For God's sake.

I just curled up on the couch with a bowl of minestrone soup and watched Grey's Anatomy, which this week featured an Amish teenager with cervical cancer caught between two cultures, and the rather melodramatic decisions she had to make. Then I flicked over to the ABC and caught the documentary version of Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion. Guess which treated divergences of belief with a modicum of sensitivity, and which exploited cultural and religious difference to make facile points about how 'modernity' and 'faith' are too incongrous to simultaneously exist?

Grrr. Dawkins make Jess angry! Jess smash! Seriously - it makes me depressed to think that there are people who consider this unutterably smug prick to be making any sort of significant constribution to debate. Amongst the things that are currently getting my blood pressure up: the condescension and disrespect he showed to anyone whose opinion diverged even slightly from his, which included cutting people off whenever they launched too deeply into real theology or showed any of the values - compassion, reason, a respect for equality - that he argued religion actively discouraged; the smarminess with which he curled his lip when he thought he was about to launch forth with a particularly stinging rebuttal (usually "Science is fact! Your worldview is stupid and wrong!"); the fact that he used "monotheistic" and "religious" seemingly interchangeably, completely ignoring the religious beliefs of most of the world's population, past and present; and the abuse he committed against the English language, terrorized as it was by hyperbole and poor simile.

Actually, all those things pale against the sins the man commits against logic. This man is not a scientist, or if he is, he's a very poor one. In what methodology do you possibly pick the most extreme examples and then extrapolate a theory around them as a mean? Use the most biased language possible in interviews, and cut people off before they have a chance to fully engage with the questions asked? Attack conservative religion for cherry-picking from the Bible, and then do exactly the same to paint God and the prophets as unredeemable thugs? It's a brutish, smarmy, poor excuse for "reasoned" argument, and I can't even go on about it because this sort of display of wilful ignorance and intolerance from a grown man, a professor no less, makes me throw up a little in my own mouth.

Also, I think I might have rants in my pants.

Recently, at a bar, a nice Irish boy asked me to explain my own existential position to him. (It's Secular Humanism, if anything - I deliberately avoid positioning myself as "atheist" or "agnostic" because both terms play into a dichotomy that organised religion sometimes perpetuates - that the only worldviews available are those comprehensive of or in opposition to religious faith. I tend to believe, quite strongly in fact, that it's possible to develop an ethical code outside of the dictums of the Church or outside of reaction to them.)

Anyway, he was intrigued by the fact that I don't believe in Jesus or the afterlife, and what he wanted to understand was how I got through the darker periods in my life without some belief in a higher existence. From this we launched into a long and drunken discussion of the merits of faith versus the reassurances of existentialist belief, and my point is that if two drunken undergraduates can tolerantly and respectfully find the holes in each others' beliefs and come up feeling enlightened and enriched (although that might have just been the beer), why oh WHY can't a PROFESSOR, no less, get off his damn high horse for a second and consider that an institution that has survived in one form or another since practically forever might have some evolutionary imperative of its own, and might actually serve a constructive purpose in people's lives if safeguards are effected to prevent the more dangerously evangelistic interpretations from gaining too much currency?

Okay, sorry, rant over. I promise. This Dawkins character is going to give me an ulcer, an affliction that the spunky doctors on Grey's Anatomy could easily cure. This is why commercial television is better than the ABC. Don't listen to your parents, kids. Channel 2 will make you angry and sad. This public service announcement was brought to you by the letter "Y".