Ophelia Benson has been discussing a wonderful paper, Religion and Respect (pdf) by Simon Blackburn. I don't have much to add, but I found the same parts of the paper extremely appealing—this is exactly how I feel about it all.

'Respect', of course is a tricky term. I may respect your gardening by just letting you get on with it. Or, I may respect it by admiring it and regarding it as a superior way to garden. The word seems to span a spectrum from simply not interfering, passing by on the other side, through admiration, right up to reverence and deference. This makes it uniquely well-placed for ideological purposes. People may start out by insisting on respect in the minimal sense, and in a generally liberal world they may not find it too difficult to obtain it. But then what we might call respect creep sets in, where the request for minimal toleration turns into a demand for more substantial respect, such as fellow-feeling, or esteem, and finally deference and reverence. In the limit, unless you let me take over your mind and your life, you are not showing proper respect for my religious or ideological convictions.

We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them. But once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational, we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it—not on account of their holding it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not that one. We would prefer them to change their minds. Or, if it is to our advantage that they have false beliefs, as in a game of poker, andwe am poised to profit from them, we may be wickedly pleased that they are taken in. But that is not a symptom of special substantial respect, but quite the reverse. It is one up to us, and one down to them.

"Respect" is such an awkwardly fluid word, as he says. For his first use of the term, in the sense of "letting you get on with it", I prefer to use the word "tolerate"; I'd rather reserve respect for those things I find admirable. It at least puts up a flimsy semantic barrier to block that odious respect creep. So, I tolerate religion, and think it's fine if people adopt dotty beliefs and confine their practice to home and church; I do not respect religion, and find no virtue in it.

As the Blackburn paper illustrates in its opening anecdote, though, showing a lack of respect for religion in the sense above is one of those things that drives the acutely religious nuts. It is not enough to let them be, you must also acknowledge the vast and weighty import of their history, their rituals, their majestic all-powerful Tooth Fairy. And since their god is infinitely malleable, they can attach him to anything to add his incalculable mass to whatever end they want. Little kids get told to say their prayers before bedtime—a meaningless ritual backed by the Lord of the Entire Universe. People are killed en masse in wars because they address same Lord by a different name or title than other people.

But equally perhaps 'God exists' functions largely as a license to demand respect creep. It turns up an amplifier, and what it amplifies is often the meanest and most miserable side of human nature. I want your land, and it enables me to throw bigger and better tantrums, ones that you just have to listen to, if I find myself saying that God wants me to want your land. A tribe wants to enforce the chastity of its women, and the words of the supernatural work to terrify them into compliance. We don't like our neighbours, and it works if we say that they are infidels or heretics. This is religion used to ventilate and to amplify emotions of fear, self-righteousness, vengefulness, bitterness, hatred and self-hatred. If this is how the religious language functions, we on the sidelines should not want people to be using it, and we should not use it ourselves.

We just go along with it all, accepting religious mythology as an implicit part of our culture, and now we're at the point where Wolf Blitzer can ask in all seriousness "if the recent natural disasters…were indication of END OF DAYS" on a major news network, and damn few question the insanity of the question. We can have a president nominate someone to the Supreme Court, and the apologists point to the fervency of her belief in Jesus as one of her qualifications.

"She is a deeply committed Christian," Dobson said. "She has been a believer in Jesus Christ since the late 1970s. I know the person who led her to the Lord. I know the church that she goes to. I know it's a very conservative church. I know that she is a tithe-paying member at that church. I know that she has deep convictions about things. I have talked at length to people that know her—and have known her for a long time. Some of them have been a close personal friend of hers for 25 years. I trust these people because I know them—I know who they are and I know their character and I know what they stand their heart for the Lord."

Try substituting "Hindu" for "Christian" and "Ganesh" for "Jesus" and rereading that if your own religiosity prevents you from seeing how deeply weird that stuff sounds to some of us. Why is uncritical devotion to the unseen and unevidenced considered a benefit for a secular position that requires scholarly analysis of evidence and history? (OK, I know the newest qualifications are for a fanatical adherence to an ideology in spite of the evidence, and in that case religiosity may indicate a predisposition to that…but I'm an idealist and would like to imagine that many people oppose such corruption of the court.)

Speaking of idealists, Jeanne has a good criticism of Hitchens (I am not a fan of Hitchens, but I am a fan of Jeanne—I guess I'm not as fanatical an adherent of atheism as I could be) that brings up a different Christian ideal.

But out here in the real world, most Christians practice their faith quietly, awkwardly, without display, never quite positive what they should do let alone what anyone else should do, without forcing their beliefs on anyone else, often without even mentioning their beliefs to anyone else, and can make no sense whatsoever of Hitchens' sense that somehow that is an unserious way to live a life of faith.

That's very nice. I'm not sure how true it is, though—after all, by definition the humble, modest Christians would not be flaunting their humility and modesty at me, so I wouldn't see it—but what I do see of the ordinary Christians in my little town are ostentatious billboards and letters to the paper condemning others for their sexual orientation and attempts to twist school curricula to fit their religious beliefs (in subtle ways so far—no overt anti-evolutionism, yet). On a larger scale, religious beliefs are an implicit prerequisite for political office everywhere. The Republicans in particular jump at every whisper from such exemplary Christians as James Dobson, and wear their flamboyant Christianity on their sleeves, while on the Democratic side, if Barack Obama were atheist, everyone would be dismissing his obvious talents and sending him back to do committee work in Chicago.

I'm sure the uncertain and sincere Christians exist, and in principle I can appreciate their virtues, but the operational reality of what we see from Christianity in America is arrogance, exclusion, intolerance, and lunacy. What may well start out as an honest humility like Jeanne describes is subject to Blackburn's "respect creep" and the God-amplifier effect, and what we actually get is monstrous and unchristian, using Christianity's own ideals of their faith.