The GOD Delusion (46 page)

'What
is the attraction of martyrdom?' I asked.

'The
power of the spirit pulls us upward, while the power of material things
pulls us downward,' he said. 'Someone bent on martyrdom becomes immune
to the material pull. Our planner asked, "What if the operation fails?"
We told him, "In any case, we get to meet the Prophet and his
companions, inshallah."

'We
were floating, swimming, in the feeling that we were about to enter
eternity. We had no doubts. We made an oath on the Koran, in the
presence of Allah - a pledge not to waver. This jihad pledge is called
bayt
al-ridwan,
after the garden in Paradise that is reserved for
the prophets and the martyrs. I know that there are other ways to do
jihad. But this one is sweet - the sweetest. All martyrdom operations,
if done for Allah's sake, hurt less than a gnat's bite!'

S
showed me a video that documented the final planning for the operation.
In the grainy footage, I saw him and two other young men engaging in a
ritualistic dialogue of questions and answers about the glory of
martyrdom . . .

The
young men and the planner then knelt and placed their right hands on
the Koran. The planner said: 'Are you ready? Tomorrow, you will be in
Paradise.'
¹³⁵

If I
had been 'S', I'd have been tempted to say to the planner, 'Well, in
that case, why don't you put
your
neck where your
mouth is? Why don't
you
do the suicide mission and
take the fast track to Paradise?' But what is so hard for us to
understand is that - to repeat the point because it is so important -
these
people actually believe
what they say they believe.
The take-home message is that we
should blame religion itself, not religious
extremism
-
as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent
religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you
believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand
Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.'

As
long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected
simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect
from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers. The
alternative, one so transparent that it should need no urging, is to
abandon the principle of automatic respect for religious faith. This is
one reason why I do everything in my power to warn people against faith
itself, not just against so-called 'extremist' faith. The teachings of
'moderate' religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open
invitation to extremism.

It
might be said that there is nothing special about religious faith here.
Patriotic love of country or ethnic group can also make the world safe
for its own version of extremism, can't it? Yes it can, as with the
kamikazes in Japan and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. But religious
faith is an especially potent silencer of rational calculation, which
usually seems to trump all others. This is mostly, I suspect, because
of the easy and beguiling promise that death is not the end, and that a
martyr's heaven is especially glorious. But it is also partly because
it discourages questioning, by its very nature.

Christianity,
just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a
virtue. You don't have to make the case for what you believe. If
somebody announces that it is part of his
faith,
the
rest of society, whether of the same faith, or another, or of none, is
obliged, by ingrained custom, to 'respect' it without question; respect
it until the day it manifests itself in a horrible massacre like the
destruction of the World Trade Center, or the London or Madrid
bombings. Then there is a great chorus of disownings, as clerics and
'community leaders' (who elected
them,
by the
way?) line up to explain that this extremism is a perversion of the
'true' faith. But how can there be a perversion of faith, if faith,
lacking objective justification, doesn't have any demonstrable standard
to pervert?

Ten
years ago, Ibn Warraq, in his excellent book
Why I Am Not a
Muslim,
made a similar point from the standpoint of a deeply
knowledgeable scholar of Islam. Indeed, a good alternative title for
Warraq's book might have been
The Myth of Moderate Islam,
which
is the actual title of a more recent article in the (London)
Spectator
(30 July 2005) by another scholar, Patrick Sookhdeo, director
of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity. 'By far the
majority of Muslims today live their lives without recourse to
violence, for the Koran is like a pick-and-mix selection. If you want
peace, you can find peaceable verses. If you want war, you can find
bellicose verses.'

Sookhdeo
goes on to explain how Islamic scholars, in order to cope with the many
contradictions that they found in the Qur'an, developed the principle
of abrogation, whereby later texts trump earlier ones. Unfortunately,
the peaceable passages in the Qur'an are mostly early, dating from
Muhammad's time in Mecca. The more belligerent verses tend to date from
later, after his flight to Medina. The result is that 

the
mantra 'Islam is peace' is almost 1,400 years out of date. It was only
for about 13 years that Islam was peace and nothing but peace . . . For
today's radical Muslims -just as for the mediaeval jurists who
developed classical Islam - it would be truer to say 'Islam is war'.
One of the most radical Islamic groups in Britain, al-Ghurabaa, stated
in the wake of the two London bombings, 'Any Muslim that denies that
terror is a part of Islam is kafir.' A kafir is an unbeliever (i.e. a
non-Muslim), a term of gross insult. . .

Could
it be that the young men who committed suicide were neither on the
fringes of Muslim society in Britain, nor following an eccentric and
extremist interpretation of their faith, but rather that they came from
the very core of the Muslim community and were motivated by a
mainstream interpretation of Islam?

More
generally (and this applies to Christianity no less than to Islam),
what is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that
faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it
requires no justification and brooks no argument. Teaching children
that unquestioned faith is a virtue primes them - given certain other
ingredients that are not hard to come by - to grow up into potentially
lethal weapons for future jihads or crusades. Immunized against fear by
the promise of a martyr's paradise, the authentic faith-head deserves a
high place in the history of armaments, alongside the longbow, the
warhorse, the tank and the cluster bomb. If children were taught to
question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the
superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there
would be no suicide bombers. Suicide bombers do what they do because
they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools:
that duty to God exceeds all other priorities, and that martyrdom in
his service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise. And they were
taught
that
lesson not necessarily by extremist
fanatics but by decent, gentle, mainstream religious instructors, who
lined them up in their madrasas, sitting in rows, rhythmically nodding
their innocent little heads up and down while they learned every word
of the holy book like demented parrots. Faith can be very very
dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of
an innocent child is a grievous wrong. It is to childhood itself, and
the violation of childhood by religion, that we turn in the next
chapter.

9

CHILDHOOD,
ABUSE AND THE ESCAPE FROM RELIGION

There
is in every village a torch - the teacher: and an extinguisher - the
clergyman.

—
VICTOR HUGO

I
begin with an anecdote of nineteenth-century Italy. I am not implying
that anything like this awful story could happen today. But the
attitudes of mind that it betrays are lamentably current, even though
the practical details are not. This nineteenth-century human tragedy
sheds a pitiless light on present-day religious attitudes to children.

In
1858 Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old child of Jewish parents living in
Bologna, was legally seized by the papal police acting under orders
from the Inquisition. Edgardo was forcibly dragged away from his
weeping mother and distraught father to the Catechumens (house for the
conversion of Jews and Muslims) in Rome, and thereafter brought up as a
Roman Catholic. Aside from occasional brief visits under close priestly
supervision, his parents never saw him again. The story is told by
David I. Kertzer in his remarkable book,
The Kidnapping of
Edgardo Mortara.

Edgardo's
story was by no means unusual in Italy at the time, and the reason for
these priestly abductions was always the same. In every case, the child
had been secretly baptized at some earlier date, usually by a Catholic
nursemaid, and the Inquisition later came to hear of the baptism. It
was a central part of the Roman Catholic belief-system that, once a
child had been baptized, however informally and clandestinely, that
child was irrevocably transformed into a Christian. In their mental
world, to allow a 'Christian child' to stay with his Jewish parents was
not an option, and they maintained this bizarre and cruel stance
steadfastly, and with the utmost sincerity, in the face of worldwide
outrage. That widespread outrage, by the way, was dismissed by the
Catholic newspaper
Civilta Cattolica
as due to the
international power of rich Jews - sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Apart
from the publicity it aroused, Edgardo Mortara's history was entirely
typical of many others. He had once been looked after by Anna Morisi,
an illiterate Catholic girl who was then fourteen. He fell ill and she
panicked lest he might die. Brought up in a stupor of belief that a
child who died unbaptized would suffer forever in hell, she asked
advice from a Catholic neighbour who told her how to do a baptism. She
went back into the house, threw some water from a bucket on little
Edgardo's head and said, 'I baptize you in the name of the Father and
of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.' And that
was it. From that moment on, Edgardo was legally a Christian. When the
priests of the Inquisition learned of the incident years later, they
acted promptly and decisively, giving no thought to the sorrowful
consequences of their action.

Amazingly
for a rite that could have such monumental significance for a whole
extended family, the Catholic Church allowed (and still allows) anybody
to baptize anybody else. The baptizer doesn't have to be a priest.
Neither the child, nor the parents, nor anybody else has to consent to
the baptism. Nothing need be signed. Nothing need be officially
witnessed. All that is necessary is a splash of water, a few words, a
helpless child, and a superstitious and catechistically brainwashed
babysitter. Actually, only the last of these is needed because,
assuming the child is too young to be a witness, who is even to know?
An American colleague who was brought up Catholic writes to me as
follows: 'We used to baptize our dolls. I don't remember any of us
baptizing our little Protestant friends but no doubt that has happened
and happens today. We made little Catholics of our dolls, taking them
to church, giving them Holy Communion etc. We were brainwashed to be
good Catholic mothers early on.'

If
nineteenth-century girls were anything like my modern correspondent, it
is surprising that cases like Edgardo Mortara's were not more common
than they were. As it was, such stories were distressingly frequent in
nineteenth-century Italy, which leaves one asking the obvious question.
Why did the Jews of the Papal States employ Catholic servants at all,
given the appalling risk that could flow from doing so? Why didn't they
take good care to engage Jewish servants? The answer, yet again, has
nothing to do with sense and everything to do with religion. The Jews
needed servants whose religion didn't forbid them to work on the
sabbath. A Jewish maid could indeed be relied upon not to baptize your
child into a spiritual orphanage. But she couldn't light the fire or
clean the house on a Saturday. This was why, of the Bolognese Jewish
families at the time who could afford servants, most hired Catholics.

In
this book, I have deliberately refrained from detailing the horrors of
the Crusades, the
conquistadores
or the Spanish
Inquisition. Cruel and evil people can be found in every century and of
every persuasion. But this story of the Italian Inquisition and its
attitude
to children is particularly revealing of the religious mind, and the
evils that arise specifically
because
it is
religious. First is the remarkable perception by the religious mind
that a sprinkle of water and a brief verbal incantation can totally
change a child's life, taking precedence over parental consent, the
child's own consent, the child's own happiness and psychological
well-being . . . over everything that ordinary common sense and human
feeling would see as important. Cardinal Antonelli spelled it out at
the time in a letter to Lionel Rothschild, Britain's first Jewish
Member of Parliament, who had written to protest about Edgardo's
abduction. The cardinal replied that he was powerless to intervene, and
added, 'Here it may be opportune to observe that, if the voice of
nature is powerful, even more powerful are the sacred duties of
religion.' Yes, well, that just about says it all, doesn't it?

Second
is the extraordinary fact that the priests, cardinals and Pope seem
genuinely not to have understood what a terrible thing they were doing
to poor Edgardo Mortara. It passes all sensible understanding, but they
sincerely believed they were doing him a good turn by taking him away
from his parents and giving him a Christian upbringing. They felt a
duty of
protection*.
A Catholic newspaper in the
United States defended the Pope's stance on the Mortara case, arguing
that it was unthinkable that a Christian government 'could leave a
Christian child to be brought up by a Jew' and invoking the principle
of religious liberty, 'the liberty of a child to be a Christian and not
forced compulsorily to be a Jew . . . The Holy Father's protection of
the child, in the face of all the ferocious fanaticism of infidelity
and bigotry, is the grandest moral spectacle which the world has seen
for ages.' Has there ever been a more flagrant misdirection of words
like 'forced', 'compulsorily', 'ferocious', 'fanaticism' and 'bigotry'?
Yet all the indications are that Catholic apologists, from the Pope
down, sincerely believed that what they were doing was right:
absolutely right morally, and right for the welfare of the child. Such
is the power of (mainstream, 'moderate') religion to warp judgement and
pervert ordinary human decency. The newspaper
II Cattolico
was
frankly bewildered at the widespread failure to see what a magnanimous
favour the Church had done Edgardo Mortara when it rescued him from his
Jewish family: