What is it about people who compulsively seek guidance from any external authority that makes them all such dicks?
Coming from Afghanistan: “In a massive blow for women’s rights, the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman’s right to leave the home.“
How much easier would it be to maintain the illusion of control over your life/wife if you could explain to her exactly why you’ve been raping her minimum four times a week? “I really wish I didn’t make your pussy dry as a field of poppies,” you could tell her. “And I totally want to devote the time to honoring your human dignity and all, but you’ve got to understand, I’ve got all these fucking quotas to meet around here! Literally! (hey-o!) So I’m sorry baby, but I can’t do nothing ’bout it! Your hands are tied!” This way, when she’s sponging off the son you have sired in the bathtub, she will not drown him in a moment of traumatized psychosis, having just recognized the face of her constant terror in his chubby blushing baby cheeks. Bureaucracy ain’t got no face, so cha-ching! Now you’ll definitely live on forever, at least in name, which is what counts, right? Right?
Right. I’m being glib. But if there’s one single thing I have learned in my time on this earth, it is that men who hate women, who need to exert force and control over them, are really only scared to (of) death. Conveniently, anyone who cherishes the ephemeral eternal over the unglamorous humane is the same. They are not unrelated. Maybe now is the time to extend my apologies to all of you very nice and empathic God-fearing folk.
I will not even bother to address any argument in the vein of, “LIKE, WHAT GIVES US THE RIGHT TO DECIDE THAT LEGALIZING CHILD BRIDES AND MARITAL RAPE IN ONE FELL SWOOP IS ACTUALLY A BAD THING?”, but I will tell you I have a really difficult time believing that anybody truly, deeply, madly believes. Faith is theatre, a mask for fear, even in the context of radical Islamo-fundamentalism, where some are willing to die for these beliefs; they will die so long as it means they will not die, they will die so long as it means they will have never had to live. By that I mean of course that living, if you are to ask me, means facing the enormity of possibility, pain and danger included.
Zizek had a memorable op-ed in the NYT a few years ago called, “How China Got Religion.“ It illuminates something about why Karzai et al. would help “rush the bill through parliament in a bid to appease Islamic fundamentalists ahead of elections” when it isn’t something he believes in himself. The op-ed (in true Slavoj form) deliberately provokes defensiveness from its audience by not bothering with a decisive conclusion, but instead issuing a challenge. He asks,
Perhaps we find [this all] so outrageous not because they are alien to our sensibility, but because they spill the secret of what we have done for so long: respectfully tolerating what we don’t take quite seriously, and trying to contain its political consequences through the law.
The truth is, none of this has ever been about God. Not the Crusades nor the Trade Center. The playing field has always been strictly relegated to the middle kingdom: religion is culture, and culture isn’t sacred. But maybe that is an answer to the argument I wouldn’t bother with; the audacity to declare “the truth” is in fact easily balanced with the understanding that empirically, no such singular thing exists. You only have to withstand the possibility of being wrong, and be willing to accept the consequences should that be the case (let’s save wrong against whom? for another time).
It’s not a gamble for a coward. But when you know something, when you know! it! Know it with your own two hands! Know it like you know the contours of your own face! Know it like you know continuing to allow government-endorsed violence against women is one of our deepest, most hideous shames! Those moments of impassioned belief do not come from a book. They come from the pit of your chest, and they should never be ignored or tampered down. They come from making God human, accountable, fragile. It is not the erasure of belief, because baby I believe. We’re only giving the holy ghost a little flesh.
One last pearl from Zizek: “the authentic Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks.”
