Religion Up Close

I apologise for the length of time I’ve taken in getting another post out.  I was away for Christmas, and then we were moving house, and have been living like benighted savages, hunting with stone-tipped spears, avoiding sabre-toothed tigers and living with no internet access whatsoever.  However, the internet has been restored to us, and we have thus returned to the folds of civilisation.  This being so, I hope that you had a very happy Christmas, and I would like to wish you a happy and prosperous new year, belated those these wishes may be.

So much for the preamble and excuses and pleasantries.  What I actually want to write about in this post is a vague realisation that I had before Christmas.  I’ve sort of mentioned it before, I think, but I believe it bears closer examination.

It is this:  When atheists and antitheists attack religion, what they very often attack is this vast, nebulous, faceless, monolithic entity called Religion.  It looks a lot like militant Islam crossed with the worst excesses of American right-wing fundamentalism, and is an oppressive, repressive, greedy, grasping, diabolical entity responsible for jihads, pogroms, inquisitions and persecutions.  It is a vast weight on history, dragging people down and back and allowing the evil to rule the ignorant through fear and superstition.

And do you know what?  Standing at the distance that they are, that is certainly what it does look like, in a certain light.  But then, from a distance, a mountain can appear to be a vast, barren rock.  From high above, a rain forest can appear to be a single, homogenous blob of green that could be swamp or jungle or even just a vast expanse of moss.  A beach appears to be an empty stretch of dry sand.  Seen from a distance, such things appear almost lifeless.  You have to get up close, or even get inside and underneath them, before you realise that they are full of life.

I frequently read the tirades of online atheists, and wonder whether they’ve actually spent any time around ‘everyday’ theists, the kind that inhabit their local parish church and run the coffee morning or the jumble sale or hand out the hymn books.  You get the impression that if they have ever met a theist in the flesh, it’s been a door-to-door Witness or a slightly spittle-flecked street preacher.  They rage not against the vicar or the minister or the church steward or the chap sitting at the back of the church with a newspaper when it’s open for people to wander about in during the week.  Their bile is reserved for Religion.  If they think about those people at all, it is only as cogs of the vast homogenous oppressive machine of Religion.

And this is it, when one looks back at the past from the distance of centuries one sees the inquisitions and witch hunts and jihads writ large in the pages of history.  You look at the newspapers and websites today and you see ISIS and the Taliban and Westboro Baptist Church, and church sex abuse scandals.  What you do not see, what was not considered history-worthy, what is not considered newsworthy, are the hundreds and thousands and millions of small acts of kindness and charity and generosity and mercy and humility and self-sacrifice, of hope, faith and love that are the result of individuals’ religious beliefs.

But in order to see these things, you have to get up close.  You need to put down the telescope and actually walk up to the mountain, and talk to the people living on its slopes, to understand what life is like there.  Unfortunately, to do such a thing is not only daunting, I suspect that many would think it unnecessary.  They don’t need to talk to religious people to see that Religion is evil, any more than they need to dig up the crabs and worms to know that a beach is lifeless, or walk beneath the trees to see the many animals living in the forest.

“Oh, of course there are some good religious folk,” some may concede, but Religion should still be banned.  What they fail to realise is that there is no such thing as Religion.  Only religious people.  I’ve said in a previous post that there’s no such thing as Christianity, but that goes double for Religion.  They rage against a thing which does not exist, and ignore the people that actually make up what they think they oppose.

And of course these footsoldiers and factory floor workers aren’t perfect.  Many, maybe even most of us are hypocrites and recidivists, wrapped up in our own holiness and how much better we are than others, by sheer dint of being us.  But that doesn’t mean that those acts of goodness that I mentioned aren’t being performed and a billion ways, in a billion places, every single day.

A machine is just the aggregate of its parts.  A society is just the aggregate of its members.  A religion is just the aggregate of its people, and their actions and their beliefs and their opinions.  There is no such thing as Religion, there is only us, and as a result we each have the responsibility to make sure that what we are adding to that aggregate is something positive and worthwhile, even if the people who think that they oppose us never see it.

Am I Charlie?

For the past two weeks, most of my spare time has been taken up by the deeply unpleasant business of moving house.  We’ve only moved a few hundred yards, but nonetheless the process of packing, moving, unpacking and cleaning has been neither brief nor easy.  (And, indeed, we only got the internet back yesterday!)

This is all by way of an excuse for not having written a new blog post for a little while, especially given the events of the past couple of weeks.  Having pontificated previously on the question of free speech, offense, blasphemy and religious toleration, I thought I’d better weigh in on this one too, and let you all know the Important Thoughts I’ve had on the subject.

Firstly of course, I should restate my absolute belief that anyone should have the right to say anything to anyone, and not face violence, persecution or prosecution.  If we wish to have freedom of speech, we have to accept that people are free to speak, whether they are racists, fascists, lunatics or even people who disagree with me on any subject whatsoever.  People have the right to be as offensive, crude, vulgar, blasphemous or generally unpleasant as they can possibly be, and do so without fear of violent or legal reprisal.  Of course, they also have to accept that others can act in exactly the same way towards them.

However, as Chesterton once said, “To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”  I believe absolutely that you should have the right to be offensive.  I would defend it to the death.  That does not mean that I think you actually should be offensive.  The cartoons published by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo were offensive, and deliberately so.  They have every right to publish them.  I just don’t think that they should have.  Not out of fear, you understand.  If there was any suggestion that someone was not saying or publishing a thing purely out of fear of attack, then I would strongly suggest that they say it or publish it, and I would be happy to publically support them, if only because the kind of people who resort to intimidation and threat are perhaps the only sort of people who actually do need belittling and insulting.

No, I think that they should have refrained from publishing those cartoons for the simple fact that they were insulting.  I do not like having my beliefs and opinions insulted.  Challenged, yes.  Having them challenged is absolutely vital, but insulted?  No.  It’s the issue I take with much of the aggressive, evangelical atheism I see online.  Much of it seems to be far more interested in insulting religious belief than in challenging it in a sensible, respectful (but nonetheless challenging) manner, and this is helpful to no-one whatsoever.  Satirise it by all means.  Make fun of it, laugh at it, but stop short of direct insult if you want the conversation to continue.  Charlie Hebdo might hold itself up as an icon of free speech, and in a faintly unpleasant, distinctly canary-like way I suppose it is, but to me it also represents the abuse of free speech to deliberately upset others in a way that is completely non-constructive.  If anything, it’s just entrenched people’s views, widened divisions, added grist to the extremist mill and generally made things worse. 

In a way, I actually think the cartoon of Mohammed printed in the first issue after the attack was more justified, since it acted as a signal that the magazine would not be swayed by violence or threats of violence, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t think the initial cartoon can be justified by a mere appeal to the principal of free speech.

The BBC (yeah, yeah, I know) ran an article about people getting fired for posting racist comments online.  Well, which are we going to have?  Do we want free speech, in which Charlie Hebdo can publish offensive cartoons, or do we want limits on what one can say, even as private individuals online?  Should people be racist?  Of course not.  Should they be ostracised or, preferably, reasoned with and educated?  Very much so.  Should they lose their job (assuming of course that they are not acting in an official manner, or on a company blog or twitter feed etc, or otherwise representing the company when they make the post) over their (unpleasant, offensive) personal opinions?  My opinion on holocaust denial is the same.  Historians who deny the holocaust should be publically identified as very poor historians, and their scholarship and credentials rightly scrutinised and doubted, but should it be illegal?  Should it be against the law to hold an erroneous opinion?  I believe not.  We cannot have it both ways, and only maintain the right to be offensive when it’s not us being offended.

If we actually believe in the principle of free speech, and we certainly claim to, then we have to accept that it applies to everybody equally, irrespective of their position or opinion. 

Am I Charlie?  No, I am not, nor do I want to be, thank you.  However, I will defend to the death your right to be Charlie if that’s what you think is right.