Author: Ophelia Benson

Pretty.

Cellphone videos have appeared on the Internet showing an Iraqi mob stoning and kicking to death a 17-year-old girl after she offended her minority community by eloping with a Muslim man…In the video – on the Kurdish website Jebar.Info and rapidly spreading on the Internet – Aswad is shown lying in the road as men kick her and throw a large lump of rock or concrete at her head. Her face is drenched in blood but uniformed and armed officers of the Iraqi police stand by and do nothing to prevent the attack…At one point she struggles to sit up and cover herself, but a man kicks her in the face knocking her violently back to the ground…Members of a large crowd can be seen filming the murder on their cellphones, some of them shouting or kicking out at the cowering victim. Nobody tries to help her.

What a lovely, lovely, heartening story. How pleasant it is to know that a mob of men can stand around watching and even fucking filming a slight thin teenage girl being kicked and bludgeoned with rocks, and 1) not help her and 2) join in.

No actually it isn’t pleasant. It’s both horrifying and terrifying. It’s despair-inducing – to know that people can and do let stupid, trivial, unimportant rules or traditions or loyalties or ideologies override what ought to be natural pity and revulsion and fellow-feeling to the point that they can take pleasure in battering people to death.

From Why Atheism? by George Smith (Prometheus 2000) p. 17:

If most Christians (and other religious believers) dismiss atheism outright, this is not because they have examined the arguments for atheism and found them wanting, but because they do not take atheism seriously enough to examine its arguments in detail. Atheism, in their view, lacks credibility, so they have no motive to examine it further. To portray atheism as utterly lacking in credibility has long played a crucial role in religious propaganda. Atheism must be rendered unthinkable, because doubt, if left unchecked, can easily propel the believer down the path of deconversion (the process by which a religious believer becomes an atheist)…To say that atheism is credible is to suggest that the atheist may be right; to say that the atheist may be right is to suggest that the Christian may be wrong; to say that the Christian may be wrong is to suggest that faith may be an unreliable guide to knowledge; to say that faith may be an unreliable guide to knowledge is to suggest that each and every tenet of Christianity should be reexamined in the light of reason.

That would explain a lot. That would explain the way theists fail to engage with the arguments that atheists actually make, and it would explain the way they pretend atheists make silly futile claims that they don’t actually make. That would be because theists aren’t paying attention to what atheists say at all, they’re just ignoring all of it and proceeding on their own pre-ordained track, like a runaway train ignoring all signals because the engineer has stepped outside for a sandwich.

What is the morality behind forcing a girl or woman to carry to term an anencephalic foetus that will die within days of birth?

Doctors have told the girl that her four-month foetus will not live more than a few days beyond birth. She is in the care of Ireland’s health service which has issued an order stopping her from going to Britain…Miss D was informed last month that her foetus has anencephaly, a condition which means that a large part of the brain and skull is missing. Babies with anencephaly live a maximum of just three days after birth.

What is the principle at work here? I don’t understand it. I don’t even begin to understand it. Ireland’s health service wants this teenager to carry the foetus for another five months so that she can give birth to it the usual painful way and then watch it die? Because…what? God is punishing her and we mustn’t interfere with God’s punishments? But then there wouldn’t be such a thing as Ireland’s health service at all. No, I don’t begin to understand it. It just looks like stark sadism and cruelty.