Author: Ophelia Benson

Norm has commented on my comment on his comment on why not mention the good of religion as well as the bad. So I want to see what I think about what he thinks.

First the more minor, contingent issue – my claim that because there is a lot of unmixed criticism of atheism (and rationality, science, secularism) around, people like me don’t always feel like giving mixed criticism back.

I see no reason why opposition to religion, forthright, outspoken opposition to it, cannot, as with anything else, recognize the virtues in what it opposes if there are any.

No, nor do I. It can. But I’m not convinced that it always ought to. I can see plenty of reasons for doing so (tactical, epistemic, moral), but I can also see reasons (same kinds) for not doing so. Sometimes strong, non-balanced comment can shake up people’s thinking – or it can just entrench it further. Sometimes I, for one, feel like going the attempted shake-up route, rather than the mollification route.

But the less minor point is the more interesting to both of us, I think.

But Ophelia’s basic strategy of argument is flawed. In a quasi-Hegelian move, she disallows application of the usual resources of analysis – of analytical discrimination – where religion is concerned. It’s all just a unity, and because something very bad is at the heart of this unity, everything else in it must be bad too, as if poisoned, transmuted, by the badness.

A quasi-Hegelian move? Moi? Surely not! On account of how I wouldn’t recognize one if it bit me. No, but seriously, that’s not what I’m saying, and if it came out that way, I said it badly. I don’t think religion is all just a unity, and it’s not a matter of poisoning, as in contamination. It’s not that the bad bits kind of leak into the good bits, making them dirty or polluted. (Is it? Hmm. Yes, maybe, in a way. I probably do feel that way about it. I do have a visceral dislike of having religion forced on me. But I don’t think what I’m saying depends on that – I think what I’m saying is something slightly different.) It’s that I don’t see how to have the good parts without subscribing to the supernatural truth claims, so I don’t see how to have the good parts without subscribing to (what one takes to be) a lie. It’s not a matter of contamination but one of what is more important. As I said – I think the cost is too high. That’s not pollution, I don’t think, it’s a matter of competing goods.

Joe is a good friend: generous, loyal, funny, a great conversationalist. But he has a ferocious temper, is dishonest in business and in his sexual relationships, is vain and neglectful of his old mother. Must we say that he is all bad, then, because he has these bad qualities, and his other, better qualities, are all mixed in with the worse ones as part of the single personality?

No, but that’s not the right analogy for what I’m saying. Valuing or not valuing a particular person is one thing, and valuing or not valuing religion qua religion is another. I realize some people can take the good of religion and ignore the bad – some people go to church just for the music and community, without believing a word of it. My point is just that other people can’t, or don’t want to, and that there is a reason (a goodenough reason, I think) for that.

There are radicals of one kind and another who can see some of the insights in conservative thought, anti-socialist liberals and/or Weberians who recognize some theoretical strengths within Marxism, Marxists who identify moral and political resources as well as grave deficiencies in classical liberalism. All this is just par for the course. But by her quasi-Hegelian, anti-analytical move, Ophelia would forbid us to approach religious belief in the same way. The move is artificial and arbitrary. You can’t show that religion is all bad simply by focusing on what is bad about it.

But that’s because I take religion to be a different kind of thing. (And I think I’m right, too. If it weren’t a different kind of thing, would it get the special demands for respect and deference, the calls not to ‘offend’ it, that we’re always noticing? Isn’t it generally agreed that religion is a special case of some sort?) Liberals and Weberians don’t base their claims on the existence of a supernatural deity. So I don’t think my move is arbitrary, because the supernatural deity aspect of religion is precisely the stumbling block.

In Warsaw in 1943, a Polish Catholic risks her life to save an endangered Jew. She does so because she has been taught from childhood that all people are the children of God and it is a sin to take innocent life. How, in the face of that – which has happened plenty, and in many other historical variants as well – can one say there has been no good in religion, or that this good is merely apparent because of what it is mixed together with? I could give more than this, but it is enough. Just two things: that religious believers have often been motivated by their beliefs to act in beneficent, caring, selfless, heroic ways; and that there are universalist variants of religious belief which, in historical context, have marked a significant progress for humankind…

But do we know that it was the Catholicism, or the children of God teaching, that made the difference? Do we know that an atheist couldn’t and wouldn’t have had the same thought and the same motivation? Maybe we do, maybe we do – maybe there is some way to know this, and there are studies that back it up. But as of this moment, I’m not convinced that I do know that. I can see that it could be true – but I can also see that it could be untrue. Counterfactually, if the Polish Catholic had been taught from childhood that all people are people even as she is and it is bad and wrong to murder people – is it possible to know that that would not have motivated her to act as she did? And do we really want to give religion the credit for qualities and actions that come from somewhere else – from personal courage, generosity, kindness, for instance? Maybe the Polish Catholic acted the way she did because she was a good human being.

But my point isn’t to deny the existence of good in religion, or to say that it is all bad, it is simply to say that the price is too high.

Let’s celebrate, shall we? Oh yes, do let’s. Let’s celebrate diversity, and plurality, and variety, and mulitpicity, and multitudinity, and difference, and variosity, and culture. Let’s celebrate culture. Here, have some confetti. Let’s party.

A national festival to promote Muslim culture which is being partly funded by the government has refused to stage an event designed to highlight the lives and experiences of gays and lesbians…Promotional publicity states that the festival will feature the “diversity and plurality” of Muslim cultures, but gay Muslims say they have been refused permission to present an event.

Well of course they have. They’re not plural, you see. They’re not diverse. They don’t fit in, they don’t match up, they don’t belong. How can anyone celebrate diversity with them when they’re so different, and wrong? I ask you.

In her letter to Mr Saeed [Muslim affairs spokesman for Outrage! – OB], the festival’s director, Isabel Carlisle, said: “We have sought to go beyond sectarian, ethnic or other group divisions so we do not enquire into the sexual orientation, gender or ethnicity of the artists … equally, at this difficult time for Muslims living in this country we are not prepared to present works that will give offence to significant numbers.”

Okay wait wait wait – nobody say anything for a minute. Nobody talk. I have to think really hard. Wait. Okay – we have to go beyond sectarian, ethnic or other group divisions, so that we can have a festival to celebrate Muslim culture – which is not sectarian, or ethnic, or group division-y. Okay – how is it not sectarian, exactly? I get how it’s not ethnic, because I’m always saying that, it’s everyone else who keeps wanting to pretend ‘Muslim’ is like a racial or ethnic term, which makes zero sense – I get that, but how is it not sectarian? And how is it not group divisiony? Isn’t group division the point? If it weren’t the point, wouldn’t this festival just be a festival of culture? So – what does Carlisle mean?

Nothing, is my guess. Not a damn thing. She just wants to say something more or less at random to get Mr Saeed to go away, and allow the festival to carry right on saying No to Muslim gay culture. So she says cats are dogs and spots are stripes.

Ms Carlisle told the Guardian: “The festival is non-ideological and non-political and non-sectarian … we don’t want to be subverted by any other agenda and that is principally why we turned Mr Saeed down.”

Right, because Carlisle and whatever ‘we’ she is speaking for already have their agenda, so they don’t want to be subverted by any other brand new different one. Their agenda is – erm – to celebrate diversity and plurality – erm, erm, erm – up to a point. Only up to a point, mind. More than that would be an agenda, and we don’t want that. Only up to a very sharp point, and not an inch farther.

Well this came as a shock. How had I managed to miss it until now? And is there never going to be an end to this kind of nonsense?

The State Board of Education, California, is currently engaged in approving the history/social science textbooks for grades six to eight in schools, an exercise undertaken periodically. The Hindu Education Foundation and the Vedic Foundation (based in the U.S.) have used the occasion to push through “corrections” in the textbooks approved. Shiva Bajpai, who constituted the one-member ad hoc committee set up by the Board, succeeded in getting virtually all the changes requested by these organisations incorporated into the textbooks. Professor Emeritus at California State University, Northridge, and a Hindutva-leaning adviser to the Board, Bajpai was proposed as expert by the Vedic Foundation. That the Hindutva groups have not had a walkover is thanks to the vigilance and commitment of the many academics involved in Indian studies all over the world.

Here we go again. And again, and again, and again.

Intervention by Professors Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer in the form of a letter, signed by 50 other scholars, presented at a public hearing on November 9, resulted in the Board reversing its initial approval of the pro-Hindutva changes. Prof. Witzel is a well-known Indologist and has often taken up the cudgels against Hindutva ideologues such as David Frawley, N.S. Rajaram and Konrad Elst in the West. Witzel’s letter, endorsed among others by renowned Indian historians Romila Thapar, D.N. Jha and Shereen Ratnagar, to Ruth Green, President, State Board of Education, California, on behalf of “world specialists on ancient India”, voicing “mainstream academic opinion in India, Pakistan, the United States, Europe, Australia, Taiwan and Japan” on the issue, is now part of a concerted campaign encompassing well-known scholars and hundreds of teachers and parents in California.

Well good luck to them, and if B&W can help them at all, perhaps by drawing attention to the subject – it will, that’s what. I’ve emailed PZ; that’s a start.

Asserting that “the proposed revisions are not of a scholarly, but of a religious-political nature and are primarily promoted by Hindutva supporters and non-specialist academics writing about issues far outside their areas of expertise”, the scholars have called on the Board to “reject the demands by nationalist Hindu (Hindutva) groups”. From India, 12 historians have written to the CC to reject the changes proposed by the RSS-linked organisations in the U.S…Frantic mobilisation…in support of the changes suggested by the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation, and the pressure of a host of organisations that constitute the `parivar’ in the U.S. resulted in many of the proposed changes in textbooks getting the approval despite scholarly opinion being heavily weighted against it…Of the total 156 edits requested, the CC accepted 97 that conformed to what the Hindutva organisations had proposed.

Read the whole thing. I want to keep quoting and quoting, but there’s such a thing as copyright – so read it. It’s amazing stuff – also all too familiar.

The moves by the Hindu Right in the U.S. are no flash in the pan. The web sites of two of the organisations spearheading the Hindutva campaign – the Hindu Education Foundation and the Vedic Foundation – expressly state the revision of school textbooks in the U.S. as part of their political agenda. They regularly “interact” with State Education Committees that define school curriculum…

Oh, gawd…here we really do go again. Well – once more unto the breach, dear friends. Tell everyone you know.

Stewart gave us a report on seeing Salman Rushdie at a reading on Friday, and I thought I would make it more visible. Hit it, Stewart:

He had a few nice obvious laugh lines like his reply to the question as to why he now lives in the States: “Well, you know, of course the real reason is I’m an enormous fan of George W.Bush.” Also, a somewhat unnecessary disclaimer that got the reaction he expected: “Let’s just be clear: I’m not in favour of Islamic terrorism. I mean, in case there was any doubt about that, that’s not my view.”

He mentioned his grandmother being “scary” and followed up with: “And my grandfather was the opposite. My grandfather was very gentle. He sometimes tried to be scary but he didn’t fool anybody. And he was – unlike me – he was very religious. I mean, he was a practicing Muslim. He went on the pilgrimage to Mecca, he said his prayers five times a day every day of his life. And yet, for me, he was then and remains now a kind of image of tolerance and civilisation and open-mindedness and culture.”

He was asked about an interview in which he was quoted as linking Islamic terror to a sexual fear of women and clarified as follows: “Well, it’s clear that Osama Bin Laden is not a feminist. The twentieth century – the twenty-first century might be a different place if he were. No, I think in a way, in this interview that was published, they – the journalist – somewhat oversimplified what I was trying to say. Because I was trying to say two slightly different things. I was trying to say, first of all, it is true, in my view, that it is a part of the project of conservative Islam to keep women in their place, in a very secondary and very sequestered place. And you see that from the behaviour of those cultures towards women. I wasn’t trying to say that that’s the project of Islamic terrorism, you know, but I’m saying it is a part of the mindset of conservative Islam. Separately I would say that cultures in which the central moral axis is between honour and shame, rather than, in the West, let’s say in Christian culture, roughly speaking, between guilt and redemption, you know, the morality of such a culture operates differently when it’s an honour culture and the force on the individual self of a sense of having been dishonoured is much, much more powerful than that phrase would mean to a Western mind. And its consequences in terms of action can be much more extreme. And I’ve been writing about this, I think, all my life. I mean, ‘Shame’ is a novel I wrote in 1983, which deals with a very similar investigation of honour culture. Why is it that in certain conservative Muslim families girls are murdered by their brothers and father because they had a love affair with somebody thought to be inappropriate? You know, I mean – to kill your child because she – to kill your sister because she – because she – kissed the wrong guy. You know, it’s a very hard thing to understand. So I was trying to say that this is a culture in which that very strange axis between honour and shame is somewhere at the centre of how people make choices.”

Norm quoted a question the other day that I’ve been thinking about on and offishly. It’s from a theologian or professor of ‘divinity’ (wot?) called Keith Ward (who wrote a presumptuous godbothering book called ‘God is Better Than Science’ or some such thing which I’ve read and disliked very much). He wonders why Richard Dawkins can ‘only see the bad in religion’. (He means ‘see only the bad,’ but never mind). That’s what I’ve been pondering, as a general question, not a specifically Dawkins-directed question. Why do some atheists ‘see only the bad’ in religion? Or, at least, why do we (because I’m one, although I do in fact sometimes note what one could call ‘the good’ or at least the understandable in religion) choose to concentrate on the bad rather than offering a more mixed or ‘balanced’ view?

There are some not terribly interesting, what one might call pragmatic reasons, to do with the fact that there are thousands of voices yapping about ‘the good’ in religion right now and not all that many insisting on the other thing, so it seems not unreasonable for opponents to go ahead and be opponents, rather than scrupulously giving the religious side its putative due (especially since the religious side so often gives remarkably inaccurate and badtempered accounts of atheism and atheists). But never mind that for the moment; it’s not all that complicated or productive, and it’s related to contingencies which could change. The real reason is not contingent, and it is more interesting, I think – because it’s about something that matters, and that’s the point.

The reason I, at least, am not much inclined to talk about ‘the good in religion’ is because it comes at a price, and the price is too high. The good is inseparable from that price, you can’t get the good without the price, so if you think the good is not worth the price – then for you it is not a good. It can’t be a good because it’s so tangled up with the price – with the bad.

It’s not as if you can make two lists, good, bad, and judge each in isolation. Because the basic problem with religion, the thing that makes people like me adopt a fighting stance, is that it’s not true. That’s not just some minor or detachable problem that one can compartmentalize or bracket – it’s right smack in the middle.

It’s a corruption, a surrender, an abdication, and we don’t make it because – we don’t want to endorse a lie. That’s why.

In other words, yes, we can see that religion has some useful and beneficial aspects sometimes – consolation, solidarity, inspiration, motivation – but they depend on a supernatural belief system, on a systematic illusion, and we don’t consider and don’t want to consider that a good thing.

We think truth matters, and that the human ability to sort truth from fiction, and speculation from findings based on evidence, matters. If religion consisted of maybe, if it were about uncertainty as some of its defenders claim, that would be different – but it’s not. It’s assertive – it makes firm, coercive truth claims. (And then shifts the ground by saying that no one can prove them false. No, of course not, but that is not a reason to assert them as true.)

The pivot is the word ‘faith.’ It’s no accident that that keeps coming up – ‘faith’ is the problem, faith is where religion demands that we treat speculation and hope – invention and fantasy – as true. And that is a bad thing, and we do know that in other contexts. (You’re in the car. ‘Is this the right road?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘Faith.’ ‘Err…’) If religion were about, and were named, hope, or speculation, that would be one thing – but it’s not, it’s ‘faith.’ So we don’t see how to cite the putative good aspects of religion without endorsing the lying and refusal to think. It’s all one fabric.