieces are cross-referenced; one interesting pairing is of a chapter (2) on the way we feel real emotion about fictional characters and their situations, and another (8) on love, what selves are, what stories we tell ourselves about people we love.

It is very odd, and even somewhat mysterious, what powerful emotions we can feel about fictional characters. The oddity becomes more obvious if you try to imagine animals doing it. The idea is absurd – yet we’re so used to doing it ourselves that we forget how odd it is. What’s that about, do you suppose? Other minds, probably. Right? Must be. The social animal thing. Our brains would have been too expensive to have evolved if they didn’t have a huge payoff; the payoff is social collaboration; for that we need a working theory of mind. So we have this hypertrophied faculty of thinking and feeling about the interior worlds of other people – so hypertrophied that it works even (or especially) on people who don’t actually exist. Page 9:

The most rational of people can be moved by fictions yet, even when moved, know full well that they are seated in a theatre, reading a book, or watching television. Or do they? Perhaps, one way or another, they suspend their belief in the stagy surroundings, suspend their memories of the tickets they purchased or block out the sound of the book’s rustling pages. Perhaps they fall for what is being represented as real, as being, indeed, all for real. Remember, though, they cannot be taken in that much; if they were, they would be warning of danger…

It is a peculiar mental state. Peculiar and delicate. It is easy to be jostled out of it – to be deeply in it one moment and the next to remember that you’re sitting in a chair holding and looking at a rectangular box-shaped object packed with slices of paper with black marks on them in rows. But then it’s easy to jump right back into it again. Story-telling seems to work that way. Peter Cave suggests that romantic love does too. Page 44:

When we attend a play, we can lose ourselves within the action. Despite awareness of the theatrical surroundings, we cannot help being moved by the characters on stage. My suggestion is that such fictionalism spills over those in love, generating an erotic fictionalism. When in love, we often cannot help feeling, and believing in, the eternity of that love, despite knowing that, transient and fickle creatures that we are, things may be so very, very different later on; even as early on as the following morning.

Indeed. You’re so wonderful. Oh wait, no you’re not. Human life in eight words.