CT Blue

This post was written on Christmas Eve, but I've delayed posting it, since even to me posting something anti-religious on Christmas seems a bit tacky. Or is it residual Catholic guilt? Anyway…

I came across this post at Pharyngula, in which we learn that our Christian brethren are far less likely to oppose torture than we secularists, atheists and agnostics. In fact, we are alone in being more likely to oppose torture than support it. This is hardly surprising, inasmuch as nowadays (and it has likely always been thus) religion is used as a way of justifying what we find convenient to do anyway. When racists needed a place to send their kids after their schools were integrated, the first thing they did was found religious schools in which it was an article of faith that the races should not mix, because apparently Jesus wanted it that way.

The torture issue is richly ironic, given that said Jesus, the man who they all claim to love and worship, was tortured and then executed in brutal fashion. I've read the New Testament several times, and I don't recall any hint that Jesus approved of the treatment he was getting. But from the point of view of today's Christians, maybe they just figure that if it was good enough for Jesus it ought to be good enough for those Arab ragheads.

Perhaps the difference in perspective is a result of differing takes on the role of reason in decision making. Non-religious types may, indeed do, use their noggins more than “faith based” people. That term, after all, is simply another way of saying that one is comfortable with being told what to think by people who, more often than not, have good reason to want one to think things they themselves know are untrue. Thinking people know that torture doesn't work. As the folks at Consortium News point out :

It has long been known that torture does not work. One can go back to the Age of Enlightenment. In 1764, Cesare Beccaria published his groundbreaking work, On Crimes and Punishments, in which he examined all the evidence available at that time and concluded that individuals under torture will tell their interrogators anything they want to hear, true or not, just to get the pain to stop. Beccaria’s book led to a temporary waning of the state-ordered torture.

It is hard to believe that you would need to examine any evidence at all to conclude that people being tortured will say what their torturers want to hear. I would, wouldn't you? Nonetheless, it apparently needed saying.

Of course this begs the larger question. Torture is wrong, pure and simple. Somehow, Christians have talked themselves into believing that the god of love doesn't agree.

Our sainted Founding Fathers, products of the Enlightenment all, even the slave owners among them, also had a thing about not torturing people. Great discussion here and I should add that George Washington strictly forbade the mistreatment of prisoners, despite the fact that it was well known that the British were treating their own prisoners horribly. You see, to a certain extent, despite the evident contradiction of slavery, they were ..ummm…“Enlightened”. Their political descendants, see, e.g., the entire Republican Party and a good share of the Democratic Party, can only be described as “benighted”.

So, add torture to the list of evils that the religious find compatible with the Christian creed. It joins racism, sexism and homophobia, just to name a few items on the list.