Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

  Last year, during a visit to Brazil, Pope Benedict declared that the native populations of the Americas had been “silently longing” for the Christian faith that arrived with their conquerors and colonizers, and that it in no way represented the imposition of a foreign culture. Indigenous groups protested bitterly, but he stood his ground.

  In 2006, speaking at the University of Regensburg, he quoted, with seeming approval, a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor’s comment: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

  When Muslims protested, Pope Benedict took refuge in the claim that he was just quoting somebody else, not saying it himself. (You know how those quotes from Byzantine emperors just pop into your mind unbidden.) His defence of the Church’s treatment of Galileo all those years ago was done in just the same style: an outrageous proposition delivered in what he seemed to think was a deniable way.

  Galileo was the first man in Italy to build a telescope, through which he discovered the moons of Jupiter—and the sight of them rotating around a much larger planet set him to thinking about the relationship between the Earth and the Sun. Copernicus had published his book asserting that the Earth rotated about the Sun more than half a century before, and a “Copernican” had been burned at the stake for his heretical views in 1600, so Galileo approached the matter carefully. On the other hand, unlike Copernicus, he had a telescope, so he could see what was going on.

  Galileo was summoned to Rome in 1616 and ordered not to write about the Copernican theory any more, but, in 1623, a man he saw as a patron and sympathizer, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, was chosen as Pope Urban VIII. He travelled to Rome again, and believed that he had been given permission by Pope Urban to discuss the Copernican theory in public, provided he presented it as only a hypothesis. Unfortunately, either the political balance in the Vatican subsequently changed, or else Galileo simply misunderstood what he had been told.

  When he published his book in 1632 it was banned. In 1633, he was interrogated in Rome under threat of torture, and condemned for “following the position of Copernicus, which is contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture.” He recanted his views to save his skin, but they sentenced him to life imprisonment anyway.

  But there is a story, perhaps untrue, that as Galileo was led away he muttered defiantly under his breath “Eppure si muove” (And yet the Earth moves). True or not, scientists continue to view this scene as the great defining moment in the conflict between authority and truth—or, if you like, between faith and reason. Clearly, so does Joseph Ratzinger, which is presumably why he felt compelled, back in 1990, to take one more kick at Galileo.

  Speaking at La Sapienza, Rome’s most prestigious university, he declared that the Church had been quite right to try and punish Galileo. Or rather, in a typical Ratzinger ploy, he quoted the maverick Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend, who said: “At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.” God knows what Feyerabend actually meant by that, but that was the quote that Ratzinger chose to use.

  If you pay attention to what Pope Benedict has been saying all these years, it’s clear that he does see Catholicism as superior to other religions and faith as superior to reason. There is nothing surprising about this. After all, he is the head of the Catholic Church, and many, if not most, committed Catholics do believe these things.

  But he does go a little further than most. In the circumstances, you can see why the scientists at La Sapienza University were not all that keen on a return visit.

  There are certain things that you can’t do in a column that is read by people in many different countries, most of whom follow one religion or another, and one of them is to mock their beliefs. Fair enough: common courtesy would require that, even if self-interest didn’t. But sometimes things come by that you really want to highlight, and there is one in the third paragraph of the next piece.

  Tim Bleakley of CBS Outdoor in London says that the sponsors of his advertising campaign couldn’t put the flat statement “There is no God” in their ads because it “would have been misleading” for religious people. Does that mean that the believers would have lost their faith if they had seen that written on the side of a bus, Tim? Or what?

  February 8, 2009

  THE ATHEIST BUSES

  If the objective was to undermine people’s belief in God, then turning the atheist buses loose in Britain was largely a waste of time, because most British people don’t believe in God anyway.

  The atheist buses are all over London and some other big British cities by now, with a large ad running down the sides saying: “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” But you have to ask: if the sponsors of the ad, the British Humanist Association, felt strongly enough about it to spend £35,000 ($50,000) to put the signs on all those buses, why did they only say “probably no God”?

  It’s not their fault. Tim Bleakley, managing director for sales and marketing at CBS Outdoor in London, which handles advertising for the bus system, explained that advertisements saying flatly that there is no God “would have been misleading” for religious people. “So as not to fall foul of the code, you have to acknowledge that there is a grey area.”

  When the complaints rolled in anyway, alleging that the ad was offensive to Christians and that the “no God” claim could not be substantiated, the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the ads were “an expression of the advertiser’s opinion and that the claims in it were not capable of objective substantiation.” For a non-theological organization, the ASA is pretty sharp.

  Never mind all that. The real question is: what did the British Humanist Association think it would achieve with its ad campaign? It’s not as though non-believers in Britain were an oppressed minority. In fact, they’re not a minority at all. They are the majority, although you have to read the statistics carefully to understand this.

  According to the 2001 census, only seven million people in Britain said they had no religion, while thirty-seven million said they were Christian; one and a half million said they were Muslim, half a million were Hindu, 390,000 were Jedi Knights (there was a conspiracy among younger Britons to mock the process by claiming allegiance to the religion of Star Wars), 329,000 were Sikhs, and 260,000 were Jewish.

  Those numbers suggest that Britain is an overwhelmingly Christian country, with under 20 percent of the population describing themselves as non-believers. Yet three-quarters of the people in Britain do not go to church even once a year. On an average Sunday, only 6 percent of the population is in church, and that figure has been dropping by 2 per cent per decade since the 1970s. Something doesn’t add up here.

  When the International Social Survey Program conducted a more in-depth study of religious belief almost twenty years ago, it asked people if they agreed or disagreed with the statement “I know God exists and I have no doubts about it.” In Britain, only 23.8 percent of people said they agreed.

  That’s a normal number for Europe. In that ISSP poll, most European countries registered between 20 and 30 percent for confident belief in God, although Italy struggled up to 51 percent, Ireland reached 58 per cent, and Poland got the prize with 66 percent believers.

  What is happening is that people in Britain and many other countries are answering the census question about religion in terms of their cultural heritage (which is, in most cases, Christian), not in terms of their actual beliefs. It all depends on how you phrase the question, but the official figures are misleading. Actual levels of religious belief in Europe are very low.

  Moreover, the collapse in belief is continuing, with the youngest least likely to identify with a religion. An Ipsos MORI poll commissioned by the British Library in 2007 found that nearly half of the teenagers in Britain were atheists.

  This fits in better with what you actu
ally observe from day to day in most European countries. People are no less moral than they ever were, but religion is simply absent in daily life in Europe, at least compared to the United States, where it seems omnipresent. Yet here’s a strange thing: the very first place those bus ads came out was the United States.

  The idea started in Britain, but the American Humanist Association moved faster. Their ads appeared on buses in Washington, D.C., in November, saying “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake”—and there was little public outcry. Maybe the United States is not that different after all.

  The U.S., we are constantly told, has a level of religious belief almost as high as Iran’s, and every Gallup poll since 1944 has reported that at least 94 percent of Americans “believe in God or a universal spirit.” But look at this wording. If you had any lingering guilt at all about having abandoned your ancestral religion, you’d say yes to that, wouldn’t you?

  When the ISSP asked its much more rigorous question, only 66 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “I know God exists and I have no doubts about it.” That was almost twenty years ago, and it’s very likely that the level of belief has fallen since.

  The United States is not the same as Europe but it is not invulnerable to the same trends. Which may be why President Obama, while rhyming off the roll call of America’s religions in the time-honoured fashion in his election-night acceptance speech, for the first time added “and non-believers.”

  I was obviously very cross when I wrote this next one, but look at the date. The Israelis were pounding the bejesus (pardon the expression) out of the Gaza Strip once again while the United States, Canada and Britain ran interference for them on the diplomatic front. It seemed just the right time for …

  December 27, 2008

  A CHRISTMAS MESSAGE FROM AHMADINEJAD

  There’s something about the Middle East that brings out the hypocrisy in people, and never more so than at Christmas. Take, for example, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Britain’s Channel Four, in its never-ending quest for cheap controversy, has fallen into the habit of getting someone to deliver an alternative address to the Queen’s traditional Christmas message, and who better than the Iranian lunatic?

  That was the intent, obviously, but Ahmadinejad foxed them all with a low-key talk full of brain-curdling platitudes like the following: “If Christ were on Earth today, undoubtedly he would stand with the people in opposition to bullying, ill-tempered and expansionist powers … He would hoist the banner of love and justice for humanity to oppose warmongers, occupiers, terrorists and bullies the world over.”

  Really? Christ lived in the Roman Empire, the very epitome of a bullying, ill-tempered and expansionist power, and his own native land, Palestine, was under Roman occupation, but he didn’t hoist the banner to oppose anything. He was certainly in favour of love and justice, but he said “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” Don’t revolt, don’t even withhold your taxes, because this world does not matter. Only the next one does.

  Muslims are right in grouping Judaism, Christianity and Islam together as the “Abrahamic religions,” the “peoples of the Book,” but the differences between them are much wider than the ecumenical fraternity pretend. Jews and Muslims share a belief in the law and an enthusiasm for the state that was utterly absent in early Christianity.

  Abraham, Christ and Muhammad were all born within a very long day’s drive of one another, and they grew up in slightly different versions of the same basic culture, but Abraham and Muhammad were both prominent and powerful men. Christ was not. He was probably illiterate, and he never showed the slightest interest in politics.

  Jesus’s followers were initially drawn from the downtrodden and the excluded, the women and the slaves, and they did not believe that they could or should engage in earthly politics. They courted martyrdom, and they eagerly awaited the time when injustice, and indeed the world itself, would be swept away in the Last Judgment (coming soon to a cemetery near you). Of course, after a couple of centuries, Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, and all of that changed.

  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knew none of this, and why should he? He was just saying the words that somebody slightly better informed (but only slightly) put into his mouth. It was pious hypocrisy from a man who has almost no influence on events. The power in Iran lies elsewhere, with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the Assembly of Experts and the Guardian Council.

  The president of Iran has no more power than the vice-president of the United States: he doesn’t control the armed forces, he makes no foreign-policy decisions, he is not in the loop as far as the intelligence services are concerned, and he can neither propose nor pass any laws. As Jack Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s first vice-president, said of his own job, being president of Iran is “not worth a tub of warm piss.” Ahmadinejad accepted Channel Four’s offer because he had nothing better to do that day.

  So why pick on this self-promoting but marginal figure? Partly because there is something funny about watching a certifiable religious fanatic struggling to be ecumenical. But also because all politicians who feel pressured to say something positive about the ghastly situation in the Middle East fall into the same empty platitudes. The reality of frozen deadlock, huge hatred and lethal weapons is just too ugly to be addressed in a Christmas message.

  25.

  LATIN AMERICA

  The big event in South America in 2005 was the election in Bolivia of the first-ever indigenous (that is, Indian) president, Evo Morales. Mexico has had some mestizo (mixed-race) presidents and there have been a few elsewhere, but a genuine indio president who still speaks a native language fluently (Aymara, in Morales’s case), in addition to Spanish, is a complete novelty in Latin America. And Morales doesn’t just happen to be indigenous; that is his whole political raison d’être.

  December 19, 2005

  BOLIVIA: RACE AND REVOLUTION

  Bolivia has had more presidents by far than any other South American country mainly because so many of them were overthrown long before their terms ended. They were also all white, even though the majority of Bolivia’s population is “indigenous,” descended from the Indians whose ancestors already lived there as subjects of the Incan Empire at the time of the Spanish conquest five centuries ago. So, what are the odds that Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, will survive a full term of office?

  Morales, who won an absolute majority of the votes in last Sunday’s presidential election, faces not only the usual hazards of life as the president of South America’s poorest country, but also the threat of American intervention to overthrow him. As a socialist whose declared goal is to “end the colonial state” and as a leader of the coca farmers who promises to lift the ban on growing coca leaf, the crop from which cocaine is produced, he is deeply unpopular in Washington.

  In the past, South American policies that are unpopular in the United States have frequently proven to be bad for the health of those who propose them. The U.S. found the time to organize the overthrow of the president of Chile in 1973 despite being neck-deep in the Vietnam War, and the election of Morales may finally focus Washington’s attention on how countries all over Latin America are rejecting U.S. tutelage.

  The main target of Washington’s wrath so far has been Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chavez, has built an unassailable domestic base—he has won eleven elections and referendums in the past seven years—by spending a lot of the country’s oil revenues on the health and education of poor Venezuelans. He has built a close relationship with Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and he is now providing Venezuelan oil at a discount to other Caribbean and Central American countries (and even to poor Americans).

  It is Chavez’s incendiary language that gets the headlines—last month he called President George W. Bush a “madman, a killer and a mass murderer”—but his aim is serious: to free all of Latin America from the grip of neo-liberal e
conomic policies, indeed from American influence in general. Last July’s launch of TeleSUR, a new television network whose aim is to provide an alternative to U.S.-based news and analysis for all Latin Americans, is a case in point. It is based in Caracas and is 70 percent financed by Venezuela, but it is also backed by the governments of Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba and Brazil.

  While the Bush administration has been obsessed by its grandiose plans for reshaping the Middle East, a real transformation has been happening in America’s “backyard.” Left-wing governments have come to power in Brazil and Argentina, the two biggest countries of South America, and in a number of smaller countries as well. Furthermore, the continent is seeing more than just a comeback in modern dress by the traditional left.

  The Indians and part-Indians who form a downtrodden majority in some of the Andean countries are staging their own comeback. They talk mostly in terms of winning elections and rewriting constitutions, but they basically share the view of Antauro Humala, leader of the Movimiento Etnocaceristas (Nationalist Movement) in Peru: “There are four races, black, white, yellow and copper. We are the copper people and I want us to be recognized as a race.”

  Hugo Chavez’s Indian and black ancestry is written all over his face, and this explains much of his popularity with the majority of mixed-race Venezuelans who felt excluded by the dominant white minority in that oil-rich country. Evo Morales is even more clearly a descendant of the Incas who ruled the central and southern Andes before the white conquerors and settlers arrived, and he wants the two-thirds of Bolivians who share his heritage to at last hold power in their own country.

  It will get very fraught in Bolivia when Morales starts rewriting the constitution to include the excluded, as he has already sworn to do, but the ethnic solidarity among Bolivian Indians that has helped him into power will also make it very hard for Washington to overthrow him. So long as he avoids the civil war that some of the more extreme members of the white minority may now try to provoke, he will probably manage to serve a full term in office. What he does with that term may change Bolivia beyond recognition.