More On Religious Intolerance

Simon Borchardt’s derisive piece on Jaco van der Westhuyzen’s (pictured) antics after the Super14 final offers a suitable case study on a trend of religious intolerance in the media.

It seems that Borchardt had two main problems with the said scenario. Firstly, the white T-shirt with “Jesus is King” scrawled on it, was politically incorrect by virtue of it being a religious text shown at a public sporting-spectacle. Secondly, there seem to be ‘theological’ problems with the context. I’ll focus on the former.

Borchardt cuts to the quick in his lambasting, but gives little substance as to the reason for his outrage. Near the end, he breathlessly rasps, “…South Africa is a secular state and Van der Westhuyzen’s actions were grossly inappropriate”. Sadly, this shows an unmitigated distortion of the concept of a secular state. It seems the only part Borchardt correctly grasped is that South Africa happens to be one.

A secular state is officially neutral on matters of religion, neither supporting nor opposing any particular religious belief, practice or expression. Hence there is no state religion or equivalent. All citizens are treated equally, irrespective of their religious persuasion, with none gaining preferential status due to their faith (or absence of it). Was Jaco – playing for the “Blue Bulls” franchise – representing government? Did Jaco’s action result in a religion gaining government preference? Was there a law altered giving the “Jesus-group” special privileges? No. Then for the life of me, I can’t see how this has diddly-squat to do with South Africa being a secular state.

The outrageous aspect is that ‘secular state’ is brazenly extrapolated to infer a relegation of religion from all public arenas to the private. Not only does this beg the question of the validity of such a bold public/private distinction, it assumes government interference and opposition to all public expressions of religion – a tenet incompatible with secularism. This is a two-edged sword: it protects the state from religion, but equally protects religion from state meddling. It seems that Borchardt had interpreted freedom of religion to mean freedom from religion.

Borchardt further implies that the tender egos of non-funky-Christians were shattered at the exhibition. I’ve just about had it with the Politically Correct crowd. To demonstrate, let’s say Jaco wore a bright pink T-shirt saying “Pronutro is King” – or perhaps one saying, “Aliens Exist”, or “They arrested me for being the ugliest man alive – could your dad come to the local jail to prove them wrong”. The first is a statement of preference. We all know Pronutro… but I might personally prefer iphalishi. Big deal. The second is an unproven statement which could be either right or wrong. The last, is an insult to every humourless cretin that reads it. Jaco’s T shirt lies somewhere between the first and second and is agonizingly innocuous as far as T shirts go nowadays. If he had scrawled a four-letter verb followed by “…you, sharks!” it would probably have been converted into a lucrative clothing brand.

Borchardt’s offense at some bloke expressing his religious belief is just an indication of his bald-faced intolerance and prejudice against religion. However, as much as I will defend Jaco’s right to show off his shoddy handwriting, I’ll defend Borchards gold-plated drivel. He’s as much entitled to his opinion as the next person – only he shouldn’t pass it off as unbiased ‘sport’ reporting.

The Intolerant Tolerant

Pierre’s response to my comments seems to ignore, at best the indifference, and at worst, the contempt, religion has enjoyed from western academic and philosophical circles since the enlightenment period: to a lesser degree germinating from Kant’s scathing critique of metaphysics, through to Hume’s Guillotine, the rantings of Nietzsche’s madman and culminating in the likes of Russell’s logical censure of Christianity. Hence, as aptly exhibited by Pierre, theology and other philosophies of religion find little or no credibility in the contemporary academic arena – perhaps with good reason. Hence, it is to the credit of religion’s resilience that this ‘opiate of the masses; the sigh of the oppressed’ is still held as a formidable force by the contemporary intelligentsia.

As for the media’s supposed silk-glove approach, one need look no further than the recent Ted Haggard debacle to see how scathing it can be. Whether it be a priest caught red–handed with a hand in the altar boy’s… uhm… cookie jar, an off-duty traffic cop caught speeding, or a lawyer showing blatant disregard for the law -- it always draws a flitter of laughter from the crowd when hypocrisy is unmasked.

To say that an objectionable religious teaching (such as a church’s position on homosexuality) should be “spurned by the media, vilified in editorials, reported to the Human Rights Commission and taken to the equality court” is an exercise in question-begging. That is tantamount to having the Holy Office peer-review the latest articles of Scientific American. Criticising a belief purely by its result is a thinly veiled ‘appeal to consequence’ and therefore logically fallacious. By this I don’t say that the consequences should be irrelevant. Rather, religious tenets are a matter of propositional truth and should be critically evaluated through comparative religious dialogue and exegetical scrutiny of valid texts.

Now on to the main thrust of my rebuttal: toleration. Taken as a solitary pillar of interaction, this ‘virtue’ of modern liberalism runs into some serious pitfalls. By definition, it can only be exercised when there are beliefs, actions or practices the tolerator would prefer not to exist – not merely when indifferent. Herein lies the rub: from the actions of its proponents, it seems that philosophically, one can tolerate any position, so long as it is not claimed to be ‘true’; morally, one can practice anything, so long as one does not claim it the ‘better way’; religiously, one can hold to anything, so long as it does not mention a ‘supreme being’.

When applied to any religious concept of moral ‘wrong’, tolerance erroneously comes up trumps – the said moral is wrong simply by virtue of its ‘intolerance’. The reasoning is that if there is no way to guarantee religious or moral truth (as many of these tolerevanglists proclaim), then we aren’t justified to impose out moral precepts on others. However, the self-defeating nature of this contention becomes visible when tolerance is itself proclaimed as the Moral Truth. Why should tolerance receive special treatment?

I’m certainly for tolerance, but not in its current ungrounded, watered-down and self-serving form.

Pastor Jacob?

I didn’t know the church was in the business of conferring honorary pastorships – but even so, this one sent the warning bells ringing. Educational institutions such as universities usually confer honorary degrees to recipients who have demonstrated a level of eminence and scholarship sufficient to formally earn such a degree. I would assume that in the church’s case it would require the exhibition of a high level of moral and spiritual repute. Not to mention that it might even be a prerogative for the candidate to be of that particular religious persuasion.

How then does Mr Zuma, a public figure who’s been endlessly embrangled in embarrassing scandals which range from rape to corruption, qualify? Isn’t the church meant to uphold societal values such as loyalty and virtue? This man publicly admitted to having sex with his best friend’s HIV positive daughter – and then having a shower as a contraceptive/anti-retroviral measure; shamefully impetuous. If anything, he’s provided more reason for society to distrust the political elite rather than any form of virtuous puissance.

Perhaps this has nothing to do with morals or ‘playing church’. Perhaps this has everything to do with the next leader of the ANC being chosen at the end of this year and the political and fiscal ramifications associated with this.

Rather than a clerical collar, they should have handed him his cheque-book and dispensed with the farce of pandering to the choir.

Fanaticism, forgiveness and "the Banality of Evil"

I was physically sick when I read of the 3 staff members of a bible publishing company in Turkey who were brutally attacked by an Islamic fundamentalist group. Unverified reports claim these animals filmed their heinous deeds on cellular phone as they proceeded to disembowel, dismember and repeatedly stab their helpless victims, before slitting their throats.

I struggle to understand how the human creature can intentionally kill another in cold blood, let alone barbarically torture for no reason other than incompatible religious beliefs. Psychologists would probably opt for the insanity defense, but given some of the perpetrators already owning up to the crime, I strongly suspect that this insult to civilized society was planned, psyched and executed with the full knowledge of what they were doing.

In attempting to understand I refer to philosopher Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, where she argues that great evils, such as the holocaust, are not committed by fanatics and sociopaths, but rather by very ordinary people who having embraced certain common premises, participate with the view that their actions are normal and acceptable -- even ordinary.

Is it possible that these young, obviously impressionable and mutually motivated men thought their atrocities were acceptable, even normal? Is it possible that they were given credibility by their mutual disdain of a foreign religion? Are their actions much different from the insanity of the suicide bombers who are daily blowing up hundreds of their fellows in mutual contempt of an invading army?

On one side I see a religion which can so easily be construed to encourage mindless violence in the name of Jihad -- whether for preservation or proselytization. Yet on the other I see the Banality of Evil. It's everywhere. You don't need to look any further than South Africa -- which parades the second highest number of murders per capita in the world. We're only 'one-upped' by a country where kidnapping for ransom while growing some freakish narcotic is the national sport. Of the 150 children being raped per day in SA, 3 out of 5 of the mothers are aware of the abuse. Oh yes, South Africa is by far the world leader in rapes per capita. Without a doubt, there's a little Eichmann inside each of us, waiting to be released.

Amongst all this turmoil, there stands the wife of one those tortured and murdered in Turkey -- publicly forgiving these men, emulating those immortal words, "for they know not what they do".

This is a stark reminder of the choice that each one of us faces -- every moment, of every day.