British or Christian?

Another quote from the comments on the article I discussed last time:  “I will never trust anyone who claims allegiance to religion over this country.”

An interesting point, which begs two questions.  The first is personal: If it came down to it, and I had to choose between my beliefs and my country, which would I choose?  Currently I see only minor conflicts between the two, in areas such as the treatment of the poor, but suppose that they came into direct opposition.  In an either/or situation, would I choose my country or my religion?

You occasionally see claims that one’s religion is something one chooses, normally to emphasise that as a result religion should yield to things that are not chosen, such as sexuality.  I’ve already addressed this question in a different post, in which I stated that I did not ‘choose’ to be Christian, merely that it makes sense to me to be so.  Equally though, I most certainly did not choose to be British.  I’m happy to be, maybe even proud to be, if that’s not entirely irrational, but I am not British by choice.

The thing is though, that my beliefs are my own.  Although, like Chesterton, my personal heresy turned out to be orthodoxy (or something very close), I’m neither a literalist nor a fundamentalist.  I do indeed cherry-pick my beliefs, and believe that it is right to do so.  I am not slavishly devoted to every word of the Bible; I consider its teachings carefully, accepting many, rejecting some.

I have no such options when it comes to my country.  I am unable to go through its laws and statutes and decide which ones make sense to me, which ones seems right, which ones, in the context of the overall corpus, seem truest to the general message, and reject the others.  For the record, off the top of my head I am unable to think of any laws that I would wish to be exempt from.  It is not merely the written laws of the land that prevent me from going on killing sprees or tour the country defrauding old ladies of their pensions.  All the laws of the land apply to me; I can’t opt out of any because I happen to disagree with them, and this is for the best.  After all, if everyone could do that, they would be completely pointless.

However just because something is legal does not make it right; there are a great many examples of this, not all of which are merely down to loopholes and lawyers’ tricks.  Conversely, just because a thing is illegal doesn’t not make it wrong, although this is more subjective and relativist.  Some laws even now seem unjust, and there is no guarantee that in the future, unjust laws will not be enacted.  At that point, when my faith and my personal morals tell me one thing, and my country tells me another, which will I choose?

It is a foregone conclusion.  Currently I don’t feel that my allegiance is split, but if it ever is, I will choose my faith over my country over and over again.  And why should I not?  I would choose my faith over country, but my faith is self-crafted and carefully picked over, it’s not one forced onto me from outside, and informs, rather than contradicts my personal morals. 

This brings me to my second question; Why would this poster not trust anyone who claims allegiance to their religion over their country?  What the commenter doesn’t seem to realise is that by comparing the two, he (I’m assuming, on the basis of nothing whatsoever, that it’s a he) has made the latter into the former.  In the absence of God, he has deified the state, turned it into something to which we should bring our unquestioning praise and obedience irrespective of what it does or how it treats us.  ‘My country, right or wrong’ is a foolish and fundamentalist creed, as dangerous as any militant sect which says ‘Our god above all, death to the unbeliever!’  Blind faith is blind whether it is in a religion, a political ideology or a state.

The implication is that the poster won’t trust the hypothetical disloyal theist because they are irrational and dangerous.  I would contend that he is exactly what he is trying to condemn.  I wouldn’t trust anyone who claims allegiance to country over their own private beliefs, be they religious or secular.  If these happen to coincide with the country’s, then good for them, but I struggle to believe that anyone, in the face of an obviously unjust ruling, would say “That doesn’t seem right to me, but the government says so, so it must be ok.”  Actually, having just typed that, I suspect that it has indeed happened multiple times in the past; people have persuaded themselves that any disquiet they feel is misplaced, because clearly a national government wouldn’t do anything utterly wrong, and if they did it must be for a very good reason which is more than adequate to justify the apparent wrong.  I suspect it was thinking just like that that birthed and sustained the most horrific regimes in history.

Anyone who suspends their own judgement and morals and blindly and uncritically accepts the commands of others, who claim absolute allegiance to any movement, ideology, faith or state at the expense of their own conscience and free will is a person who should be treated very carefully, because they are potentially capable of anything.  “But I was just following orders!” is the cry of one who has abdicated responsibility for their actions, and is therefore capable of anything.  Unfortunately, it seems that there are plenty of people apparently willing to do just that, and persuade themselves that they are right to do so.  For whatever reason, the commenter seems to think that it is perfectly acceptable to do this for a country while it is foolish to do it for a religion, and is therefore part of the exact problem they claim to want to solve.

Opposing Extremism Extremely

Another blog post, another link to another BBC story, this time about the idea of locking up ‘extremists’ in separate sections.  Never mind the quote from the article, “Extremist prisoners who "seek to poison the minds of others" will be put in special units”, which sounds like something that should be coming from China or North Korea, that’s not the issue I wish to address today, significant and terrifying though it is.

In their infinite wisdom, the BBC opened the story up for comment, and you can imagine some of the gems that came up.  However, beyond the usual daft ‘ban religion’ posts were some rather more disturbing ones: “People who still believe in gods in the 21^st century just need culling”, “All religious people believe in an afterlife, so why don’t we just kill them?”, “Just cut (Anjem Choudary’s) tongue out.”  Now, my understanding of the law is that these are actually incitement to violence and therefore illegal, and I know that the first one at least was removed by the BBC moderators.

Now, as a ‘religious person’, it may not surprise you to learn that I am not wholly in favour of these as long-term plans.  I feel in myself that being culled would not align with my interests, and although I do indeed believe in an afterlife, albeit only with the very vaguest ideas of what precise form it might take, I don’t feel that I should be prematurely ushered into it, even by the most well-intentioned of violent extremist maniacs.

More specifically, there was plenty of ranting against Islam extremism, or indeed just Islam itself.  Plenty of calls to deport them (regardless of the fact that many, including Anjem Choudary, the focus of the article, were born in the UK) and quite a few to just shoot them.  To be fair, these latter were mostly directed towards extremists preaching violence, not Muslims generally.  Mostly.  There were however plenty of calls for such people to be forcibly silenced, and prevented from preaching at all.

Many of the posters claimed that they wanted to protect the UK from Islamisation, and that these extremists want to turn Britain into another “backwards, medieval hellhole”.  In short, to prevent Britain from becoming like Saudi Arabia or Yemen, they want to reinstitute the death penalty, mutilation and corporal punishment, crack down on free speech and quash freedom of religion and freedom of assembly.  Wait a second…

Extremism takes a great many forms, nebulous and easily-abused concept that it is, but if nothing else the saddening and baffling comments quoted above demonstrate that it is by no means the sole domain of religion.  We should also bear in mind of course that the vast, vast majority of moderate, reasonable rational atheists decry and condemn the calls to violence, intolerance and oppression made by their sadly loud but nonetheless tiny extremist fringes.  It can be easy to forget this when they are so very visible, but the aim of such people is to polarise us, enforce the ‘us vs them’ mentality, whether ‘Us’ is British people, atheists, right-wingers or whomever, and the ‘Them’ Muslim extremists, Muslims in general, ‘religious people’, left-wingers etc etc etc.

I reject them and their vile and poorly-thought out antagonism.  We are better than the people who seek to oppress or destroy us, and we should be proud of that fact, not racing people like Choudary to the bottom.  Fighting fire with fire is an excellent way of burning down the entire world, and we need to preach this until everyone gets the idea.

The Convenience, Utility and Justice of Homogenous Groups, Regardless of Size

I would ask you, gentle reader, to compare the two lists below:

List A	List B
Charles Darwin	Caligula
William Shakespeare	Elizabeth Bathory
Charles Dickens	Robespierre
Saint Peter	Adolf Hitler
Obi Wan Kenobi (Episode II onwards)	Joseph Stalin
Me	Nero
Francis of Assisi	Pol Pot
Socrates	Emperor Palpatine
William Booth	Napoleon Bonaparte
Charlemagne	Myra Hindley

The conclusions that we can draw from the scientific and wholly representative study above should be so obvious as to be hardly worth expanding on, and I imagine that you will all be taking action accordingly.  However, that would make for a very short blog post, so I’m afraid that I must insult your intelligence and act as though the above were not self-evident. 

Obviously List A consists of paragons of humanity and over-achievers in their respective fields, be that writing, discovering evolution, philosophy, feeding the poor, fighting the Sith, blogging about writing and/or theology, forming the Holy Roman Empire etc. etc.

List B consists of murderers, dictators and Sith lords; all, it must be admitted, over-achievers in their fields, but one might wish that they’d tried less hard and been distracted more easily.

The common factor is, I hope, instantaneously obvious: beards.  The occupants of List A are all bearded, while the denizens of List B are all unbearded.  At most they might have a moustache.

Now, as we all know, correlation does not necessarily equal causation.  No reasonable person would actually suggest (despite the overwhelming weight of evidence in support of the hypothesis) that beards make one good, wise, witty, and modest.  Nonetheless, it does allow one to make some generalisations that can be assumed to hold true.  If you don’t have a beard, you’re probably a murderer.  You may well have attempted, at some point in the past, to conquer Europe.  You’ve most likely tried, probably unsuccessfully, to shoot lightning from your hands and/or crush the rebel alliance.  You’ve almost certainly had numerous people executed.  Unbearded people are generally and as a rule of thumb, evil.

If you, dear reader, are yourself unbearded, please do not take offence.  Of course the above is not true of all your kind; there are, or at least there must be, somewhere, unbearded people who are good, upright individuals, even if they cannot aspire to the heights of achievement catalogued by the inhabitants of List A.  You may even be one of them, or at least it is not totally beyond the realms of possibility.  I myself don’t have anything against unbearded people; many of my best friends don’t have beards, indeed I am married to an unbearded person.

I imagine that if one were to google ‘Unbearded People’, there would be a wide variety of websites, sound-bites and memes pointing out and mocking the many shortcomings of the breed.  This is unkind, but hardly unexpected.

In the same way that one can talk about bearded people, generalisations may be made about other groups.  Religious people for example.  Although there may be a little variety within the group, nonetheless what holds true for a Taliban suicide bomber can be assumed to also apply to the denizens of your local parish church.  What can be fairly said of a Young Earth creationist can equally be said of an Oxford theology professor.  More so, what can be said of a sixteenth century inquisitor can be said of the staff of the nearest Salvation Army soup kitchen or your local food bank.  Across time and space, ‘religious people’ are as homogenous and unchanging as ‘unbearded people’ (if the latter can really be called ‘people’ at all).  By and large, they (religious people that is, not unbearded people) are ignorant, anti-intellectual and potentially violent, extremely close-minded and hostile (often violently so) to change or any suggestion that their beliefs might not be accurate.

It is extremely useful to us that such generalisations hold true.  We live in a world of convenient clumps, clearly divided into distinct colours and types.  A world of nuance and change would be far too complicated for the human mind to encompass.  I mean, yes public discourse suffers somewhat, and the divisions between groups remain the same, if not growing ever wider, like continental plates slowly and inexorably drifting apart, but what can we do but shrug and wait for our continent to take us somewhere sunny?  Not only that, but the fact that all groups are monolithic and homogenous also allows far greater accountability than would otherwise be possible, a factor which we can all agree if of the utmost benefit to the world. 

After all, since unbearded people can be classed as a distinct and cohesive whole, the actions of any one unbearded person can be fairly laid at the door of any other unbearded person.  You, humble and bare-chinned reader, no matter how innocent you may assume yourself to be, bear the weight of Napoleon’s conquests, the blood of Elizabeth Bathory’s hot-tub stains your skin, the stench of Caligula’s orgies clings to your clothes.  We more fortunate people can ask you to get your house in order and discipline your more fractious elements, and we are able to justify our mistreatment of you because, after all, many innocent bearded people suffered the depredations of Napoleon’s armies, many were oppressed by Nero’s persecutions, a great many killed during Robespierre’s reign of terror.  It is only fair, right and just that you accept responsibility for the sins of your co-barefacers and at least offer a grovelling apology, even if you can’t necessarily offer physical reparations of any kind.

I hope that you now understand, tragic and whiskerless reader, why it is that you receive so much unkindness and abuse, and accept that although it is by no means your fault per se, it is nonetheless just, fair and reasonable, and that you should accept it graciously, humbly, maybe even gratefully.  Ultimately, you have no-one but yourself and those millions of other unbearded people throughout time and space, almost entirely identical to you in all essentials, to blame.