The GOD Delusion (47 page)

Whoever
among us gives a little serious thought to the matter, compares the
condition of a Jew - without a true Church, without a King, and without
a country, dispersed and always a foreigner wherever he lives on the
face of the earth, and moreover, infamous for the ugly stain with which
the killers of Christ are marked . . . will immediately understand how
great is this temporal advantage that the Pope is obtaining for the
Mortara boy.

Third
is the presumptuousness whereby religious people
know,
without
evidence, that the faith of their birth is the one true faith, all
others being aberrations or downright false. The above quotations give
vivid examples of this attitude on the Christian side. It would be
grossly unjust to equate the two sides in this case, but this is as
good a place as any to note that the Mortaras could at a stroke have
had Edgardo back, if only they had accepted the priests' entreaties and
agreed to be baptized themselves. Edgardo had been stolen in the first
place because of a splash of water and a dozen meaningless words. Such
is the fatuousness of the religiously indoctrinated mind, another pair
of splashes is all it would have taken to reverse the process. To some
of us, the parents' refusal indicates wanton stubbornness. To others,
their principled stand elevates them into the long list of martyrs for
all religions down the ages.

'Be
of good comfort Master Ridley and play the man: we shall this day by
God's grace light such a candle in England, as I trust shall never be
put out.' No doubt there are causes for which to die is noble. But how
could the martyrs Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer let themselves be burned
rather than forsake their Protestant Little-endianism in favour of
Catholic Big-endianism - does it really matter all that much from which
end you open a boiled egg? Such is the stubborn - or admirable, if that
is your view - conviction of the religious mind, that the Mortaras
could not bring themselves to seize the opportunity offered by the
meaningless rite of baptism. Couldn't they cross their fingers, or
whisper 'not' under their breath while being baptized? No, they
couldn't, because they had been brought up in a (moderate) religion,
and therefore took the whole ridiculous charade seriously. As for me, I
think only of poor little Edgardo
- unwittingly born into a world dominated by the religious mind,
hapless in the crossfire, all but orphaned in an act of well-meaning
but, to a young child, shattering cruelty.

Fourth,
to pursue the same theme, is the assumption that a six-year-old child
can properly be said to have a religion at all, whether it is Jewish or
Christian or anything else. To put it another way, the idea that
baptizing an unknowing, uncomprehending child can change him from one
religion to another at a stroke seems absurd - but it is surely not
more absurd than labelling a tiny child as belonging to any particular
religion in the first place. What mattered to Edgardo was not 'his'
religion (he was too young to possess thought-out religious opinions)
but the love and care of his parents and family, and he was deprived of
those by celibate priests whose grotesque cruelty was mitigated only by
their crass insensitivity to normal human feelings - an insensitivity
that comes all too easily to a mind hijacked by religious faith.

Even
without physical abduction, isn't it always a form of child abuse to
label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have
thought about? Yet the practice persists to this day, almost entirely
unquestioned. To question it is my main purpose in this chapter.

Priestly
abuse of children is nowadays taken to mean sexual abuse, and I feel
obliged, at the outset, to get the whole matter of sexual abuse into
proportion and out of the way. Others have noted that we live in a time
of hysteria about pedophilia, a mob psychology that calls to mind the
Salem witch-hunts of 1692. In July 2000 the
News of the
World,
widely acclaimed in the face of stiff competition as
Britain's most disgusting newspaper, organized a 'name and shame'
campaign, barely stopping short of inciting vigilantes to take direct
violent action against pedophiles. The house of a hospital pediatrician
was attacked by zealots unacquainted with the difference between a
pediatrician and a pedophile.
¹³⁶
The mob
hysteria over pedophiles has reached epidemic proportions and driven
parents to panic. Today's Just Williams, today's Huck Finns, today's
Swallows and Amazons are deprived of the freedom to roam that was one
of the delights of childhood in earlier times (when the actual, as
opposed to perceived, risk of molestation was probably no less).

In
fairness to the
News of the World,
at the time of
its campaign passions had been aroused by a truly horrifying murder,
sexually motivated, of an eight-year-old girl kidnapped in Sussex.
Nevertheless, it is clearly unjust to visit upon all pedophiles a
vengeance appropriate to the tiny minority who are also murderers. All
three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose
affection for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was
indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless if, fifty years on, they had been
hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I
should have felt obliged to come to their defence, even as the victim
of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience).

The
Roman Catholic Church has borne a heavy share of such retrospective
opprobrium. For all sorts of reasons I dislike the Roman Catholic
Church. But I dislike unfairness even more, and I can't help wondering
whether this one institution has been unfairly demonized over the
issue, especially in Ireland and America. I suppose some additional
public resentment flows from the hypocrisy of priests whose
professional life is largely devoted to arousing guilt about 'sin'.
Then there is the abuse of trust by a figure in authority, whom the
child has been trained from the cradle to revere. Such additional
resentments should make us all the more careful not to rush to
judgement. We should be aware of the remarkable power of the mind to
concoct false memories, especially when abetted by unscrupulous
therapists and mercenary lawyers. The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has
shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in
demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are
entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true
memories.
¹³⁷
This is so counter-intuitive that
juries are easily swayed by sincere but false testimony from witnesses.

In
the particular case of Ireland, even without the sexual abuse, the
brutality of the Christian Brothers,
¹³⁸
responsible for the education
of a significant proportion of the male population of the country, is
legendary. And the same could be said of the often sadistically cruel
nuns who ran many of Ireland's girls' schools. The infamous Magdalene
Asylums, subject of Peter Mullan's film
The Magdalene
Sisters,
continued in existence until as late as 1996. Forty
years on, it is harder to get redress for floggings than for sexual
fondlings, and there is no shortage of lawyers actively soliciting
custom from victims who might not otherwise have raked over the distant
past. There's gold in them thar long-gone fumbles in the vestry - some
of them, indeed, so long gone that the alleged offender is likely to be
dead and unable to present his side of the story. The Catholic Church
worldwide has paid out more than a billion dollars in compensation.
¹³⁹
You might almost sympathize with them, until you remember where their
money came from in the first place.

Once,
in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I
thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic
priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt
was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological
damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.
It was an off-the-cuff remark made in the heat of the moment, and I was
surprised that it earned a round of enthusiastic applause from that
Irish audience (composed, admittedly, of Dublin intellectuals and
presumably not representative of the country at large). But I was
reminded of the incident later when I received a letter from an
American woman in her forties who had been brought up Roman Catholic.
At the age of seven, she told me, two unpleasant things had happened to
her. She was sexually abused by her parish priest in his car. And,
around the same time, a little schoolfriend of hers, who had tragically
died, went to hell because she was a Protestant. Or so my correspondent
had been led to believe by the then official doctrine of her parents'
church. Her view as a mature adult was that, of these two examples of
Roman Catholic child abuse, the one physical and the other mental, the
second was by far the worst. She wrote:

Being
fondled by the priest simply left the impression (from the mind of a 7
year old) as 'yucky' while the memory
of my friend going to hell was one of cold, immeasurable fear. I never
lost sleep because of the priest - but I spent many a night being
terrified that the people I loved would go to Hell. It gave me
nightmares.

Admittedly,
the sexual fondling she suffered in the priest's car was relatively
mild compared with, say, the pain and disgust of a sodomized altar boy.
And nowadays the Catholic Church is said not to make so much of hell as
it once did. But the example shows that it is at least possible for
psychological abuse of children to outclass physical. It is said that
Alfred Hitchcock, the great cinematic specialist in the art of
frightening people, was once driving through Switzerland when he
suddenly pointed out of the car window and said, 'That is the most
frightening sight I have ever seen.' It was a priest in conversation
with a little boy, his hand on the boy's shoulder. Hitchcock leaned out
of the car window and shouted, 'Run, little boy! Run for your life!'

'Sticks
and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.' The adage
is true as long as you don't really
believe
the
words. But if your whole upbringing, and everything you have ever been
told by parents, teachers and priests, has led you to believe,
really
believe,
utterly and completely, that sinners burn in hell
(or some other obnoxious article of doctrine such as that a woman is
the property of her husband), it is entirely plausible that words could
have a more long-lasting and damaging effect than deeds. I am persuaded
that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe
what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to
believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an
eternal hell.

In
the television documentary
Root of All Evil?
to
which I have already referred, I interviewed a number of religious
leaders and was criticized for picking on American extremists rather
than respectable mainstreamers like archbishops.* It sounds like a fair
criticism - except that, in early 21st-century America, what
seems
extreme
to the outside world is actually mainstream. One of my interviewees who
most appalled the British television audience, for example, was Pastor
Ted Haggard of Colorado Springs. But, far from being extreme in Bush's
America, 'Pastor Ted' is president of the thirty-million-strong
National Association of Evangelicals, and he claims to be favoured with
a telephone consultation with President Bush every Monday. If I had
wanted to interview real extremists by modern American standards, I'd
have gone for 'Reconstructionists' whose 'Dominion Theology' openly
advocates a Christian theocracy in America. As a concerned American
colleague writes to me:

*
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Cardinal Archbishop of
Westminster and the Chief Rabbi of Britain were all invited to be
interviewed by me. All declined, doubtless for good reasons. The Bishop
of Oxford agreed, and he was as delightful, and as far from being
extremist, as they surely would have been.

Europeans
need to know there is a traveling theo-freak show which actually
advocates reinstatement of Old Testament law - killing of homosexuals
etc. - and the right to hold office, or even to vote, for Christians
only. Middle class crowds cheer to this rhetoric. If secularists are
not vigilant, Dominionists and Reconstructionists will soon be
mainstream in a true American theocracy.*

*
The following seems to be real, although I at first suspected a
satirical hoax by
The Onion:
www.talk2action.org/story/2006/5/29/195855/959.
It is a computer game called Left Behind: Eternal Forces. P. Z. Myers
sums it up on his excellent Pharyngula website. 'Imagine: you are a
foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America
as a Christian theocracy and establish its worldly vision of the
dominion of Christ over all aspects of life . . . You are on a mission
- both a religious mission and a military mission - to convert or kill
Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the
separation of church and state . . .' See
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/05/gta_
meet_lbef.php; for a review, see
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?
res=F1071FFD3C550C718CDDAA0894DE404482.

Another
of my television interviewees was Pastor Keenan Roberts, from the same
state of Colorado as Pastor Ted. Pastor Roberts's particular brand of
nuttiness takes the form of what he calls Hell Houses. A Hell House is
a place where children are brought, by their parents or their Christian
schools, to be scared witless over what might happen to them after they
die. Actors play out fearsome tableaux of particular 'sins' like
abortion and homosexuality, with a scarlet-clad devil in gloating
attendance. These are a prelude to the
piece de resistance,
Hell
Itself, complete with
realistic sulphurous smell of burning brimstone and the agonized
screams of the forever damned.