The GOD Delusion (43 page)

Perhaps
uniquely among fundamentalists, Kurt Wise is honest -devastatingly,
painfully, shockingly honest. Give him the Templeton Prize; he might be
the first really sincere recipient. Wise brings to the surface what is
secretly going on underneath, in the minds of fundamentalists
generally, when they encounter scientific evidence that contradicts
their beliefs. Listen to his peroration:

Although
there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth, I am a
young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the
Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in
college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism,
I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist
because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must
stand.
¹¹⁶

He
seems to be quoting Luther as he nailed his theses to the door of
the church in Wittenberg, but poor Kurt Wise reminds me more of Winston
Smith in
1984
- struggling desperately to believe
that two plus two equals five if Big Brother says it does. Winston,
however, was being tortured. Wise's doublethink comes not from the
imperative of physical torture but from the imperative -apparently just
as undeniable to some people - of religious faith: arguably a form of
mental torture. I am hostile to religion because of what it did to Kurt
Wise. And if it did that to a Harvard-educated geologist, just think
what it can do to others less gifted and less well armed.

Fundamentalist
religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless
thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds.
Non-fundamentalist, 'sensible' religion may not be doing that. But it
is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children, from
their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue.

In
the previous chapter, when trying to explain the shifting moral
Zeitgeist,
I invoked a widespread consensus of liberal, enlightened,
decent people. I made the rosy-spectacled assumption that 'we' all
broadly agree with this consensus, some more than others, and I had in
mind most of the people likely to read this book, whether they are
religious or not. But of course, not everybody is of the consensus (and
not everybody will have any desire to read my book). It has to be
admitted that absolutism is far from dead. Indeed, it rules the minds
of a great number of people in the world today, most dangerously so in
the Muslim world and in the incipient American theocracy (see Kevin
Phillips's book of that name). Such absolutism nearly always results
from strong religious faith, and it constitutes a major reason for
suggesting that religion can be a force for evil in the world.

One
of the fiercest penalties in the Old Testament is the one exacted for
blasphemy. It is still in force in certain countries. Section 295-C of
the Pakistan penal code prescribes the death penalty
for this 'crime'. On 18 August 2001, Dr Younis Shaikh, a medical doctor
and lecturer, was sentenced to death for blasphemy. His particular
crime was to tell students that the prophet Muhammad was not a Muslim
before he invented the religion at the age of forty. Eleven of his
students reported him to the authorities for this 'offence'. The
blasphemy law in Pakistan is more usually invoked against Christians,
such as Augustine Ashiq 'Kingri' Masih, who was sentenced to death in
Faisalabad in 2000. Masih, as a Christian, was not allowed to marry his
sweetheart because she was a Muslim and - incredibly - Pakistani (and
Islamic) law does not allow a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man.
So he tried to convert to Islam and was then accused of doing so for
base motives. It is not clear from the report I have read whether this
in itself was the capital crime, or whether it was something he is
alleged to have said about the prophet's own morals. Either way, it
certainly was not the kind of offence that would warrant a death
sentence in any country whose laws are free of religious bigotry.

In
2006 in Afghanistan, Abdul Rahman was sentenced to death for converting
to Christianity. Did he kill anyone, hurt anybody, steal anything,
damage anything? No. All he did was change his mind. Internally and
privately, he changed his mind. He entertained certain
thoughts
which were not to the liking of the ruling party of his
country. And this, remember, is not the Afghanistan of the Taliban but
the 'liberated' Afghanistan of Hamid Karzai, set up by the American-led
coalition. Mr Rahman finally escaped execution, but only on a plea of
insanity, and only after intense international pressure. He has now
sought asylum in Italy, to avoid being murdered by zealots eager to do
their Islamic duty. It is still an article of the
constitution
of 'liberated' Afghanistan that the penalty for apostasy is
death. Apostasy, remember, doesn't mean actual harm to persons or
property. It is pure thoughtcrime, to use George Orwell's
1984
terminology, and the official punishment for it under Islamic
law is death. On 3 September 1992, to take one example where it was
actually carried out, Sadiq Abdul Karim Malallah was publicly beheaded
in Saudi Arabia after being lawfully convicted of apostasy and
blasphemy.
¹¹⁷

I
once had a televised encounter with Sir Iqbal Sacranie, mentioned
in Chapter 1 as Britain's leading 'moderate' Muslim. I challenged him
on the death penalty as punishment for apostasy. He wriggled and
squirmed, but was unable either to deny or decry it. He kept trying to
change the subject, saying it was an unimportant detail. This is a man
who has been knighted by the British government for promoting good
'interfaith relations'.

But
let's have no complacency in Christendom. As recently as 1922 in
Britain, John William Gott was sentenced to nine months' hard labour
for blasphemy: he compared Jesus to a clown. Almost unbelievably, the
crime of blasphemy is still on the statute book in Britain,
¹¹⁸
and in 2005 a Christian group tried to bring a private prosecution for
blasphemy against the BBC for broadcasting
Jerry Springer,
the Opera.

In
the United States of recent years the phrase 'American Taliban' was
begging to be coined, and a swift Google search nets more than a dozen
websites that have done so. The quotations that they anthologize, from
American religious leaders and faith-based politicians, chillingly
recall the narrow bigotry, heartless cruelty and sheer nastiness of the
Afghan Taliban, the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Wahhabi authorities of
Saudi Arabia. The web page called 'The American Taliban' is a
particularly rich source of obnoxiously barmy quotations, beginning
with a prize one from somebody called Ann Coulter who, American
colleagues have persuaded me, is not a spoof, invented by
The
Onion:
'We should invade their countries, kill their leaders
and convert them to Christianity.'
¹¹⁹
Other
gems include Congressman Bob Dornan's 'Don't use the word "gay" unless
it's an acronym for "Got Aids Yet?"', General William G. Boykin's
'George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United
States, he was appointed by God' - and an older one, the famous
environmental policy of Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Interior: 'We
don't have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand.'
The Afghan Taliban and the American Taliban are good examples of what
happens when people take their scriptures literally and seriously. They
provide a horrifying modern enactment of what life might have been like
under the theocracy of the Old Testament. Kimberly Blaker's
The
Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America
is
a book-length expose of the menace of the Christian Taliban (not under
that name).

In
Afghanistan under the Taliban, the official punishment for
homosexuality was execution, by the tasteful method of burial alive
under a wall pushed over on top of the victim. The 'crime' itself being
a private act, performed by consenting adults who were doing nobody
else any harm, we again have here the classic hallmark of religious
absolutism. My own country has no right to be smug. Private
homosexuality was a criminal offence in Britain up until -astonishingly
- 1967. In 1954 the British mathematician Alan Turing, a candidate
along with John von Neumann for the title of father of the computer,
committed suicide after being convicted of the criminal offence of
homosexual behaviour in private. Admittedly Turing was not buried alive
under a wall pushed over by a tank. He was offered a choice between two
years in prison (you can imagine how the other prisoners would have
treated him) and a course of hormone injections which could be said to
amount to chemical castration, and would have caused him to grow
breasts. His final, private choice was an apple that he had injected
with cyanide.
¹²⁰

As
the pivotal intellect in the breaking of the German Enigma codes,
Turing arguably made a greater contribution to defeating the Nazis than
Eisenhower or Churchill. Thanks to Turing and his 'Ultra' colleagues at
Bletchley Park, Allied generals in the field were consistently, over
long periods of the war, privy to detailed German plans before the
German generals had time to implement them. After the war, when
Turing's role was no longer top secret, he should have been knighted
and feted as a saviour of his nation. Instead, this gentle, stammering,
eccentric genius was destroyed, for a 'crime', committed in private,
which harmed nobody. Once again, the unmistakable trademark of the
faith-based moralizer is to care passionately about what other people
do (or even think) in
private.

The
attitude of the 'American Taliban' towards homosexuality epitomizes
their religious absolutism. Listen to the Reverend Jerry Falwell,
founder of Liberty University: 'AIDS is not just God's punishment for
homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates
homosexuals.'
¹²¹
The thing I notice first about
such people
is their wonderful Christian charity. What kind of an electorate could,
term after term, vote in a man of such ill-informed bigotry as Senator
Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina? A man who has sneered:
'The
New York Times
and
Washington Post are
both
infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down
there is a homosexual or lesbian.'
¹²²
The
answer, I suppose, is the kind of electorate that sees morality in
narrowly religious terms and feels threatened by anybody who doesn't
share the same absolutist faith.

I
have already quoted Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition.
He stood as a serious candidate for the Republican party nomination for
President in 1988, and garnered more than three million volunteers to
work in his campaign, plus a comparable quantity of money: a
disquieting level of support, given that the following quotations are
entirely typical of him: '[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and
disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give
people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers.' '[Planned Parenthood]
is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every
kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism - everything that the
Bible condemns.' Robertson's attitude to women, too, would warm the
black hearts of the Afghan Taliban: 'I know this is painful for the
ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship
of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the
husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period.'

Gary
Potter, President of Catholics for Christian Political Action, had this
to say: 'When the Christian majority takes over this country, there
will be no satanic churches, no more free distribution of pornography,
no more talk of rights for homosexuals. After the Christian majority
takes control, pluralism will be seen as immoral and evil and the state
will not permit anybody the right to practice evil.' 'Evil', as is very
clear from the quotation, doesn't mean doing things that have bad
consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are
not to 'the Christian majority's' private liking.

Pastor
Fred Phelps, of the Westboro Baptist Church, is another strong preacher
with an obsessive dislike of homosexuals. When Martin Luther King's
widow died, Pastor Fred organized a picket of
her funeral, proclaiming: 'God Hates Fags & Fag-Enablers! Ergo,
God hates Coretta Scott King and is now tormenting her with fire and
brimstone where the worm never dies and the fire is never quenched, and
the smoke of her torment ascendeth up for ever and ever.'
¹²³
It is easy to write Fred Phelps off as a nut, but he has plenty of
support from people and their money. According to his own website,
Phelps has organized 22,000 anti-homosexual demonstrations since 1991
(that's an average of one every four days) in the USA, Canada, Jordan
and Iraq, displaying slogans such as 'THANK GOD FOR AIDS'. A
particularly charming feature of his website is the automated tally of
the number of days a particular, named, deceased homosexual has been
burning in hell.

Attitudes
to homosexuality reveal much about the sort of morality that is
inspired by religious faith. An equally instructive example is abortion
and the sanctity of human life.

Human
embryos are examples of human life. Therefore, by absolutist religious
lights, abortion is simply wrong: full-fledged murder. I am not sure
what to make of my admittedly anecdotal observation that many of those
who most ardently oppose the taking of embryonic life also seem to be
more than usually enthusiastic about taking adult life. (To be fair,
this does not, as a rule, apply to Roman Catholics, who are among the
most vociferous opponents of abortion.) The born-again George W. Bush
is typical of today's religious ascendancy. He, and they, are stalwart
defenders of human life, as long as it is embryonic life (or terminally
ill life) - even to the point of preventing medical research that would
certainly save many lives.
¹²⁴
The obvious ground
for opposing the death penalty is respect for human life. Since 1976,
when the Supreme Court reversed the ban on the death penalty, Texas has
been responsible for more than one-third of all executions in all fifty
states of the Union. And Bush presided over more executions in Texas
than any other governor in the state's history, averaging one death
every nine days. Perhaps he was simply doing
his duty and carrying out the laws of the state?
¹²⁵
But then, what are we to make of the famous report by the CNN
journalist Tucker Carlson? Carlson, who himself supports the death
penalty, was shocked by Bush's 'humorous' imitation of a female
prisoner on death row, pleading to the Governor for a stay of
execution: ' "Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock
desperation, "Don't kill me." '
¹²⁶
Perhaps this
woman would have met with more sympathy if she had pointed out that she
had once been an embryo. The contemplation of embryos really does seem
to have the most extraordinary effect upon many people of faith. Mother
Teresa of Calcutta actually said, in her speech accepting the Nobel
Peace Prize, 'The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion.'
What?
How can a woman with such cock-eyed judgement be taken
seriously on any topic, let alone be thought seriously worthy of a
Nobel Prize? Anybody tempted to be taken in by the sanctimoniously
hypocritical Mother Teresa should read Christopher Hitchens's book
The
Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.