Hitchens’ “god is not Great”. An Assessment — III: A Short Digression on the Pig; or, Why Heaven Hates Ham
Since the third chapter of god is not Great is, in fact, short, we can be brief (well, relatively brief, anyway!). Nevertheless, the issue of forbidden foods is an important one in the criticism of religion, because, on the face of it, there is little reason why there should be any connexion between religion and prohibited foodstuffs. John the Baptist, we are told, ate locusts and wild honey, but he was presumably forbidden pork. Why does heaven hate ham? Or lobsters, shrimp and clams? Or rabbits?
Rabbits are cute, and children are naturally drawn to little piglets, but it isn’t for their attractiveness or repulsiveness that forbidden animals are forbidden. The original reason, according to many biblical scholars, for the Jewish distinction between Kosher (Permitted) and Trayf (Forbidden) foods, seems to have something to do with their separation into natural kinds. Animals with cloven hoofs which chew the cud are Kosher, like cows, whereas animals with cloven hoofs which do not chew the cud are Trayf, like pigs. Animals which chew the cud (as rabbits were thought to do, but do not) but are not cloven hoofed, are Trayf. Fish with scales, like salmon, cod, and tuna, are Kosher, but fish with legs and/or shells, like crabs, clams and lobsters, are Trayf. The same restrictions seem to have been taken over by Islam. Birds that eat grain and seeds, like quails, are Kosher, but carrion birds are Trayf, since animals that die of natural causes are Trayf. And so on. There may be a kind of primitive reason behind the distinctions.
This is why I think that Hitchens’ speculations about the reasons for the prohibition of pork are probably wide of the mark. He thinks there is some resemblance between the flesh of roast pig and roasted human flesh, and, as the eating of human flesh would have been reserved to sacrificial rites, the eating of pork, by association, may have been “privileged and ritualistic.” (40) As he writes in more detail:
The simultaneous attraction and repulsion [to and from pig flesh] derived from an anthropomorphic root: the look of the pig, and the taste of the pig, and the dying yells of the pig, and the evident intelligence of the pig, were too uncomfortably reminiscent of the human. [40]
These reminded people too much, he thinks, of night-time rituals of human sacrifice and cannibalism, at which, he suggests, “the ‘holy’ texts often do more than hint.” (40) And then he points out that optional things are usually not prohibited unless there is already a repressed desire for the prohibited thing. I’m afraid my own knowledge does not extend so far, but some evidence I think is required. The more than hints to which he refers should have been adduced here in support, and some anthropological evidence provided as well.
An important point, however, is that these ancient prohibitions are now pointless and unnecessary, and the preservation of them equally so. The exaggerated response of some Muslims to stories about pigs, such as in Winnie the Pooh, or Animal Farm, is simply ridiculous, and should be seen to be so. As Hitchens says:
In microcosm, this apparently trivial fetish shows how religion and faith and superstition distort our whole picture of the world. [41]
The same thing applies to regulations regarding the strict separation of milk and meat for those who observe strict rules of “keeping kosher”. For these rules also lead to other forms of separation which are less harmless or trivial, as is evidenced in Israel, where the strict separation of women from men is being enforced by bullying religious conservatives, which reminds us of the kind of bullying which religions more generally practice in attempting to see society’s regulations and laws based on religious prohibitions and permissions. As Hitchens said in the last chapter regarding Catholics and the Irish referendum about the legalisation of divorce:
There [was] not even the suggestion that Catholics could follow their own church’s commandments while not imposing them on all other citizens. [17]
This is a characteristic of religion that we will meet with again and again. Religions tend to bully others into acquiescing in practices and regulations which have no rational warrant, just because they can.
As I have said on numerous occasions and in different contexts, religions do not respect boundaries, and they are very quick to trespass on matters that are quite simply issues of personal preference. Just because Catholics and others think of embryos as “pre-born” and entitled to all the rights that are granted to full moral persons, does not mean that others must so regard them. It simply does not follow. Indeed, if they go back far enough in their own church’s history they will find that earlier Catholics did not regard human embryos as full persons. They may argue that this is because of early ignorance about the processes of development, but this is irrelevant. For, however regarded, they were then and still are potentially persons, but are not for that reason entitled to be regarded as persons equal in rights to the women who bear them. This is an idiosyncratic belief based on religious pretension, a pretension based on the church’s urgent need to retain power over others. Without the power to govern others and their behaviour, in ways that can be seen to be effective, leaders of the church (or any other religious group) feel and appear powerless. The need to be able to control certain aspects of social life is urged largely because without such control religion appears to be of marginal significance. This marginalisation was actually beginning to occur in the late twentieth century, and has been particularly marked in the Scandinavian countries. The increased intrusiveness of religion in the public sphere which is everywhere apparent — David Cameron’s remarks about Britain as a Christian country is only the latest evidence of a change now well underway – is related directly to the increasing sense of powerlessness experienced by religious leaders and their followers.
Islam is especially intrusive in this respect. The spectacle of men all bowing in unison is clearly meant to be controlling as well as menacing. A society this regimented, we are being told, is one that can bring about its own aims in society. This is further reinforced by the veiling of seclusion of women, and the threat of violence for those who question the regimentation imposed by the religion, and the respect demanded by it. Dietary laws, laws regarding dress or facial hair, regulations governing cleanliness and other aspects of personal or social life are all designed to keep religion central to the ordering of society and individual life. The prohibition of pork, regardless of its origin, is a form of social control which extends into the inner life of individual persons, just as rules regarding sexuality — how, when, why and with whom — reach into the most intimate spaces of individual life.
The interesting thing about this form of social control is that the more marginal, the more idiosyncratic, the less rationally based the demands are, if a religion can convince its adherents to observe them faithfully, the more immediate and effective is the control that is exercised. This seems to me to be the key to understanding religious prohibitions and permissions regarding food, routines of cleanliness, sex, and other things which, for secular people, are matters of individual choice and preference. Whether the prohibition of pork is related to ancient classifications of living things, or to its relatedness to human sacrifice, its effect now is apparently a matter of arbitrary command, adherence to which, if successfully managed, gives the religion greater control over its devotees.
That for which we have good reasons, we have good reasons, quite independently of religious command, but regulations that are arbitrary and unexplained, if observed, are observed out of faithfulness to the religion and its requirements, and thus gives the religion itself and its leaders greater control over individual action and even, in some cases, over thought and the uses of language, thus shaping our whole picture of the world by the demands of religion. Hitchens calls such control a distortion of our picture of the world. Since such restrictions on thought and action are not founded on reason or evidence, this seems to me to be a reasonable conclusion. Religions distort the way that people perceive and understand the world, and thereby maintain control over the individual both in his private and in his public behaviour, thought and expression. Since religions cannot justify their foundational beliefs, and much less the incidental regulations of thought and behaviour, dress and food, there are no reasons — other than cultural ones — to shape one’s life according to religious beliefs or regulations. There are better and more reasonable ways to organise our lives, and beliefs and practices that distort our picture of the world should be abandoned in favour of them. Besides being foolish and controlling, religious beliefs are socially divisive and dangerous. It is time for us to abandon them.
Posted on 29 December 2011, in Atheism, Criticism of Religion, Enlightenment. Bookmark the permalink. 20 Comments.
Religions can’t respect boundaries, because they are about the will of God Almighty, and whatever God Almighty says has to be the norm. It has to be, no arguing. Therefore, if the christian god says “Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee”, the muslim says that the christian god is a heretic. So, I suppose, does the jew.
It seems to me that the whole muslim idea is, that in order to live a truly godly life, one has to think of god at every single moment. God is jealous, and will not permit one to think of anyone but him. So naturally one has to govern one’s life in such a way that not a single action, not even a syllable, should be expressed that is not in every way mindful of god. It’s monasticism brought into the everyday world. I think that this is a perversion of the idea that our whole being is derivative (that is, contingent) and that if we are to live in accordance with what is true we must dedicate ourselves to honesty and truthfulness. Or, if it isn’t a perversion of that, it’s a primitive and dim perception of it, expressed in personal — i.e. human — terms, and corrupted by the primitive and unaware mentality of the everyday human animal. Turning it all into a ritual of obsessive behaviour is one way to overcome the animality of our nature, I suppose. But it’s an animal solution, primitive, even stupid.
the primitive and unaware mentality of the everyday human animal
I apologise if this sounds arrogant: I think it’s just how we are, that’s all; but we can help each other, and thus we can learn to do better.
It’s a perpetual conflict between the animal and the spiritual. For every one of the 12 tribes of Israel, there are 11 tribes that say that they just don’t see why they shouldn’t have what they want, and create their god in their preferred image. So human (and especially male) desires compete with the philosophical ideas, and in a half-formed primitive world of desires and ghosts it is perhaps inevitable that the two should be inextricably entangled. That’s why the situation of women is so precarious (desires and ghosts) — and it seems to me that the situation of women is a punctus determinationis, or even a definition, of our condition. Thus one’s neighbour is always to be distinguished from one’s neighbour’s wife. For that matter, one has only to consider the recent fracas over Rebecca Watson and her — apparently — insufferable degree of independence of male authority, even of the authority of self-supposed good and worthy gnu atheists who wouldn’t dream of being authoritarian, naturally.
“Besides being foolish and controlling, religious beliefs are socially divisive and dangerous.”
All very well said, right up to this point at which I beg, and respectfully, differ. I don’t think religious beliefs are socially divisive, but the opposite–religion binds societies. But bind them, as you suggest above, in a controlling and tyrannical way. The tyranny of the group.
I think religion works that way, like the metaphorical poison, into the social mind. That’s why religion doesn’t go away–and far worse, it replaces what otherwise would be individual ethical judgment with obedience.
Rather than a social disease, religion makes society the disease. We should care very little about such society, and care more about defeating those who wish to overpower us.
I’m of Jewish heritage, and I’ve always enjoyed a bit of pork. Today I was at a Chinese buffet and had a pork rib, and yesterday I was at another one and had a shrimp wrapped in bacon (although fatty, it tasted rather better than I expected). When I turned 13, in 1955, some of my relatives wanted me to be bar-mitzvahed, but I refused, and I am still proud of myself that I did so. I did not want to be boxed into belonging, even superficially, to a group that I did want to be a part of, and it was a matter of honor. Every now and then Jerry Coyne, who is also an atheist of Jewish parentage (there are very many of us), expresses embarrassment when some idiotic rabbi makes a stupid comment, but I am not bothered any more than if a moronic minister made the same comment. I have a cousin who is an orthodox Jew, side-braided hair, the whole bit, and I feel like he’s from another planet. I prefer the company of secular people to those whose minds are locked in the grip of religion. I say this, but I still have my Catholic girlfriend. Go figure.
@Egbert
Surely religion is divisive in that when it binds one group together it divides them from everyone else.
@Stonyground, I think such conflicts are the result of the state, rather than societies. It is when religion is mixed with politics that we get the great evils of conflict.
Come, come, Egbert, just consider the priests from different churches clashing with brooms in the Church of the Nativity, or the soi-dissant “communal violence” in India between Hindus and Muslims, or the refusal of Muslims, very often, to associate with kuffar. Religions may have been the cement holding communities together, but the separation of communities by religious allegiance has often been the source of violence and division.
I agree with your assessment of Hitch’s argument. I was quite boggled by it, frankly, and think it a glaring weakness of “god Is Not Great”.
But I have often (jokingly) declared that I will convert to a theistic belief just as soon as all religions everywhere can agree on the status of the bacon cheeseburger.
And hats. Lots and lots of rules about hats.
Eric, I know at first glance it seems obvious to say that religion causes social conflict, but I think it’s more subversive and complicated than that. If we are talking about free societies (if any of those still exist), then yes, it conflicts with free societies. But if we are talking about deeply conservative religious societies that make up most of the societies of the world, then it actually binds them together. That is the problem! I don’t want to live in such societies, I want to change them.
You see, I don’t have a problem with conflict, if it means a fight against tyranny and authoritarianism. And that is the price of liberalism–free societies don’t have that social cohesion and the glue that religious societies or oppressed societies have. Free societies are vulnerable and fragmented, and that is another problem to solve.
Egbert, my point is not that religions don’t create closely bonded communities, and sometimes even entire societies, but that in most cases religion divides societies. Take Iraq, for instance, divided into Shia, Sunni, as well as marginal types of Islam, Christianity, etc. These groups are divided from each other and dangerous to each other. In this sense, as I have been trying to say, religion tends to be divisive and dangerous.
I don’t have a problem with conflict as such, but it is not always a matter of fighting tyranny. Religions have been at each other’s throats from the beginning, because in most cases they served to distinguish us from them. And religion is good at doing this for the precise reasons dealt with in this chapter of Hitchens’ book, because these are idiosyncratic differences between people based on particular forms of devotion.
Indeed, I do understand your point Eric, but I won’t labour you more with my point. I do hope you and your family enjoy a wonderful New Year, and let’s hope next year is a better one for reason and sanity, as the death of Hitchens is a blow to that much needed voice.
I’ve been pondering how to describe the main religions as single words. I realise that this is grossly inadequate, but I wonder if it would help in debates about forbidden foods or practices etc.
Judaism I suggest is all about a ‘covenant’
Christianity I suggest is all about ‘obedience’
Islam I suggest is all about ‘submission’
Hinduism is perhaps about ‘acquiesence’
Sikhism – perhaps ‘salvation’
I don’t want to sideline the thread with debates about my suggestions (or the need for them) but I feel that unless you have the ‘shape’ of peoples’ relationships with their god(s) in mind, it is too easy to translate the ‘necessity’ for forbidden foods into modern terms while ignoring the original intent. So if the avoidance of trayf food is a contractual obligation for Jews, is it different from submitting to God’s wishes about unclean food for a Muslim?
Is it too cynical to suggest that pride might be a word describing many religious? Pride in possessing extraordinary knowledge inaccessible to others (unless they listen to me). Pride in enduring deprivation that sets me apart from the common rabble. God chose me to live this way. Oh, and I’ve been able to dispense entirely with pride.
@DiscoveredJoys
I attended a talk by Margaret Visser as part of the Naming the Holy (how do they come up with these names ?) series at the Newman Centre* at the U of T and she claimed that older pagan religions were based on honour which xtianity replaced with guilt.
This was supposed to be an improvement according to Visser.
She is much easier to take when she talks about food.
* A hotbed of catholic activism, named after Cardinal John Henry Newman, recently separated (post mortem) from Ambrose St John, with whom he had a “particular friendship” (to use clerical terminology), by Ratzinger as part of an attempt to highjack the cult that surrounds this man. Hitchens has commented on Newman a few times in debates.
Steve Oberski
Thank you for reminding me about the Newman Centre at U of Toronto. I checked out its website and it certainly is a hotbed of Catholic activism
The Newman Centre’s Mission, “to provide a variety of opportunities for students to live out the teachings of Jesus by exploring, deepening and celebrating our Catholic faith; by serving those in need; and by experiencing the richness of a community rooted in Christ” (http://www.newmantoronto.com/about-us/mission)
seems at odds with John Henry Newman’s _Idea of a University_:
“the high protecting power of all knowledge and science, of fact and principle, of inquiry and discovery of experiment and speculation…” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Newman
Perhaps Eric’s and Egbert’s points can be combined into one, by saying that “religion polarizes.” When humans are drawn together into a group, it often occurs that they are drawn away from people in other groups. I don’t care much for professional sports, but if I were to become an ardent Eagles fan, I would most likely experience more fellow-feeling with other Eagles fans than I do now, and less fellow-feeling with everyone else.
Eric also said, “Just because Catholics and others think of embryos as “pre-born” and entitled to all the rights that are granted to full moral persons, does not mean that others must so regard them.”
This seems, to me, to miss the point of how moral prescriptions, in general, work. Consider a similar sentence: “Just because some people think that murder is wrong and humans should not be killed doesn’t mean that others must agree.” This is, of course, true, but nonetheless wouldn’t you do everything you could to make a society where others agree? Wouldn’t you seek the enactment of laws that make your opinion legally binding? How are Catholics any different?
Lastly, a question about this: “…regulations that are arbitrary and unexplained, if observed, are observed out of faithfulness to the religion and its requirements, and thus gives the religion itself and its leaders greater control over individual action…”
It sounds plausible, and Eric you’re not the first to have said it, but what is the evidence for it? If I can get you to abstain from eating pork, do I actually have greater ability to get you to, say, eschew contraception than if I weren’t commanding you to abstain from eating pork? Has anyone provided evidence to support this?
Oh dear, Tim. You’re really skating on thin ice here.
First of all, I don’t think, as you suggest, that I am missing the point of how moral prescriptions work. Saying “Murder is wrong” is different to saying “Embryos are pre-born, and thus have the status of full human persons.” One is a moral judgement. The other is an attempt to make a conceptual point about embryos, and one which we do not need to accept. “Murder is wrong” is in fact a tautology. “Killing is wrong” is not necessarily true, as we know from examples where killing is in fact demanded by the context. But the claim that embryos are full human persons and entitled to the protection due to adult human beings seems to me a nonsense proposition, despite the religious attempt to impose it by sheer force of repetition. Even Roman Catholic laypeople in many parts of the world do not support this, and for every good reason: because it is an infringement of the rights of women, and may do great harm. The church’s failure to observe this in some jurisdictions has led to great harm to many people. It should be condemned by all reasonable people. Just search “Pro-Life Nation” on the New York Times website, if you question this.
Besides common law has never upheld the point, and so has never considered abortion equivalent to murder. In some contemporary jurisdictions where the Roman Catholic Church has had overwhelming influence, the church has forced its conceptions on the law; but the result in every case has been to cause great harm to women, and even to girls, as in the case of the Brazilian 9 year old whose medical team were excommunicated as a result of their care for the girl. It is simply outrageous to suggest that the judgement that murder is wrong is in the same category at all, and that, for example, the woman in Phoenix should have been allowed to die instead of being aborted, because the foetus that was going to kill her was “pre-born.”
As to the question of getting people to submit to arbitrary regulations leading to greater control over them, while this is certainly open to empirical test, I do not think that, on the whole, the point can be questioned. Just think of the army, navy or air force. A lot of the training that makes a military company or crew function as one is precisely the imposition of authority over seemingly arbitrary things. Establishing unquestioned authority over minor things, is to establish authority over other aspects of a person’s behaviour. This seems to be worked out fairly well in Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority, and in the Nazi experience with the obedience of the Einzatzgruppen to commands that are simply not in the infantryman’s manual.
Eric, I think all (normally-developing) humans start out with an innate, incredibly naive sense of morality. Naive in the sense that our incredibly strong emotional reactions to certain stimuli lead us to conclude that certain things are “just wrong” and “must not be allowed,” even though these oughts have no objective truth. The killing of innocents is one of these. People of all ages, sexes, cultures, and even religions overwhelmingly respond, when asked, that killing innocents is morally wrong.
This innate feeling about what “must not be allowed” motivates us to enforce our preferences on others, both in our personal lives, and in the laws of the societies we create. The details vary over time and place, and many excuses have been made for treating other humans badly, but there is no doubt that we have some built-in moral preferences.
You say it’s outrageous to claim that the prescription against murder and the prescription against life-saving abortions are in the same category, but they are, in several important ways. In the minds of Catholic laity, both of these things are “just wrong.” Neither prescription has any objective truth, yet both compel us (if we believe in them) to enforce them.
Now, I would be wrong in this if, to a Catholic, murder was “just wrong,” whereas abortion was “wrong because it’s equivalent to murder (which is ‘just wrong’).” In that case, you could convince a Catholic that embryos were not equivalent to humans, and therefore that killing them was not murder.
But whatever the Catholic ends up believing – and this is the disagreement I have with your original statement – these moral beliefs are not a matter of “what’s true for me might not be true for you.” The entire point of moral prescriptions is that they are binding on all. So the statement that “embryos may be pre-born to you, but aren’t to me” would not, I think, hold any rhetorical force for anyone. One could just as easily say, as I did above, that “killing innocents may be wrong to you, but it isn’t to me.” Who can be satisfied with that?
As for our second point, I’ll take your examples into consideration.
Tim, you said:
No, no, that’s not what I said, or at least meant. It is outrageous to say that the proscription of murder is in the same category as the claim that the pre-born are persons in the full sense. This may lead to the conclusion that you suggest for me, but it is not the same thing. Before we can determine the wrongness of something, we need to be sure we are talking about the same things, and by simply declaring that the pre-born are persons in the full moral sense, the Roman Catholic Church is making the claim that we are. But the fact that the moral harm done by making that assumption is enough to show that we are not. The fact that moral prescriptions are binding on all is enough to guarantee that the Catholic point of view is a marginal one, and so it has been considered in common law and in most moral discourse.
As to the enforcement of morality, that is an entirely different question, and must remain so, since what is “immoral” for one group is not necessarily something that should be invested in law. The problem with the Roman Catholic position is that they have the presumption to think that its position should, simply by virtue of their claim to speak authoritatively for god. I don’t think we should give them any more recognition than the Kiwanis club, and its multiple failures to live up to their vaunted claims to moral superiority simply underlines this.