Dialogue: Spare us from the fervour that puts paid to reason

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

I used to joke ruefully that if I wanted hate mail, all I needed to do was take the Christians on. I remember receiving by mail a clipping of a column critical of the fundamentalist sects with my face struck out by many lines and an ominous "Your time will come!" scrawled in the margin.

That was only one of many violent aspersions mailed to me, always anonymously, by believers whose fervour obliterated any trace of irony.

But I can report that things are looking up. After a recent article suggesting we all put God on hold for a while, I received a spate of mail, almost all of it reasonable, only one adamantly hostile.

An Anglican clergyman still gives me applause or condemnation in a highly judgmental, patronising manner from time to time - letting me know when I'm being good and when bad - as though he were God's stand-in; but then I've often thought the priests of the Anglican Church (in which I was christened and confirmed) behave more as members of a gentlemen's club executive committee than clerics.

They don't seek the gift, Robert Burns-like, to see themselves as others see them but seek to see themselves as Anthony Trollope did.

Seriously, though, I don't want to patronise the mainstream, mature Christian churches, or Judaism or Islam, which have developed a formidable intellectual underpinning over the centuries; but the fundamentalists in any belief system, from Christianity, Islam, and Communism to the newly raucous libertarianism, are often dangerously ingenuous in the extreme.

You can tell by the way the loud arrogance of their argument outruns their reason.

The millions of American fundamentalist Christians may not be terrorists but they have the same celestial fate in mind for you and me as extreme Muslims do.

The New Yorker recently carried an article on the popularity in the US of Christian disaster movies. These videos appeal not to thousands but to millions, and most have an end-of-the-world tone from the Book of Revelation.

True believers are raptured up - leaving behind the clothes they were wearing in piles on the pavement or in their homes - before the Antichrist takes over his constituency (which seems to be the rest of us) and is defeated at Armageddon. Presumably the good guys arrive in heaven in the altogether, something their pastors would not tolerate down here.

In the fundamentalist film Apocalypse, made in 1998, only 187 million people are saved, spirited away to a heaven pretty well exclusive to Americans, it would seem.

But if these people are becoming less vituperative when their beliefs are questioned, the news is not so good for those who want to question the policies and practices of Israel, and the seemingly unconditional support they receive from the US.

If you want to draw out the hate these days, take a potshot at Israel.

One of my correspondents has made the vicious suggestion that I would regard acts of unbelievable barbarism and cruelty against Israel committed by Palestinians as "only against Jews, so in your book it probably doesn't count". Not many things offend me but that does.

These supporters of Israel - or the ones who write to me, anyhow - see things as black and white, goodies and baddies.

When I mentioned the United Nations resolutions to confine Israel's boundaries, the UN was dismissed as notoriously anti-Israel.

I asked: "If Israel has the right unilaterally to judge certain Palestinians as terrorists and then assassinate them, why shouldn't the Palestinians have the same right and assassinate Sharon?"

The extraordinary reply was: "I think even the Israeli left is pleasantly surprised at the moderation and restraint Sharon has shown as PM. If he were not so concerned about civilian Palestinian casualties he would have quelled the disturbances with much blood and brutality in the first week."

It's as though blood and brutality are a moral option.

My correspondent also suggests Sharon has a mandate for his actions because he is a democratically elected leader and Arafat is not, implying an elected leader must be morally correct. Perhaps she's never heard of the 90-plus percentage votes achieved by Hitler in plebiscites before the Second World War.

She quotes a cartoon in an Israeli newspaper showing bin Laden asking Arafat: "How come I get such bad press and you don't?"

And Arafat replies: "I make sure to only kill Jews." Thus, in the clutches of paranoia, she interprets an opinionated cartoon as a fact.

It would be unfair and delusory to blame the bin Laden terrorism on Israel and its American support alone, but dozens of commentators around the world have named it as a factor in the rampant anti-Americanism of so many Muslim countries.

And, as I said a few weeks ago, there is no doubt Israel, once widely admired, is losing the public relations battle. Obsessive ranting by New Zealand supporters won't change that.