The GOD Delusion (4 page)

Religion
. . . has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy
or whatever. What it means is, 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're
not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? -
because you're not!' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree
with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will
have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks
taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it.
But on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch
on a Saturday', you say, 'I
respect
that'.

Why
should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party
or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of
economics versus that, Macintosh
instead of Windows - but to have an opinion about how the Universe
began, about who created the Universe . . . no, that's holy? . . . We
are used to not challenging religious ideas but it's very interesting
how much of a furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets
absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed to say these
things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those
ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have
agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be.

Here's
a particular example of our society's overweening respect for religion,
one that really matters. By far the easiest grounds for gaining
conscientious objector status in wartime are religious. You can be a
brilliant moral philosopher with a prizewinning doctoral thesis
expounding the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft
board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you
can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail through
like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on
the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself.

At
the opposite end of the spectrum from pacifism, we have a pusillanimous
reluctance to use religious names for warring factions. In Northern
Ireland, Catholics and Protestants are euphemized to 'Nationalists' and
'Loyalists' respectively. The very word 'religions' is bowdlerized to
'communities', as in 'intercommunity warfare'. Iraq, as a consequence
of the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, degenerated into sectarian
civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Clearly a religious conflict
- yet in the
Independent
of 20 May 2006 the
front-page headline and first leading article both described it as
'ethnic cleansing'. 'Ethnic' in this context is yet another euphemism.
What we are seeing in Iraq is religious cleansing. The original usage
of 'ethnic cleansing' in the former Yugoslavia is also arguably a
euphemism for religious cleansing, involving Orthodox Serbs, Catholic
Croats and Muslim Bosnians.
⁶

I
have previously drawn attention to the privileging of religion in
public discussions of ethics in the media and in government.
⁷
Whenever a controversy arises over sexual or reproductive
morals, you
can bet that religious leaders from several different faith groups will
be prominently represented on influential committees, or on panel
discussions on radio or television. I'm not suggesting that we should
go out of our way to censor the views of these people. But why does our
society beat a path to their door, as though they had some expertise
comparable to that of, say, a moral philosopher, a family lawyer or a
doctor?

Here's
another weird example of the privileging of religion. On 21 February
2006 the United States Supreme Court ruled that a church in New Mexico
should be exempt from the law, which everybody else has to obey,
against the taking of hallucinogenic drugs.
⁸
Faithful members of the Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal
believe that they can understand God only by drinking hoasca tea, which
contains the illegal hallucinogenic drug dimethyl-tryptamine. Note that
it is sufficient that they
believe
that the drug
enhances their understanding. They do not have to produce evidence.
Conversely, there is plenty of evidence that cannabis eases the nausea
and discomfort of cancer sufferers undergoing chemotherapy. Yet the
Supreme Court ruled, in 2005, that all patients who use cannabis for
medicinal purposes are vulnerable to federal prosecution (even in the
minority of states where such specialist use is legalized). Religion,
as ever, is the trump card. Imagine members of an art appreciation
society pleading in court that they 'believe' they need a
hallucinogenic drug in order to enhance their understanding of
Impressionist or Surrealist paintings. Yet, when a church claims an
equivalent need, it is backed by the highest court in the land. Such is
the power of religion as a talisman.

Seventeen
years ago, I was one of thirty-six writers and artists commissioned by
the magazine
New Statesman
to write in support of
the distinguished author Salman Rushdie,
⁹
then
under sentence of death for writing a novel. Incensed by the 'sympathy'
for Muslim 'hurt' and 'offence' expressed by Christian leaders and even
some secular opinion-formers, I drew the following parallel:

If
the advocates of apartheid had their wits about them they would claim -
for all I know truthfully - that allowing mixed races is against their
religion. A good part of the
opposition would respectfully tiptoe away. And it is no use claiming
that this is an unfair parallel because apartheid has no rational
justification. The whole point of religious faith, its strength and
chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The
rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious
person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.

Little
did I know that something pretty similar would come to pass in the
twenty-first century. The
Los Angeles Times
(10
April 2006) reported that numerous Christian groups on campuses around
the United States were suing their universities for enforcing
anti-discrimination rules, including prohibitions against harassing or
abusing homosexuals. As a typical example, in 2004 James Nixon, a
twelve-year-old boy in Ohio, won the right in court to wear a T-shirt
to school bearing the words 'Homosexuality is a sin, Islam is a lie,
abortion is murder. Some issues are just black and white!'
¹⁰
The school told him not to wear the T-shirt - and the boy's parents
sued the school. The parents might have had a conscionable case if they
had based it on the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech.
But they didn't: indeed, they couldn't, because free speech is deemed
not to include 'hate speech'. But hate only has to prove it is
religious,
and it no longer counts as hate. So, instead of freedom of
speech, the Nixons' lawyers appealed to the constitutional right to
freedom of
religion.
Their victorious lawsuit was
supported by the Alliance Defense Fund of Arizona, whose business it is
to 'press the legal battle for religious freedom'.

The
Reverend Rick Scarborough, supporting the wave of similar Christian
lawsuits brought to establish religion as a legal justification for
discrimination against homosexuals and other groups, has named it the
civil rights struggle of the twenty-first century: 'Christians are
going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian.'
¹¹
Once again, if such people took their stand on the right to free
speech, one might reluctantly sympathize. But that isn't what it is
about. The legal case in favour of discrimination against homosexuals
is being mounted as a counter-suit against alleged religious
discrimination! And the law seems to respect this. You can't
get away with saying, 'If you try to stop me from insulting homosexuals
it violates my freedom of prejudice.' But you can get away with saying,
'It violates my freedom of religion.' What, when you think about it, is
the difference? Yet again, religion trumps all.

I'll
end the chapter with a particular case study, which tellingly
illuminates society's exaggerated respect for religion, over and above
ordinary human respect. The case flared up in February 2006 - a
ludicrous episode, which veered wildly between the extremes of comedy
and tragedy. The previous September, the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
published twelve cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.
Over the next three months, indignation was carefully and
systematically nurtured throughout the Islamic world by a small group
of Muslims living in Denmark, led by two imams who had been granted
sanctuary there.
¹²
In late 2005 these malevolent
exiles travelled from Denmark to Egypt bearing a dossier, which was
copied and circulated from there to the whole Islamic world, including,
importantly, Indonesia. The dossier contained falsehoods about alleged
maltreatment of Muslims in Denmark, and the tendentious lie that
Jyllands-Posten
was a government-run newspaper. It also contained the twelve
cartoons which, crucially, the imams had supplemented with three
additional images whose origin was mysterious but which certainly had
no connection with Denmark. Unlike the original twelve, these three
add-ons were genuinely offensive - or would have been if they had, as
the zealous propagandists alleged, depicted Muhammad. A particularly
damaging one of these three was not a cartoon at all but a faxed
photograph of a bearded man wearing a fake pig's snout held on with
elastic. It has subsequently turned out that this was an Associated
Press photograph of a Frenchman entered for a pig-squealing contest at
a country fair in France.
¹³
The photograph had
no connection whatsoever with the prophet Muhammad, no connection with
Islam, and no connection with Denmark. But the Muslim activists, on
their mischief-stirring hike to Cairo, implied all three connections .
. . with predictable results.

The
carefully cultivated 'hurt' and 'offence' was brought to an explosive
head five months after the twelve cartoons were originally published.
Demonstrators in Pakistan and Indonesia burned Danish flags (where did
they get them from?) and hysterical demands
were made for the Danish government to apologize. (Apologize for what?
They didn't draw the cartoons, or publish them. Danes just live in a
country with a free press, something that people in many Islamic
countries might have a hard time understanding.) Newspapers in Norway,
Germany, France and even the United States (but, conspicuously, not
Britain) reprinted the cartoons in gestures of solidarity with
Jyllands-Posten,
which added fuel to the flames. Embassies and consulates were
trashed, Danish goods were boycotted, Danish citizens and, indeed,
Westerners generally, were physically threatened; Christian churches in
Pakistan, with no Danish or European connections at all, were burned.
Nine people were killed when Libyan rioters attacked and burned the
Italian consulate in Benghazi. As Germaine Greer wrote, what these
people really love and do best is pandemonium.
¹⁴

A
bounty of $1 million was placed on the head of 'the Danish cartoonist'
by a Pakistani imam - who was apparently unaware that there were twelve
different Danish cartoonists, and almost certainly unaware that the
three most offensive pictures had never appeared in Denmark at all
(and, by the way, where was that million going to come from?). In
Nigeria, Muslim protesters against the Danish cartoons burned down
several Christian churches, and used machetes to attack and kill (black
Nigerian) Christians in the streets. One Christian was put inside a
rubber tyre, doused with petrol and set alight. Demonstrators were
photographed in Britain bearing banners saying 'Slay those who insult
Islam', 'Butcher those who mock Islam', 'Europe you will pay:
Demolition is on its way' and, apparently without irony, 'Behead those
who say Islam is a violent religion'.

In
the aftermath of all this, the journalist Andrew Mueller interviewed
Britain's leading 'moderate' Muslim, Sir Iqbal Sacranie.
¹⁵
Moderate
he may be by today's Islamic standards, but in Andrew Mueller's account
he still stands by the remark he made when Salman Rushdie was condemned
to death for writing a novel: 'Death is perhaps too easy for him' - a
remark that sets him in ignominious contrast to his courageous
predecessor as Britain's most influential Muslim, the late Dr Zaki
Badawi, who offered Salman Rushdie sanctuary, in his own home. Sacranie
told Mueller how concerned
he was about the Danish cartoons. Mueller was concerned too, but for a
different reason: 'I am concerned that the ridiculous, disproportionate
reaction to some unfunny sketches in an obscure Scandinavian newspaper
may confirm that. . . Islam and the west are fundamentally
irreconcilable.' Sacranie, on the other hand, praised British
newspapers for not reprinting the cartoons, to which Mueller voiced the
suspicion of most of the nation that 'the restraint of British
newspapers derived less from sensitivity to Muslim discontent than it
did from a desire not to have their windows broken'.

Sacranie
explained that 'The person of the Prophet, peace be upon him, is
revered so profoundly in the Muslim world, with a love and affection
that cannot be explained in words. It goes beyond your parents, your
loved ones, your children. That is part of the faith. There is also an
Islamic teaching that one does not depict the Prophet.' This rather
assumes, as Mueller observed,

that
the values of Islam trump anyone else's - which is what any follower of
Islam does assume, just as any follower of any religion believes that
theirs is the sole way, truth and light. If people wish to love a 7th
century preacher more than their own families, that's up to them, but
nobody else is obliged to take it seriously . . .