FeminismIsFree!

While I enjoyed Bill Maher’s mockumentary on religion, I didn’t find that it rocked my world in a significant way. However, there were two statements that Bill made, both near the end of the movie, that did perk up my “thought-inducing” antennae.

Warning: Very mild spoilers below.

The first came after several conversations he had with various Muslims; after he pointed out to each of them that the Quran is quite supportive in many places of treating nonbelievers with hatred and violence, even unto death, he got responses ranging from “No it doesn’t!” to “Well, yes it does but that’s only because of the time in which it was written.” All of them chorused at the end—”It’s all the politics! Not the religion!” And Bill said:

I just don’t buy it that these guys are in this state of denial. I think they’re just in a state of denial to an outsider. They will not admit anything is wrong with their culture to an outsider. (emphasis mine)

This struck me because of a recent (offline) conversation I had with a men’s rights activist–I was telling him that really, I didn’t find it much to the point to have conversations about gender issues with MRAs, because they simply weren’t going to listen to me from the get-go. It wouldn’t matter if the idea or information I was trying to impart was a solid and verifiable as the laws of thermodynamics; because I was The Enemy, a feminist, their minds would be completely walled off. Not just because of general enmity, but because my reasons for speaking must always be suspect–my purpose could only be, in their minds, to disrupt and destroy their movement–their culture. So even if something I said sounded emininently true and reasonable, it must be leading to Danger Will Robinson Danger! (An image of covered wagons circling together out on the prairie as the Injun hordes rush towards them comes to mind.)

He agreed that yes, this was a very real dynamic–and yes, it is also one that self-identifying feminists as a group also practice, as I know from personal experience being one in a group. While we may argue among ourselves, we take it as a general premise that the dissenter, since he or she is a feminist, has our group’s good in mind, no matter how disagreeable what he or she has to say is. This allows us to actually listen to it, consider it, and if it stands up to much rigorous testing and debate, sometimes even adopt it for our own. But the same dissenting idea, proposed by an MRA, would rarely get the same type and degree of consideration. And this is quite global among any group, especially one held together by some type of belief system, whether political, philosophical, or religious.

I have no idea how to solve this problem. I’m loathe to say that any problem is genuinely unsolvable, but this one is a real doozy. The fact is, many outsiders who negatively question a group do, indeed, dislike the group and would be happy to see it disbanded or destroyed. How is the group supposed to be able to tell what an outsider’s motives truly are? In the blogosphere, we even have a name for an outsider who “pretends” genuine interest and a desire to really communicate to disguise unpleasant ulterior motives–a “concern troll.”

The second was part of Maher’s final wrap-up monologue:

This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious, really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price. (emphasis mine.)

The first part, the call to, er, atheist militancy, is not new to me–I’m fairly sure I got my first dose of it via Christopher Hitchens but I’ve read many other present and past atheist and freethinking writers on the subject since. The second part, though, about the self-identified moderately religious–that did get me thinking.

My grandmother was religious. By this I mean that she unquestioningly believed in God, basically the Christian God and more specifically, the Southern Baptist Protestant Christian God, though she never in my hearing condemned a member of any other denomination specifically or other religion generally. She was a big believer in God’s love, forgiveness, lack of judgement, etc.–really, what her religion was to her was a way of expressing her belief in man’s love and caring for his fellow man, in the healthiest of human community behavior, in the ideal of physical violence being abhorrent in nearly every circumstance. (I’d say “every circumstance,” but I’m pretty sure she thought it was permissible to defend oneself from direct and immediate physical assault. She definitely thought it was to defend one’s children–my mom used to tell me a funny story about a couple of teenagers that were beating up on her and her siblings one Halloween and how my grandma chased them off with a broom.)

Did my grandma have a responsibility to discard her religion because it was irrational? Could she have? It was so deeply an ingrained part of her–but of course she could have; people ever since the beginning of any kind of widespread literacy in any decent-sized population have managed to do so. But I loved my grandmother, and she was such a good person–can I really believe her to have been propagating harm, simply because it was easier for her to practice her kindness and generosity under the guise of those tenets rather than having to contemplate them being self-originating? Can I really believe her to have been propagating harm simply because, during the most difficult times of her life, it was unimaginably comforting and inspiring for her to feel that she was loved and supported by an all-powerful being? It’s possible she might not have survived those times with her psyche fully intact if she could not have had that crutch–am I right to demand that she, and all the others like her, reject it anyway because of the overall harm the meme of “religion” has caused and is still causing mankind?

On the most personal of levels, there were significant periods of time during my adolescence and adulthood years when my grandma was the only member of my biological family who was willing to even make an effort to find out how I was doing from time to time, and I know how she felt about me–a few months before she died, she called me up to tell me that she was, indeed, dying–and also to tell me that I was the one person in the world who had always meant more to her than any other and that she thought that my existence justified her own–I meant that much to her. And she meant all that and more to me, as well–but she was irrational, and she was validating the terrible harm that religion has and is still inflicting on humanity as a whole. Should I have wounded her so deeply emotionally by insisting she give it up, and if she had refused (which I’m pretty sure she would’ve), should I have done what I would normally do with someone who I believed without a doubt was pursuing an ideology that was both generally and personally terribly harmful to myself particularly and everyone in general–should I have ostracized her? I must, if I truly believe what Bill Maher said about the “moderately religious.” And the fact is, I do agree with him completely. But I doubt I would ever have acted on it with my grandma.

And that is one reason why the moderately religious are very unlikely to ever be forced to face the harm they are enabling in any great numbers. Too many of them are wonderful, lovable people to too many atheists–too many of them are family. This would be another problem that, while I dislike calling any problem unsolvable, I am unsure of what the solution might possibly be.

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