Dialogue: No fury quite like the fury of the righteous believer

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

As the letters and e-mails have poured in lately in response to my columns about God and about Israel, I have reflected on the way in which people transfer their own rancour to those who attack their ideas.

It reminds me of the time not long ago when I was arguing with a politician. The MP yelled, "Stop shouting at me!"

"I'm not shouting, you are," I said quietly. "Well, you're making me," was the reply.

In the same way, I've been accused by vituperative correspondents of bitterness and hate when I accommodate neither, have expressed neither and have simply challenged the conventional belief systems so many people seem to lean on to avoid the drudgery of thinking for themselves.

I have, of course, no right whatever to suggest that people shouldn't believe in a god - or in the devil, for that matter - but I have the same right that I support for everyone else to question beliefs, religious and political, and the impact they may have on society. That impact might be beneficial and I would be deluded if I didn't understand that the Judeo-Christian tradition has been the main influence in making me who I am.

But believers too often take upon themselves the certainty of their own righteousness, and in their fervour want to quell anyone who doesn't agree with them. For example, is not holy war the great oxymoron of our time? Well, history underlines that this is certainly not a concept confined to fundamentalist Muslims.

Another contradiction that occurs to me from time to time is that most of the great religions accept that vanity or pride is the basis of all sin, which I tend to agree with insofar as I believe in the concept of sin.

Yet they insist that a creator of this whole, seemingly infinite universe is obsessed with the minutiae of human behaviour in a tiny corner of it, and demands our absolute subservience. That seems to me the ultimate vanity of man.

Questioning conventional religious beliefs is a long humanist tradition. The other day I was reading Montaigne, the 16th-century French essayist, and came across: "Man is quite insane. He cannot create a maggot and he creates gods by the dozen." (A new worry is scientists may soon be able to create a maggot and assume the role of gods.)

Voltaire and Thomas Paine are among thousands of writers and thinkers, both extraordinary and ordinary, who have called the Christian Church to account in the great cause of humanism.

Those who have written to me and claimed that Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin, scourges of the 20th century, were humanists are confusing humanism with megalomania, an affliction historically as common among the clergy as the laity. Atheists they may have been but humanists, no.

It's worth remembering that if it hadn't been for humanism - much of it on the edge of the Christian Church - that great liberation of the Western world, the Renaissance, would not have occurred.

On the other subject that drew heavy fire - criticism of Israel and its US-supported policy in the Middle East - one correspondent wrote: "To see, at my stage in life, the same kind of journalism appear in our New Zealand papers as appeared in the German press in the 1930s is devastating to me."

I am accused of being the most rabidly anti-Semitic columnist in New Zealand.

Of course, criticism of Israel Government policy is no more anti-Semitic than criticism of Iranian Government policy is anti-Muslim. I can't tie two such issues together in my mind. When I was angrily critical of NZ's mad-headed policy towards apartheid in 1981, was I anti-New Zealander?

Normally I would find such an accusation from a Jewish correspondent disturbing but because the writer is a survivor of the Holocaust I have nothing but the deepest, humblest compassion for what must be enduring pain. It is important, though, to remember that the Nazis would not have allowed me to publicly dissent from the lethal insanity of their beliefs.

Last, but not least laughable, the Rev Gerald Hadlow wrote to the Herald that I "am infinitely capable of erudite articles that sometimes inspire and inform; at other times he can fall badly short. He has never reacted to congratulation and praise, which leads me to think that he possibly regards that as only just and due, while responding to any criticism with churlish contempt".

I must admit that this sort of patronising blah, this humbug from the pulpit with its uncharitable presumption that he knows about me what he cannot possibly know brings out the worst in me; so every now and then when he says something especially judgmental and supercilious to me by e-mail, I give him a swift return of service.

And this seems to bring out the unprofessional worst in him.