Author: Ophelia Benson

So, it seems to be a good day for out-there pronouncements by bloodthirsty authoritarian men. For horrible glimpses into the nasty fetid power-ravenous controlfreak minds of tyrannical shits.

Osama’s pious little wet-dream is not much of a surprise, of course. No surprise at all really. But still worth a passing kick.

Osama bin Laden wants the United States to convert to Islam, ditch its constitution, abolish banks, jail homosexuals and sign the Kyoto climate change treaty…Alcohol and gambling would be barred and there would be an end to women’s photos in newspapers or advertising. Any woman serving “passengers, visitors and strangers”, presumably anyone from air stewardesses to waitresses, would also be out of a job.

From air stewardesses to waitresses isn’t all that far – presumably that would also include doctors, nurses, dentists, teachers, many lawyers, checkout clerks, bus drivers – quite a range of jobs.

In the book the terrorist responsible for the deaths of 3,000 civilians in September 2001 says that killing the innocent is wrong.

Of course he does. Nothing easier – you just define the people you want to kill as ‘not innocent’ and the job is done. No problem, no cognitive dissonance. ‘If I hate them, they must be wicked, because I am good, so I wouldn’t hate them unless they were not good, so if they are wicked naturally they are not innocent, and besides I am good, so my killing them must be right, because I am good, so it can’t be not good, therefore, logically, they must be wicked. If they are chosen by (good) me to be killed, then necessarily they must be wicked, or otherwise I (good as I am) would not have chosen them.’ Airtight, you see.

And clearly so Pinochet thinks – with a pretty, devout, humble, spiritual thought.

Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, has declared that God will pardon him for human rights abuses committed during his 17-year rule, according to newly released court documents. Asked by Chilean judge Victor Montiglio about the killing of 3,000 Chilean civilians during the military government, Mr Pinochet, 89, said: “I suffer for these losses, but God does the deeds; he will pardon me if I exceeded in some, which I don’t think.”

Heads I win tails you lose, you see. God does the deeds, so it’s none of me, but I suffer for these losses (note how compassionate I am, how sensitive, how good), but it’s that God fella wot done them, blame him. Anyhow he’ll pardon me if I went just a teeny tiny bit overboard in some – not all, mind you! No indeed, not all! Only some. He’ll pardon me if I went just a little bit mad with the fun – even though he’s the one who does the deeds. You see what I mean?

His logic isn’t quite as strong as Osama’s, but it has that touch of compassion that makes it so moving.

Everything that I did, all that I carried out, all the problems I had, I dedicate to God, all this I dedicate to Chile because this permitted that the country was not communist and arose as it is today.

Ah well – you see. Who can blame him now, after a generous gesture like that? Everything he did, he dedicates it to God. How very, very sweet. That would be the God that murders tens of thousands of people in Kashmir to give a message to Musharraf, I take it, and the God who kills hundreds of people in New Orleans and Mississippi to – what was it? Give the US a message about Darwin, was it? Or was it lesbians? Disobedient women? Something like that.

Okay, good. Great. I can do that too. I’ll dedicate some stuff to God. Here you go, God. Every single person killed or horribly injured by terrorists this year; every single person killed or horribly injured by terrorists throughout history (that’s a highish number, I should think); every person killed or horribly injured in every war; every person who dies in pain; every animal that dies in pain; every person and animal who suffers pain while alive –

Gosh, that seems to be a rather long list. God is frantically signalling that he can’t write that fast, and isn’t altogether sure he wants the dedication anyway.

He’s a funny guy though, isn’t he. Can’t stand poofters, but is terrifically fond of mass murdering thugs and tyrants. How odd. Me, I prefer queers.

Okay so these seventeen archbishops. All tied up in knots they are. All frantic and agitated and unhappy. Tearing their episcopal hair, rending their purple robes, chewing their anglican nails. And for why? For because that the Archbish of C isn’t being harsh enough toward non-heterosexuality. That’s why. Okay – why? Why is that a reason? Why are they so agitated about non-heterosexuality? Why does it upset them? Why does it worry them? Why do they think it’s so terrible?

They don’t really say. Maybe it’s too much to expect them to, in a letter to the Archbish, since they probably expect him to know. But still – since religious types never do seem to manage to come up with real – rational, universalizable, non-theist, non-authoritarian – reasons for the worry, it’s too bad they don’t.

They do make some attempt –

The Second Letter of Peter, which you quoted in terms of our participation in the divine nature (1.4) describes division in the church uncannily like the false leaders in our Communion today: “For, uttering loud boasts of folly, they entice with licentious passions of the flesh men who have barely escaped from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for whatever overcomes a man, to that he is enslaved.” (II Peter 2.18-19)

So presumably they are there saying that sexuality is slavery because of its power? But that won’t do as a reason, obviously, because it’s not as if same-sex sex is overpowering while other-sex sex is not. So that doesn’t really amount to a reason. People who get all tied up in knots about non-heterosexuality do have such a hard time coming up with real reasons – they always just end up with ‘God says,’ and that is not a reason, it’s simply a command. Basic vocabulary: a command is not the same thing as a reason, a reason is not the same thing as a command.

We appreciated your acknowledgement of the “overwhelming consensus” of the Church in time and space in believing that sex is intended by God for married couples only and therefore that same-sex sex is unacceptable and cannot be described as “holy and blessed”. You stated that you as Archbishop must stand with this consensus. We are most grateful for your unequivocal words. We wonder, however, whether your personal dissent from this consensus prevents you from taking the necessary steps to confront those churches that have embraced teaching contrary to the overwhelming testimony of the Anglican Communion and the church catholic. We urge you to rethink your personal view and embrace the Church’s consensus and to act on it, based as it is on the clear witness of Scripture.

Similar (though not identical) problem. ‘Intended by God’ – apart from all the other problems with that, some of which are of doubtful relevance here since the letter is addressed to an archbishop, it assumes that the writers of the letter know what is intended by ‘God’. Tricky. Very tricky. The evidence is contradictory and patchy.

In short it’s hard to escape the conclusion that all this kind of thing is just more Amplification, as Simon Blackburn says [pdf].

But equally perhaps ‘God exists’ functions largely as a license to demand respect creep. It turns up an amplifier, and what it amplifies is often the meanest and most miserable side of human nature. I want your land, and it enables me to throw bigger and better tantrums, ones that you just have to listen to, if I find myself saying that God wants me to want your land. A tribe wants to enforce the chastity of its women, and the words of the supernatural work to terrify them into compliance.

Or I don’t like poofters, and I can throw bigger and better tantrums – I can tell the Archbishop of Canterbury what’s what – if I claim to know what’s intended by God. It’s hard not to think that the Global South archbishops just don’t like people who go in for ‘same-sex sex’ and use God as an enforcer. And this is one of the many many reasons religion is such a regressive, narrow, stifling way to think. In any other context, a two or three thousand year old book is judged on its merits. It may well be taken to be full of wisdom, to have much to teach us, to be well worth reading and learning from – but for secular, rational, communicable, universalizable reasons, not for magical or ineffable or supernatural ones. For discussion-continuing reasons, not for discussion-ending reasons. What an airless, parched, small, blank little world the world of Authority is.

I saw this distatsteful item at Normblog. Guy called Faisal Bodi, news editor of the Islam Channel. He says things I disagree with. He also says things that strike me as incomplete, in an evasive way.

The working groups’ reports on extremism published last week have a sting in their tail that few in the Home Office could have expected…It says elements of the battered terrorism bill currently stuttering through parliament such as “glorifying terrorism” or banning nonviolent groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir will have little impact in the fight against criminal extremist violence and only further alienate Muslims.

People who read such things in a hasty way (as surely nearly everyone does – we don’t study newspaper columns as if they were great poetry or recipes for chocolate decadence cake) will get the impression that Hizb ut-Tahrir is a non-violent group in the sense of being a peace-loving gentle flower-sniffing innocent kindly group – a group that is about non-violence, in the way that peace marchers are. But as Ziauddin Sardar pointed out the other day and we discussed here, that’s not right.

The bearded and elegantly attired supporters of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), the fundamentalist Muslim group, like to emphasise the non-violent nature of their party. As a recent press release put it, they “have never resorted to armed struggle or violence”. This is correct as far as it goes. While HT has openly engaged in the politics of hatred, particularly towards the Jews, it has not, strictly speaking, advocated violence. But this does not mean that it is not a violent organisation…In fact, violence is central to HT’s goals. Its primary objective is to establish a caliphate…Their ideology argues that there is only one way Muslims can or should be ruled, that those who form this caliphate have the right to rule, that all others must submit unconditionally and that only this political interpretation of Islam is valid and legitimate. In other words, the caliphate of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s vision can be established only by doing violence to all other interpretations of Islam and all Muslims who do not agree with it – not to mention the violence it must do to the rest of the world, which also must eventually succumb.

Faisal Bodi sees things differently:

There is a big difference between someone with a strict approach to matters of faith and someone who uses indiscriminate violence for political ends: bushy beards and burkas do not a terrorist make.

Not nearly big enough, I would say. And what does he mean ‘strict’? And does he mean strict toward one’s own ‘faith’ – or does he mean strict toward, say, other people’s clothes and right to leave the house and items like that? That’s another ‘big difference’ that matters quite a lot – the big difference between a zealot who himself refrains from alcohol, kite-flying, music, image-making, whatever it may be, and a zealot who forces all those stupid prohibitions (and more, much more) on other people and whips them if they disobey. A big, big difference.

In fact the solution lies in more, and better, religion. The resort to indiscriminate violence against the homeland is often a reaction to a national disconnect, a lack of identification with a country that is persecuting fellow Muslims abroad and whose institutions remain pregnant with Islamophobic attitudes cultivated by orientalists over centuries.

No comment.

Just a small thing. I wanted to extract and keep a couple of comments by Frederick Crews from a longish piece on Philip Rieff because I think they’re interesting.

“The question ‘What can Freud teach us about the relation between our impulses and civilization?’ ceases to be interesting if it transpires that Freud didn’t actually make the discoveries he claimed to have made about the psyche,” says Frederick C. Crews, a professor emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley and a leading Freud skeptic.

Of course – oddly – a lot of people – well actually not a lot of people, but a sizable proportion of people in certain disciplines – think questions about what Freud can teach us about relations between various things don’t cease to be interesting no matter how clear it becomes that Freud didn’t actually make the discoveries he claimed to have made about the psyche. Their fixed idea (one might even call it an idée fixe) of Freud’s insight and profundity and originality seems to float completely free of any actual ontological status for his ‘discoveries’ about the psyche. There’s something puzzling and disconcerting about that.

“Rieff was brilliant in assessing the schismatics’ more simplistic visions of liberation, and he left us with the sense that Freud’s tough-mindedness, while hardly sufficient as a replacement for actual supernatural belief, deserved our sympathy and respect.” But Mr. Crews continues: “My feeling today is that those books of Rieff’s were period pieces, in three senses: In the intellectual style of the era, they overrated the extent to which social stability depends on the ideas of literary intellectuals; they overrated Freud’s permanent interest as a scientific pioneer; and as a result, they took seriously the vacuous antinomies of Civilization and Its Discontents, whereby a measure of ‘repression,’ causing personal unhappiness, is deemed requisite to the preservation of culture.”

Eloquent, isn’t it. That’s why I wanted to pull it out.