Author: Ophelia Benson

Here’s a fan of Point of Inquiry and also of Butterflies and Wheels. Here’s someone with good taste, in other words.

And another thing. As long as I’m quarreling with Alibhai-Brown – I get tired of this familiar chunk of doggerel:

Some aspects of our nature are not susceptible to scientific enquiry, cannot be dissected, categorised and validated in terms that would satisfy the “rational” disbelievers, whose intellect is colossal but imagination puny. There are no experiments and tests to explain love, empathy, longing, the agony and ecstasy of the heart, the wild and wonderful creativity of the brain…

That is such kack – yet people go on trotting it out as if it were transcendent and indisputable wisdom. Of course there are experiments and tests to explain love and the rest of it – experiments and tests, theories and evidence, as well as centuries of stories and personal accounts. They’re not a black box, they’re not immune to inquiry and even experiments and tests, and the findings of experiments and tests are highly interesting. It’s not the brash fanatic zealous hysterical atheists who are trying to rule knowledge out of order, it’s obscurantist epithet-hurling Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Give her a zero for the course.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has a few very gentle words to say to her friends in the atheist community – the

rowdy and brash God bashers [who] fulminate like demented fire-and-brimstone preachers [and who] know it all, don’t listen, and presume to judge people they won’t ever understand…the fanatic atheists…the “rational” disbelievers, whose intellect is colossal but imagination puny.

You know the ones, right? Quite unlike saintly Alibhai-Brown, they are; she says so herself.

Having faith makes me humble and self-questioning, unlike the unbelievers who know they are always right.

Ah yes – obviously – here she is humbly questioning herself all over the place. What would she sound like if she were arrogant and dogmatic, I wonder?

To these zealots, believers are mostly naive or stupid…The hysterical imagery is objectionable. But much worse is the dishonesty.

Oh, gosh, Yasmin, I know what you mean. All that hysteria and dishonesty; it’s quite shocking.

Fundamentalist atheists want to replace old religions with their own. To them all previous prophets were false. Their fervour makes them as blind and uncompromising as those following the religions they detest. Science gave them no immunity – they too are infected by the virus of faith. Only, they would say, theirs is the only true path, and all other roads lead to damnation. Of course.

Oooookay. Whatever you say. Humility and self-questioning on your side, fundamantalist religion and blind fervour and faith and damnation on our side. Well demonstrated.

Susan Jacoby takes a look at those doubt of Mother Teresa’s (thanks to Frederick Crews for pointing the article out to me).

The media frenzy over Teresa’s apparently unending crisis of faith offers a spectacular and comical example of the irrationality, credulity, and unwillingness to face facts that inform all conventional wisdom concerning religion and holiness…I have no doubt that excerpts from the letters will appear in future case studies of well-known individuals who combine masochism with narcissism…I would think that someone who observes extreme human suffering on a daily basis would have more doubts than most about the existence of a benevolent deity. But what is striking about Teresa’s doubt is that it is all about her: it has nothing to do with the dissonance between belief in a loving God and the suffering she sees.

Ah – that would explain the policy on painkillers then.

In a reverential and sanctimonious cover story in last week’s issue of Time magazine, psychonanalysts and priests are quoted. Guess what? Both the shrinks and the reverends think that Teresa is even holier because of her overwhelming doubts.

Ah again – so…doubts make you holy, and ‘faith’ makes you holy, so…what would make you not all that holy? (No, wait, don’t tell me, I know – militant atheism! That’s it!)

The agreement of priests and psychoanalysts is not, after all, very surprising. Both Freudian psychoanalysis and Roman Catholicism are faiths whose central tenets have nothing to do with evidence.

Nothing to do with evidence! What can she mean? There was all that evidence that Freud collected – when he told people what they were fantasizing about and then wrote it all down in a book. Completely different from Roman Catholicism.

What does a rational person, as opposed to someone who has a deep need to believe in the unprovable or the obviously false, do when doubt raises its insistent head? When a rational human being is confronted by evidence that contradicts his or her beliefs, then the belief must be modified…An irrational person–let us say, for the sake of argument, someone dedicated to becoming a saint who suffers for eternity–refuses to acknowledge that there may be good reasons for her doubts.

That’s the advantage of being an irrational person, see – you don’t have to modify your beliefs when you’re confronted by evidence that contradicts them. You think that’s not convenient? Think again.

Her “Home for the Dying” in Calcutta provided no modern medical care–not even modern painkillers–for the terminally ill. Indeed, Teresa’s true mission seems to have been the glorification of suffering…Teresa never showed any concern, in India or elsewhere, about the root causes of poverty – including lack of education, corrupt dictatorships, inequitable distribution of wealth, bigotry against social, ethnic, or religious underclasses, and contempt for women.

Wellll…so she was a little myopic; nobody’s perfect.