Voicing Opinions

One of the dictionary definitions of the word ‘incite’ is to “Urge or persuade (someone) to act in a violent or unlawful way”. The wholly misguided anti-Mohammed video may be seen by many as something that would incite a violent reaction. But can an attack on beliefs about a person in history really be said to engender a violent reaction?

If I was to punch you on the face, this would be a better cause for a violent reaction.

If I was to threaten to kill a member of your family, then even more so.

But the implication in the case of the video is that a violent reaction is somehow the only legitimate response.

Islam is supposed to be a peaceful religion, yet its leaders fail to address the extremists who react violently to slurs on their Islamist values.

It would appear to be that the hair trigger urge to be violent was something waiting for an excuse much more than the appropriate response to a deeply felt attack on their religious values. By acting violently, they have abandoned peace – they have attacked a foundational value of their own religion.

This is hypocrisy in action.

When a leaflet is offered to you by a religious evangelist, it is likely to portray an idyllic scene where God’s creatures are happily coexisting. You will never see a crocodile savaging a cow, thrashing around in bloody water. They will not dare to talk about the jagged array of sharp teeth lining the capacious jaw of this fearsome creature. Teeth specifically and only designed to rip apart the tough flesh of other Godly creatures. Can you talk about this matter with them? Maybe, but certainly not without a dogmatic defence of the realm.

And what about those truly nasty jelly fish in Australia. One sting and a human will endure at least an hour of the most excruciating and intense pain before certain death. (And why does the Apple Mac British English dictionary not recognise ‘endure’?). And what about the nasty creatures that enter the brains of spiders and take over, subverting the life of the host to the sole benefit of its unwanted cargo?

You cannot claim ‘Intelligent design’ when the creatures can be as barbaric as this.

You cannot claim that the designer was God in infinite wisdom if you want us to worship him.

I ponder this matter on an ongoing basis, and thought it prudent to record the theme of my current thinking.

My stance is to split suffering into two categories :

1. Appropriate suffering
2. Meaningless suffering

As far as I have read, arguments concerning God’s role with regard suffering are generally not made with such a dualistic approach.

The distinction between the two types clarifies some arguments that normally get trapped in a religious circular argument. My motive for exploring the distinction is simply because my own life is blighted with an excess amount of the meaningless suffering. Best explain by an example before I go any further.

If my neighbour Mel goes out for a night of heavy drinking, he will awaken next morning with a thick head. He will be suffering for his night of indulgence. More or less, the suffering will be appropriate and approximately proportional to the cause. It is not quite so easy to criticise God for the suffering here.

However, Mel has a history of excess drinking and suffered recent liver damage, thereby limiting his life. Again, there is a degree of appropriateness and proportionality here – abuse your body long enough and it will start failing on you. For that relationship, again, you cannot readily criticise God for the suffering. However, I believe that God can be criticised for failing to stop the bodily degradation. It is not the act of a loving, compassionate God to see an avoidable decay to the health of one of his people. So God could have added a short term effect to make the drinking of alcohol to excess less inviting. He could have interfered so as to stop Mel wrecking his body. Mel would not have felt the gradual decline in his health, (although he should have taken heed of the morning hangovers), but God would have known this – to fail to intercede is a failure of compassion.

For my own situation, things are not so simple. For reasons that hundreds of hours of exploration have not revealed an answer, I frequently awake in the morning with a headache and/or foggy mind. The condition tends to last all day. I have found no pattern in my activities or thinking the day before that could explain this suffering. So it falls into the meaningless category. An arbitrary suffering that is not a price paid for any excess. So where is the compassion here for my plight from God?

A typical defence from the religious on the matter of suffering, is that God is testing us. I have covered this matter before, but suffice to say, I am sick and tired of decades of meaningless suffering, as many millions across the world are. If I am being tested, then after so many years, God must realise that I have either passed or failed the test and am merely living a compromised existence – the suffering is entirely arbitrary and meaningless.

I mention God as if he exists. We cannot know for sure, but the possibility that he does exist and is all-loving, all-powerful and compassionate disappear in the light of meaningless suffering.

BBC Radio Two airs a religious programme on Sunday mornings, normally hosted by Aled Jones. The voice of the host this morning was unfamiliar to me. I caught the programme in the middle of a discussion on homosexuality, a particularly contentious subject for many faiths.

He read out an email that pointed out that God was not happy with male marriages because it stated quite clearly in the bible that ‘man should not lie with man’. As I said, the host was a new to me, so I have no idea if this stand in was religious or not, but his reply put a sweet smile on my face. For he pointed out that the bible also says that misbehaving children should be stoned.

This religious honesty and balance is extremely rare – the normal stance is to cherry pick the parts of the bible that support viewpoints, and gloss over the many unsavoury parts that totally undermine any good that the bible might offer. Here is my own example from Exodus 21:17 :

He that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.

If this is to be discounted as patently barbaric and out-dated, then how can we trust the bible to be a ‘moral’ guide?

The scale and depth of suffering in the world is a non-trivial matter. When cornered, a standard reply from many religious people in defence of their God in this matter is to say that ‘He is testing us’.

The say this glibly without thinking about what they are saying. In effect, they are regurgitating the stock reply that has been taught them. If you dig deeper, the catch-all dogmatic response – “God works in mysterious ways” – gets rattled out.

In their defence, the concept of testing they mean – that we are in effect being challenged to see how we cope, or to make us stronger – is not a bad excuse for pushing and extending people. But when it drags on weeks, months, years or decades, with no explanation or intervention from the almighty, then his motives have to be questioned. He would be struck off if he were an army officer, where the ‘testing’ maimed or killed far too many people. But what about the gigantic range of suffering types. Like genetic conditions that lead to a long, slow decline towards death with no respite? Or intense insomnia that leaves the sufferer exhausted.

If He made us, does He not know how we can cope? He loves us deeply, so can He not see that the testing is really bad for us, wrecking many lives, and not yielding any benefit?

To put it bluntly, if God exists, and is responsible for the arbitrary suffering, then He is a criminally pathological bully.

And the religious want me to worship Him?

Would you tempt someone you love to do wrong against you?

Would you hold a permanent grudge if they then fell for your temptation?

Would you have love for your friends conditional on them doing as you wish?

Would you wish to continuously punish those friends who did not do as you wish?

If you behaved in all these ways, do you think you would be a nice, honourable person that people wanted to be friends with?

Then why do Christians want me to be friends with God?

He tempted the entirely innocent Eve into a trivial wrongdoing.

He then held a permanent grudge not just against her but against all mankind, tainting them with ‘sin’, even in their pure innocence also.

He then expects these ‘sinners’ to let God guide them – to let the being who wrongly punished them for a crime they did not commit guide them. Not the best choice of guide.

And if you fail to let this miscreant being guide you, he will punish you further for ever and ever.

You explain the reasoning behind the Christian message …

Our Father, which art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come,
thy will be done,
in earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive them that trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,

the power, and the glory,

for ever and ever.

Amen.

Familiar to most here in the UK.

Note the forgiving of trespasses. So why is it written that the Lord failed to do this on a scale of unbelievable dimensions when Eve trespassed in the garden of Eden? Why would the Lord ask us to forgive trespasses against us while he condemns every human in the centuries since to be blighted with sin in an outrageous over-reaction to Eve’s indiscretion.

And remember that Eve was totally pure and innocent – she had no faculty for detecting a corrupting influence.

The corrupting influence of a talking snake that God put there to tease and test what were perfect beings!

Now you tell me why I should let such a grudge harbourer guide me to a better life?

I am currently reading a landmark book on the importance of emotions on rational thinking. “Descartes’ error” was written way back in 1994, but the ideas within are very new to me. Unfortunately, the writing style makes some of the ideas very hard to grasp, but those that do slip into my lumbering mind are inspirational.

The most recent of these is a concept called ‘somatic marking’; the tagging of factors in decision making with an emotional weighting. His illustrative example is well chosen – as a business man, would you take a new, lucrative business deal with someone who is an arch-enemy of a close friend? If you were to use rational thinking without emotional weighting, you would not be able to come to a clear conclusion because you are comparing very different consequences – the value of the new business to your company and the potential damage to your relationship.

Your emotions may initially draw you to visualise the impact to your friend if you were to take the deal. If this yields a somatic marker of enough weight – if you foresee too much social fallout – you may stop right there, and not even bother to look at the alternative benefit to your business. You would rationalise that your friendship was more important than the money. But it would be an emotional rather than cognitive decision, for the simple matter that you did not even start to make a comparison of outcomes.

The reason that the mind uses emotions to guide thinking and decision making is that it supplies a very efficient means of convergence to a resolution. Necessarily, it can also compromise the quality of decisions made, but humans work on a statistical basis – we take the economical route that emotions enable with a view to also minimising the risk of making a bad decision. We balance economy with quality of resolution.

With this in the back of my mind, I awoke this morning with the realisation that this concept could be applied to, and help clarify another matter that I had been thinking deeply about. I was able to combine two very different matters.

This other matter was a forthcoming discussion I am due to have with a Christian friend about God. The application of somatic marking slotted right into my line of argument, as you will see.

The starting point is the title of this article – that one of the Bible’s 10 commandments advocates that ‘Thou shalt not kill’ – a simple, self-evident and powerful message. So when we encounter this moral rule, we generate a somatic marker – the emotion we attach to the indisputable nature of this plea is very strong. Just as in the book example above, in most situations, it is so powerful that it arrests further thinking. Very powerful messages are statistically so likely to be correct that we take the risk and think no more.

But I do like to think more. So I reworded the commandment to make its message tighter and more revealing :

“Avoid action if it will result in the unnecessary and premature death of another human.”

By introducing the word ‘action’, I provide a stepping stone to the key to my argument – that the following should be equally valid :

“Avoid inaction if it will result in the unnecessary and premature death of another human.”

If we look at the life and impact of Jesus, the claimed son of God, on earth, we see that he spread the message of this and the other commandments. He also ‘walked the talk’ – he did indeed stop to care for those suffering, and he did perform miracles, such is the restoration of sight in a blind man.

But his life on earth was short, and the subsequent 2,000 years has been a much longer time of course. In that time, the world has continued to be fraught with suffering far in excess of blindness. Tsunamis wipe out thousands in a matter of minutes. Diseases decimate the lives of millions. And the point here, as you may be realising, is that there is precious little evidence that God has carried on performing miracles and helping those who suffer. He is claimed to be infinitely powerful and compassionate, yet fails miserably by His inaction.

However you may describe God, with the above argument in mind, I cannot rationally subscribe to the belief that God is good and thereby worthy of worship. To the contrary, with powers that infinitely exceed all the medics and carers on the planet, he is surely guilty of reckless negligence and disinterest.

I am listening to the excellent Jeremy Vine BBC Radio 2 programme as I write. They are discussing the condition Tinnitus, where sufferers are blighted with ringing and other sounds in their ears. It is distressing to listen to some of the listeners who have called into the phoned into the programme. The obviously deeply depressed many who has suffered almost constant, very loud ringing in his ears for 30 years. It is baffling how he could possibly cope, but it is so intense that his life is severely affected by both the intrusive nature of the auditory bombardment, the difficulty in holding down a job and the constant tiredness from heavily disturbed sleep.

In light of just this one condition, can there really be an all-loving, all-knowing, personal, all-powerful God looking over these sufferers? Would such a God not be aware of the desperate plight of these poor people? If he is testing these people, it would only take a day or two to realise that the tinnitus is too debilitating to bear, and achieves nothing. But 30 years of suffering? Is God so oblivious to such extreme suffering? If he is all-powerful, why does he not fix the problem? Or does he simply not care about the quality of life here? But if so, how can he possibly be described as all-loving?

I did promise not to write anti-God rants, but this was too compelling.

Imagine if the managing director of a major bank were to propose a visit to the UK in order to do a mass promotion of his services.

And that this bank was one of those indicted in the recent banking collapse.

Oh, and it wanted to charge the public the multi million pound cost for the privilege of carrying out this free advertising.

I guess you see where this is heading. I refer, of course, by metaphor, to the Papal visit to the UK on 16th/17th September 2010. That the extremely rich Catholic Church is fundamentally a business (but which hides this fact as much as it can), guilty of atrocities that have affected the public, albeit of a sexual rather than financial nature. And yet we pay millions for the privilege of hearing the Pope skirt around these severe problems, deflecting attention away from the guilty priests to the need to help the victims. This is a standard political device to make the church look good, and stop us pondering its ails.

But the free advertising (of Christianity) went on unchecked, with a captive audience of those pre-indoctrinated with religious dogma. And the Pope had the audacity, the gall, and the stupidity to describe the Nazi rising as an atheist one, and then to compound this by stating that atheism was an extremism that we should fight against.

Fortunately, there were a decent number of eminent figures protesting against the visit and the criminal apathy that the church has towards its failing priests. This is no more eloquently voiced than in the excellent (but often verbose) book ‘The case of the Pope’ by Geoffrey Robertson QC, the Internationally renowned Human Rights lawyer. The book is worth reading for appendix A alone, where a transcript is supplied of the courtroom dialogue between a church representative and a prosecutor, who was charging him with a failure to take action over many years against priests who abused the trust put in them and the children they ministered. It makes enlightening reading, as if the church had totally lost touch with reality and a total failure to understand the lifelong scarring that results in most cases of child abuse. It is the first ‘Penguin Special’ since 1989.

One example of a continuing inability to ‘get real’ is the blindingly stupid failure of the church to recognise that it is both unhealthy to expect its priests to be celibate, and that one of the manifestations of the mental instability that arises from this abstinence is an obsession with masturbation. Which is presumably why 81% of the children abused are boys and not girls. And no, the book points out, the likelihood of sexual abuse is no more likely in homosexuals.

From my perspective, the excessive privileges proffered to the Catholic Church should be removed until it cleans its up its act. Can it really act above the law? Can it really operate its mas indoctrination methods in the way it does without any regulation whatsoever?

There is one more telling parallel with big business – it is equally incapable of self regulation, but is, alas, even more flippant about the matter.