by Matthew Cobb

I’m sure Jerry won’t mind me butting in to inform everyone that Mr Nesbit, a rescue cat who was a WEIT Caturday Felid back in July, has passed away, and is off chasing rodents in Cat Heaven/Mouse Hell.

In the October 23 Washington Post, Dawkins takes on The Holy See and its attempt to snap up disaffected Anglicans.

Give Us Your Misogynists and Bigots

What major institution most deserves the title of greatest force for evil in the world? In a field of stiff competition, the Roman Catholic Church is surely up there among the leaders. The Anglican church has at least a few shreds of decency, traces of kindness and humanity with which Jesus himself might have connected, however tenuously: a generosity of spirit, of respect for women, and of Christ-like compassion for the less fortunate. The Anglican church does not cleave to the dotty idea that a priest, by blessing bread and wine, can transform it literally into a cannibal feast; nor to the nastier idea that possession of testicles is an essential qualification to perform the rite. It does not send its missionaries out to tell deliberate lies to AIDS-weakened Africans, about the alleged ineffectiveness of condoms in protecting against HIV. Whether one agrees with him or not, there is a saintly quality in the Archbishop of Canterbury, a benignity of countenance, a well-meaning sincerity. How does Pope Ratzinger measure up? The comparison is almost embarrassing. . .

. . . Archbishop Rowan Williams is too nice for his own good. Instead of meekly sharing that ignominious platform with the poachers, he should have issued a counter-challenge: “Send us your women, yearning to be priests, who could make a strong case for being the better-qualified fifty percent of humanity; send us your decent priests, sick of trying to defend the indefensible; send them all, in exchange for our woman-haters and gay-bashers.” Sounds like a good trade to me.

I have to hand it to the Post: this piece appeared in its On Faith column, run by Sally Quinn and John Meacham.  And it answers my question of a few posts ago: “where is the religion editor who doesn’t feed intellectual pablum to her readers?”

When Maher picked up his Dawkins Award at the Atheist Alliance International meetings in Burbank, he used his thank-you speech to give a hilarious verbatim reading of Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, apart from the Bible the best-selling hardcover book of all time (the two have many similarities).  I didn’t realize that this schtick was part of his standup, routine, which you can see below.  This bit is nearly identical to what Maher said in Burbank.  And if you haven’t seen Warren’s book, you’ll be amazed at the tripe that has sold more than 25 million copies. (The sales do, however, bespeak a deep need in the American psyche.)

Today’s the day, at least in the US, when 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, edited by my mate Russell Blackford and Udo Schüklenk, goes on sale in the US. (The Amazon link is here.)

It’s a very good book, and I recommend it for all of us godless ones — or those who are considering abjuring the divine.  I even contributed a cover blurb, “There are many ways to lose one’s faith, but all are enlightening, for a voice of disbelief is a voice of reason.  Blackford and Schükklenk have collected 50 stories that not only present the many arguments for atheism but also show that, contrary to popular belief, atheists are just as moral and humane — if not more so –than the faithful.”

The blurb highlights one of the book’s great virtues: it’s far more than just a collection of stories about “How I came to give up God.” Many of the writers describe the philosophical and empirical considerations that led them to atheism. Indeed, the book can be considered a kind of philosophical handbook for atheists.  And here are some of the people who contributed: Blackford and Schüklenk themselves, Ophelia Benson, Michael Shermer, James Randi, Sean Carroll (the physics one), Victor Stenger, Anthony Grayling, Susan Blackmore, Peter Singer and Marc Hauser (one chapter), and Laura Purdy.  There is a lot of meat here, so buy the book!

As reported by The Village Voice,  famous Hollywood director Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of our Fathers) has renounced a 35-year commitment to Scientology.  In a scathing — and long — letter written to the national spokesperson for Scientology (the letter appears in the Voice article), Haggis faults the organization for supporting Prop. 8, the anti-gay-marriage bill in California.

As you know, for ten months now I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology of San Diego. Their public sponsorship of Proposition 8, a hate-filled legislation that succeeded in taking away the civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens of California – rights that were granted them by the Supreme Court of our state – shames us.

I called and wrote and implored you, as the official spokesman of the church, to condemn their actions. I told you I could not, in good conscience, be a member of an organization where gay-bashing was tolerated.

In that first conversation, back at the end of October of last year, you told me you were horrified, that you would get to the bottom of it and “heads would roll.” You promised action. Ten months passed. No action was forthcoming. The best you offered was a weak and carefully worded press release, which praised the church’s human rights record and took no responsibility. Even that, you decided not to publish.

The church’s refusal to denounce the actions of these bigots, hypocrites and homophobes is cowardly. I can think of no other word. Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent.

There are other accusations of Church malfeasance as well. These won’t surprise anyone who’s followed the history of Scientology:

And though it may seem small by comparison, I was truly disturbed to see you provide private details from confessionals to the press in an attempt to embarrass and discredit the executives who spoke out. A priest would go to jail before revealing secrets from the confessional, no matter what the cost to himself or his church. That’s the kind of integrity I thought we had, but obviously the standard in this church is far lower – the public relations representative can reveal secrets to the press if the management feels justified. You even felt free to publish secrets from the confessional in Freedom Magazine – you just stopped short of labeling them as such, probably because you knew Scientologists would be horrified, knowing you so easily broke a sacred vow of trust with your parishioners.

How dare you use private information in order to label someone an “adulteress?” You took Amy Scobee’s most intimate admissions about her sexual life and passed them onto the press and then smeared them all over the pages your newsletter! I do not know the woman, but no matter what she said or did, this is the woman who joined the Sea Org at 16! She ran the entire celebrity center network, and was a loyal senior executive of the church for what, 20 years? You want to rebut her accusations, do it, and do it in the strongest terms possible – but that kind of character assassination is unconscionable.

My only question is why did it take him so long?  Although you may not consider Scientology a religion, it is classified as one by the government, and has all the trappings of a faith: a theology, supernatural beings, and the like. But if you read about the organization (not its own puffery), you’ll find that it doesn’t seem much of a force for good, although, like many conventional faiths, it does manage to squeeze a lot of bucks out of its adherents.  Do those who say we shouldn’t criticize religions include Scientology among them? After all, we can’t prove that Xenu doesn’t exist!

As atheists become more visible and vocal, the mainstream media, aware of who butters their bread, digs in its heels.  This often takes the form of critiques of the New Atheists, decrying them for being “militant,” “shrill,” and “intolerant.”  Athough these epithets are annoying, I see big-media attention to atheism as a kind of victory.  Attention is being paid.

That’s why I have mixed feelings about Lisa Miller’s latest column in Newsweek.  Miller, the magazine’s religion editor, has been a consistent critic of New Atheism and, what’s worse, a fan of Karen Armstrong, showing a fatal susceptibility to wooly-headed apologetics.

This week, Miller tells us that she’s tired of atheist arguments against God, dismissing a debate betweeen Christopher Hitchens and pastor Douglas Wilkins as “two middle-aged white men talking. ” (Really! Imagine how Miller’s hackles would rise if someone characterized a debate between Margaret Downey and Ann Coulter as “two middle-aged white women talking.”)  But before explaining why she wants to “move on” from such debates, Miller gets in a gratuitous lick at the NAs:

Three charismatic men—Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Hitchens (who is a NEWSWEEK contributor)—have not just dominated the conversation, they’ve crushed it. And so they’ve become celebrities. Together they’ve sold more than 3 million books worldwide, which suggests they may be in this for more than just our edification.

Um. . . is it civil to impute to Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens such base motives? (Likewise, is it civil to denigrate them as “middle-aged white men”? ) And how on earth does selling so many books prove that these guys did it for the money?  I’m sure that Harris, for one, had no idea how well The End of Faith would sell.  My best guess is that the main reason these guys wrote their books is that they wanted to spread their ideas. If an atheist used this kind of argument, she’d be immediately chastised for being shrill and militant.

But what apparently galls Miller the most is about the Three Horsemen is this:

But this version of the conversation has gone on too long. We have allowed three people to frame it; its terms—submitting God to rational proofs and watching God fail—are theirs . . . The whole thing has started to feel like being trapped in a seminar room with the three smartest guys in school, each showing off to impress … whom? Let’s move on.

What can this mean but that the atheists have won?  For here Miller tacitly admits that there are no “rational proofs” of God.  So when she says that we should move on, does she mean that we can all agree there’s no rational basis for faith? Not on your life.  She thinks that we’ve simply taken the wrong tack: we need to look at faith as poets rather than scientists.

There are other voices out there, and other, possibly more productive ways to frame a conversation about the benefits and potential dangers of religious faith. In 2003 the historian and poet Jennifer Hecht wrote Doubt: A History, an exhaustive survey of atheism. She advises readers to investigate questions of belief like a poet, rather than like a scientist. “It is easier to force yourself to be clear,” she writes, “if you avoid using believer, agnostic, and atheist and just try to say what you think about what we are and what’s out there.” Hecht is as much of an atheist as Hitchens and Harris, she says, but she approaches questions about the usefulness of religion with an appreciation of what she calls “paradox and mystery and cosmic crunch.”

When you hear stuff like this, you know that the goal posts have suddenly shifted.  In this case they’ve moved from the truth of religion to its “benefits and dangers.”  Well, at least Miller admits that you can get some of those benefits by secular means:

This week Harvard’s humanist chaplain Greg Epstein comes out with Good Without God, a book arguing that people can have everything religion offers—community, transcendence, and, above all, morality—without the supernatural. This seems to me self-evident, yet the larger point is important. We need urgently to talk about these things: ethics, progress, education, science, democracy, tolerance, and justice—and to understand the reasons why religion can (but does not always) hamper their flourishing.

I may be wrong, but haven’t the NAs, especially Sam Harris, been talking about this all along?  Harris devotes a fair chunk of his book to the human needs that religion meets, and how they can be met by secular activities like meditation.  Dawkins has devoted his pen — and some of his ill-gotten gains! — to showing how we can be good without God.  And Hitchens has detailed the numerous ways that faith hinders democracy, tolerance, and justice. What, then, is “the larger point” that we’ve all missed?

Perhaps Miller could devote a few words to explaining why you don’t need faith to be moral, a position that doesn’t seem so “self-evident” to many Americans.  Now that would be doing her readers a service! Instead, she feeds them intellectual pablum.  But where is the religion editor who does otherwise?

If you grew up in the 60s, you could hardly have missed the underground comic artist R. Crumb.  Creator of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, Crumb worked out his neuroses in public (see the movie Crumb for the backstory), becoming immensely popular among hippies having a penchant for the grotesque.

Crumb has now become pretty mainstream, publishing his newer pieces in The New Yorker and showing his work in galleries, where it fetches high prices.  His latest production is an illustrated book of the Bible, The Book of Genesis Illustrated. It’s reviewed in today’s New York Times by David Hadjou, a professor at Columbia University’s School of Journalism and music critic for The New Republic.

This isn’t the Crumb you’d expect from his earlier work in Zap Comics.  Crumb does it straight, without exaggerated grotesqueries, women with large rumps, or the like.  A sample is below, and you can see another here.  I’ve seen larger excerpts, and clearly Crumb has made a serious effort to turn the Bible into graphic art rather than a religiously-themed comic.   Dismissing the book a priori as a mockery of religion is a big mistake. As Hadjou says:

Crumb’s book is serious and, for Crumb, restrained. He resists the temptation to go all-out Crumb on us and exaggerate the sordidness, the primitivism and the outright strangeness (by contemporary standards) of parts of the text. What is Genesis about, after all, but resisting temptation?

Hadjou goes on to praise the book. But at the end of his review he can’t resist one little zinger:

For all its narrative potency and raw beauty, Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” is missing something that just does not interest its illustrator: a sense of the sacred. What Genesis demonstrates in dramatic terms are beliefs in an orderly universe and the godlike nature of man. Crumb, a fearless anarchist and proud cynic, clearly believes in other things, and to hold those beliefs — they are kinds of beliefs, too — is his prerogative. Crumb, brilliantly, shows us the man in God, but not the God in man.

It always helps to truckle to the faithful — something that’s becoming house policy at The New York Times.

In truth, I was a bit disappointed by Crumb’s book, not because it’s not engrossing or artistic, but because when I read a book, whether it be Genesis or Middlemarch, I always conjure up visual  — and auditory — images of the scene. (Think about this when you’re reading a novel.  Are you imagining what things look like?) And, as expected, my images and sounds never comport with those of other people.  That’s why I didn’t like the movie Lord of the Rings (Gollum was pretty faithful to my imagination, but the depilated, rarely-hungry hobbits let me down), and thought that the animated versions of Peanuts were dire (Charlie Brown didn’t sound right).  And, it’s still the Bible, so Crumb’s imagination, so wild and bizarre in his earlier pieces, is constrained by a text that we already know well.   In the end, I can’t imagine who Crumb saw as his audience for this book.  I doubt that it will be bought by the faithful, although it’s currently #8 on Amazon, and reviewer Greta Christina considers it a “must-read” for atheists.

Fig. 1. A snippet of Crumb’s Genesis (from the NYT review). Click to enlarge.