What can make tens of millions of people -- who are in their daily lives peaceful and compassionate and caring -- suddenly want to physically dismember a man for drawing a cartoon, or make excuses for an international criminal conspiracy to protect child-rapists? Not reason. Not evidence. No. But it can happen when people choose their polar opposite -- religion. In the past week we have seen two examples of how people can begin to behave in bizarre ways when they decide it is a good thing to abandon any commitment to fact and instead act on faith. It has led some to regard people accused of the attempted murders of the Mohamed cartoonists as victims, and to demand "respect" for the Pope, when he should be in a police station being quizzed about his role in covering up and thereby enabling the rape of children.
In 2005, 12 men in a small secular European democracy decided to draw a quasi-mythical figure who has been dead for 1400 years. They were trying to make a point. They knew that in many Muslim cultures, it is considered offensive to draw Mohamed. But they have a culture too -- a European culture that believes it is important to be allowed to mock and tease and ridicule religion. It is because Europeans have been doing this for centuries now that we can no longer be tyrannized into feeling bad about perfectly natural impulses, like masturbation, or pre-marital sex, or homosexuality. When priests offer those old arguments, we now laugh in their faces -- a great liberating moment. It will be a shining day for Muslims when they can do the same.
Some of the cartoons were witty. Some were stupid. One seemed to suggest Muslims are inherently violent -- an obnoxious and false idea. If you disagree with the drawings, you should write a letter, or draw a better cartoon, this time mocking the cartoonists. But some people did not react this way. Instead, Islamist plots to hunt the artists down and slaughter them began. Earlier this year, a man with an axe smashed into one of their houses, and very nearly killed the cartoonist in front of his small grand-daughter.
This week, another plot to murder them seems to have been exposed, this time allegedly spanning Ireland and the United States, and many people who consider themselves humanitarians or liberals have rushed forward to offer condemnation -- of the cartoonists. One otherwise liberal newspaper ran an article saying that since the cartoonists had engaged in an "aggressive act" and shown "prejudice... against religion per se", so it stated menacingly that no doubt "someone else is out there waiting for an opportunity to strike again."
Let's state some principles that -- if religion wasn't involved -- would be so obvious it would seem ludicrous to have to say them out loud. Drawing a cartoon is not an act of aggression. Trying to kill somebody with an axe is. There is no moral equivalence between peacefully expressing your disagreement with an idea -- any idea -- and trying to kill somebody for it. Yet we have to say this because we have allowed religious people to claim their ideas belong to a different, exalted category, and it is abusive or violent merely to verbally question them. Nobody says I should "respect" conservatism or communism and keep my opposition to them to myself -- but that's exactly what is routinely said about Islam or Christianity or Buddhism. What's the difference?
This enforced "respect" is a creeping vine. It soon extends beyond religious ideas to religious institutions -- even when they commit the worst crimes imaginable. It is now an indisputable fact that the Catholic Church systematically covered up the rape of children across the globe, and knowingly, consciously put pedophiles in charge of more kids. Joseph Ratzinger -- who claims to be "infallible" -- was at the heart of this policy for decades.
Here's what we are sure of. By 1962, it was becoming clear to the Vatican that a significant number of its priests were raping children. Rather than root it out, they issued a secret order called "Crimen Sollicitationis"' ordering bishops to swear the victims to secrecy and move the offending priest on to another parish. This of course meant they raped more children there, and on and on, in parish after parish. Yes, these were different times, but the Vatican knew then that what it was doing was terribly wrong: that's why it was done in the utmost secrecy.
It has emerged this week that when Ratzinger was Archbishop of Munich in the 1980s, one of his pedophile priests was "reassigned" in this way. He claims he didn't know. Yet a few years later he was put in charge of the Vatican's response to this kind of abuse and demanded every case had to be referred directly to him for 20 years. What happened on his watch, with every case going to his desk? Precisely this pattern, again and again. The BBC's Panorama studied one of many such cases. Father Tarcisio Spricigo was first accused of child abuse in 1991, in Brazil. He was moved by the Vatican four times, wrecking the lives of children at every stop. He was only caught in 2005 by the police, before he could be moved on once more. He had written in his diary about the kind of victims he sought: "Age: 7, 8, 9, 10. Social condition: Poor. Family condition: preferably a son without a father. How to attract them: guitar lessons, choir, altar boy." It happened all over the world, wherever the Catholic Church had outposts.
Far from changing this pedophile-protecting model, Ratzinger reinforced it. In 2001 he issued a strict secret order demanding that charges of child-rape should be investigated by the Church "in the most secretive way... restrained by a perpetual silence... and everyone... is to observe the strictest secret." Since it was leaked, Ratzinger claims -- bizarrely -- that these requirements didn't prevent bishops from approaching the police. Even many people employed by the Vatican at the time say this is wrong. Father Tom Doyle, who was a Vatican lawyer working on these cases, says it "is an explicit written policy to cover up cases of child sexual abuse and to punish those who would call attention to these crimes... Nowhere in any of these documents does it say anything about helping the victims. The only thing it does say is they can impose fear on the victims, and punish [them], for disclosing what happened." Doyle was soon fired.
Imagine if this happened at The Independent. Imagine I discovered there was a pedophile ring running our crèche, and the Editor issued a stern order that it should be investigated internally with "the strictest secrecy". Imagine he merely shuffled the pedophiles to work in another crèche at another newspaper, and I agreed, and made the kids sign a pledge of secrecy. We would both - rightly - go to prison. Yet because the word "religion" is whispered, the rules change. Suddenly, otherwise good people who wouldn't dream of covering up a pedophile ring in their workplace think it would be an insult to them to follow one wherever it leads in their Church. They would find this behavior unthinkable without the irrational barrier of faith standing between them and reality.
Yes, I understand some people feel sad when they see a figure they were taught as a child to revere -- whether Prophet or Pope -- being subjected to rational examination, or mockery, or criminal investigation. But everyone has ideas they hold precious. Only you, the religious, demand to be protected from debate or scrutiny that might discomfort you. The fact you believe an invisible supernatural being approves of -- or even commands -- your behavior doesn't mean it deserves more respect, or sensitive handling. It means it deserves less. If you base your behavior on such a preposterous fantasy, you should expect to be checked by criticism and mockery. You need it.
If you can't bear to hear your religious figures criticized -- if you think Ratzinger is somehow above the law, or Mohamed should be defended with an axe -- a sane society should have only one sentence for you. Tell it to the judge.
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here.
Follow Johann Hari on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johannhari101
SallieParker - You ask for evidence of rape. Obviously you have not been following the Boston sex abuse scandals. Check out what the victims, now middle age men, said happened to them. The law generally in the United States is that sexual contact with minors by adults is rape.
The whole fabulous farrago stinks. It strains credibility. It makes alien-abduction stories look like the Scientific Method. How do you keep all those millions and trillions of "rapes" a secret for all those decades? Most male hustlers will talk volubly about anything they've done (and quiet a few things they haven't). Yet we are to believe these boys stayed quiet, leading lives of quiet desperation and dysfunctionality when they could have been riding the victimization gravy-train. Oh please.
If you haven't known many priests or teenage boys, I suppose you can believe any fish story you hear. I have known plenty of both, and I call BS.
Yes, the axe-wielding maniac did what he did in the name of Islam. Yes, there are some equally disturbed Muslims saying it was justified. But there are millions of Muslims whose moral compass is not twisted, who recognize violence as what it is, and who do not have any interest in defending this hateful act.
Similarly, there are millions of Catholics who are wholly disgusted by the rape of children, who do not excuse the Pope or the priests (still a small fraction of the whole) who committed the rapes.
But in both cases both the acts themselves and the moral gymnastics required to perform them are performed by PEOPLE, not RELIGION. You can be a Muslim and decry the axe attack. You can be a Catholic and decry the rapes. And most, in fact, do.
So for the many posters here who spew irresponsibly simplified nonsense like "religion causes violence"...give your heads a shake.
Hari takes leave of his senses and embellishes marvellously. 'By 1962, it was becoming clear to the Vatican that a significant number of its priests were raping children.' Oh really? RAPING? Rape in the old sense of abduction? No, he means anally sodomizing. He has no evidence of this at all. All the reports say is that some priests were suspected of being perverts. This could be anything from a lewd suggestion to diddling a male prostitute. And aren't we supposed to be kind and tolerant to the perverts among us?
I also believe any Catholic who continues to support this church and false religion should be shunned.
But what do I know? I'm just a liberal.
Respect, indeed.
Is there a history book?
It's not just a clergy problem, it's inherent within the body, as well.
Time for dissolution.
They are usually the most extreme anti-Catholics in my experience.
And probably rightly so. Clean up your own house, so to speak.
What makes you think every parish council or parishioner knew what was going on? Do you really think call Catholics are closet pedophiles? Is there any source for this?
But who determines what’s evil or holy? Stone Age religionists or neo-irreligionists? Atheists or so-called New Age intelligentsia?
None of the above!
Most Westerners belong to Semitic religions. Rest, disgusted by resident evil and rambling devil of their inherited obsolete belief systems either turn hostile to or turn away from all religious dogmas. Majority does the latter. Much of East is under reign or writ of Islam; which brooks no opposition. Other Eastern regions have their own fancied idols and icons.
Presently, neither East nor West has it right.
Pedophilia is indefensible. Yet, homosexuality too doesn’t become ‘natural’ by pushing through this agenda politically. Expecting all to accept it or any such issues as a god-given norm is simplistic.
Yet, popes and prophets are but ordinary people. They are as fallible as any of us. Were one to go by their deeds many a Biblical prophet and past pope would be put behind bars under modern day justice system!
Problem isn’t with popes or prophets but with people and philosophy.
We just do not know What Is. Science knows a little. Yet, its prophecy too falls flat on its ass every now and then.
Thus, until we as a people self-realize that quintessentially, scientifically and spiritually, Whatsoever Is but One Unified Whole is, humankind shall continue to be crude and cruel than kind and considerate.
Till death do us apart!
All religions have a tendency toward flights of fancy pretending to know God, when there's only one place 'God' can be found, and that's within.
The problem in the Ctholic church is the fact they don't believe Jesus when he said we are all gods and goddesses.... and have no need for religion. We must go within, instead.
Simply put, it means ‘rebinding’ or ‘reuniting’. Similarly,’ yoga’ is ‘to yoke’. With what? With Whatsoever Is. Highest Truth. Alpha and Omega. Beginning and End. Nature of Reality. God. Or whatever one calls That Which Is.
In higher spiritual circles of East, more specifically India, formal ‘outside’ rules and rituals are considered mere means to an end. For seekers to later on delve WITHIN and find NATURE OF SELF. This metaphysical precept and practice has in varying forms and formats existed in India since times immemorial. Much before the time of Jesus.
If some in West assume religion originated for ‘nothing more’ than appeasement of illusory gods for ‘fertility in the fields and in their women’; then, it is their naïve belief.
Semitic religions - Judaism, Islam, Christianity - believe in an unproven, unseen, non-existent anthropomorphic god: a deity in man-like form. In East or West, people not well versed with Metaphysics of The Ultimate Reality, believe similarly.
None of the Biblical prophets except Jesus postulated Reality As Is: “Kingdom of God is Within you!” “I and my Father are One!” “I am in the Father, He in me!” This self-experienced surrealism that ALL IS ONE runs deep in the veins of seers and sages of the Himalayas. Still does.
This SELF-REALIZATION is addressed as NIRVANA or SALVATION. Without IT, all of us, of this-that direction or dedication, are barking up the wrong BUDDHA TREE!
We need religion. Just not the wrong kind.
The Church has been battling a shortage of priests for decades. In 1965 the US had 58,000 Priests, in 2009 (with a much larger population)- 40000.
To take away pedophile access to children would be to remove an important recruiting tool and one of the last incentives to become a Priest.
There are still people who choose a career out of an impulse to serve.
But your view of corporate necessity is interesting
and rings an accurate tone.
As is often said on other pages here, corporations have a lot to account for!
As for your last line, I don't believe it. There are good men who become priests and never harm a child. On the otehr hand, had you admitted men satisfy their own needs to become prieats and rarely have a 'call from God' I'd be in total agreement.
It seems to me that the Pope is trying to protect a very human institution with a very human practice of denial. Anyone who would defend such behavior as a part of faith is a loon.
There is war of immigration going on in Europe. Radicalized Arab youth don't seem to need much of an excuse to retaliate in violence. This might have a whole lot less to do with defending Muhammed then you might think. It is very hard to distinguish that which is cultural and that which is religious in an environment in which the two are so closely linked.
Perhaps your suggestion that one should be able to question, ridicule, and challenge religion is quite right. I am wondering if you'll be willing to change your opinion if the answers to your questions, ridicule, and challenges come back differently than you expected?
So what other force do you think there is? My understanding is the ridicule was of their religion, not their "culture". I've read some evidence to the effect that it is the lack integration of young Muslims into European society and culture that contributes to this (from Hari, I believe). Is this still not because of their religion? You are quick to shift any responsibility from religion (any religion) or god beliefs without giving an alternative explanation. You do the same when you describe the Catholic Church as a "human" institution with "human" practices, which it surely is, but that doesn't mean that absolves the god beliefs of any culpability in this. I've read a number of your posts, and you consistently try to dissociate religion from the negative and associate it with the positive. You seem more heavily invested in protecting god/religious beliefs than defending ethics and morality. As for "changing opinions" about religion, you haven't posted anything yet to change mine, but keep trying. Your obviously pretty resistant to having your opinion changed too.
I won't deny that the Danish cartoon looked racially insensitive, but the thing to do would have been for Arabs to come out and call it racist. As for the Pope, I don't think that the Catholic Church as an institution has any more credibility.
"Drawing a cartoon is not an act of aggression. Trying to kill somebody with an axe is."