Author: Ophelia Benson

There is a discussion at Twisty Sticks of the subject we were talking about a few days ago (‘Immunity’), and will be talking about in the future – as I said, it’s one I’m curious about and would like to explore. The subject of Why Does Religion Get Special Treatment? Why does it get a blank check, a free pass, a dispensation, diplomatic immunity. Why are there special rules that apply to religion and nothing else, why does religion get to trump other concerns, why does the importance of religion outweigh the importance of other things – of other concerns, commitments, values, desires, goals.

Which raises a related question, one which probably needs answering or at least clarifying in order to think about all this. The question of what religion is. When I ask why the importance of religion outweighs the importance of other things, what do I mean by other things? What are we talking about here? What things, what kinds of things?

I think that’s part of the problem in such discussions, and maybe part of an answer to the why question. Religion is probably the ultimate example of being all things to all people. That’s part of what’s wrong with it, why it’s so irritating (and dangerous and harmful, often), why it’s often so futile and frustrating to argue about it, as Phil Mole notes in an article in ‘Skeptical Inquirer.’ Because it doesn’t have to pin itself down and limit itself, because it’s just anything and nothing. It’s a feeling, it’s morality, it’s meaning, it’s love, it’s Daddy, it’s goodness, it’s purpose, it’s community, it’s someone watching over us, it’s the intelligence of the universe, it’s Mind.

But one of the main things it is is a set of ideas and truth-claims. If it’s not that it’s not really religion, not in the normal meaning of the word (as we’ve discussed here before, at considerable length). It is institutional religion we’re talking about here, because that is the kind that gets this special treatment. It’s the big, powerful, traditional religions about which people say Well maybe we’d better let them ignore laws about humane animal slaughter or else they might burn down Leeds. (Someone did actually talk about cities in Northern England in flames, at Twisty Sticks, so I’m not exaggerating.) So what I’m wondering about is why other sets of ideas that people care a great deal about don’t get this kind of treatment. I only get more curious the more I wonder about it.

Norm Geras has taken up the discussion of women and names. (And by the way, speaking of Norm, there was a conference to honour his career at Manchester a few days ago. Chris Bertram of Twisty Sticks gave a paper there on Marx and Engels reading Rousseau, Ian Kershaw gave one on the singularity of the Holocaust. I was not there, I was over here, several miles away, turning pale with envy.) You’ll see that he doesn’t entirely agree with JerryS.

..what’s always struck me as the most difficult issue is not – as gets pointed out pretty quickly – that by keeping her own name a woman is still thereby accepting to be known by the name of another man: in this case her father’s. That is unavoidable.

The background to that is that Manchester City beat Manchester United last weekend.

No it’s not, I’m just being silly. As usual. Or rather more than usual. It’s this book, you see. I work on it for awhile and end up feeling light-headed – all that snickering. Anyway, Norm makes a good point about this business of a woman’s keeping her own name after marriage but then giving all the children the father’s name.

But I find the option perplexing. For what it seems to initiate by the woman’s retention of her own name – that is, putting men and women on an equal footing in this domain – it effectively undercuts by the way the child is named.

Just so. I suppose that’s one of the many bits of radicalism that was just allowed to drift away over the years. But many of those bits of radicalism were worth hanging onto and trying to implement, I’ve always thought and still think. And that’s one of them.

Yes and speaking of writing books (yes we were, yesterday) and Adonis and one thing and another – we are writing a book, as a matter of fact. We’re doing a much-expanded version of the Fashionable Dictionary. It’s going to be very, very, very funny. Eye-closingly funny, lung-emptyingly funny, furniture-breakingly funny. In fact, to tell you the unvarnished truth and not to put too fine a point on it, it already is. I say this with all due modesty and humility, on account of how I don’t have any. Don’t know what the words mean. (Better bung them in the dictionary then.) Anyway I can pretend I’m talking exclusively about my colleague’s work when I boast. But I’m not. His stuff makes me whinny and shriek like a demented horse, yes, but so does some of mine. How I long to show you some of today’s work…but alas, alas, I cannot. You will just have to wait. It won’t be long – the book will be out in the autumn. And then you can whinny and shriek too, and then you’ll rush off to buy armloads of the book to give all your friends, and I’ll be able to postpone the evil day of having to get an actual Job for another month or two, and so will Adonis.

Actually we’re writing two books. We thought one wasn’t enough, that one is kind of a pale, timid, half-hearted thing to do, that the really butch decisive assertive approach would be to write two. So we are. I’m also raising a litter of feral polecats while my colleague is building an SUV from a kit. No, that’s not true, I just felt like saying it. But all the rest of it is true.