Mockery is a vital tool against hate – but is it still OK?
Ihad an entertaining evening this week reading about a destination for which I am bound. This destination is a warm place called hell.
According to the biblical scholar Israel Folau, who is also wellknown as an Australian representative rugby union player, I can look forward to a long spell in hell due to meeting a number of his criteria.
Just to recap, Folau has been in hot water for posting a meme that read: ‘‘Warning Drunks Homosexuals Adulterers Liars Fornicators Thieves Atheists Idolaters, hell awaits you. Repent! Only Jesus saves.’’ He then added a Bible verse from Galatians.
If I was being honest, I would have to tick at least the atheist and drunk box, and my pencil would hover over the liar category as well.
That’s why I’m a little surprised only homosexuals seem to have been offended by Folau’s remarks. What about fornicators who, just to be clear, are unmarried people engaging in sexual intercourse?
As a Catholic educated by nuns wearing the same sort of headgear as strict Muslims, I grew up with concepts of hell and a sort of halfway-house Catholics call purgatory. In purgatory you suffer, but joyously, because you know someday the pain will end.
The bar to reach heaven always seemed impossibly high to me, so, as a sensitive, fearful boy, I lived with the prospect that hell’s fires would one day swallow me up.
We all have our own versions of hell, a place only too easy to conjure up in our imaginations. Religious texts are often at their richest and most affecting in their depictions of the place we are sent, not to repent, but only to suffer.
Catholic church father Cyprian of Carthage, who lived around AD250, described how those being ‘‘devoured by living flames’’ could never have any respite.
‘‘Souls along with their bodies will be preserved for suffering in unlimited agonies . . . The grief at punishment will then be without the fruit of repentance; weeping will be useless, and prayer ineffectual.’’
The Koran, which provides seven levels of hell for the various grades of sinners, depicts hell as a blazing fire where ‘‘the wretched inhabitants sigh and wail, their scorched skins constantly exchanged for new ones so that they can taste the torment anew’’.
By warning us about hell, Folau has, I believe, our best interests at heart. Jesus loves us, he preaches, and wants to save us from the awful fate that awaits us. He just wants us to know that his loving and merciful God has something very nasty in store for us as our reward for going our own way and rejecting the salvation offered.
In a way, Folau’s post comes at a particularly injudicious time, given the recent shootings in Christchurch that claimed the lives of 50 Muslims.
The question of whether Folau can remain a salaried Wallaby while using that platform to
pontificate has been decided by the Australian Rugby Board, although Folau is challenging his sacking.
But the question we need to address is whether Folau’s condemnation of gays, and fornicators and drunks for that matter, as morally suspect, should carry some sanction of the law.
Gay people have long struggled and suffered for the right to live in freedom, safety and dignity. Branding their sexual expression as morally wrong invites further restriction, persecution and a return to a less enlightened age.
In other words it’s getting pretty close to the sort of language that could be banned under tighter free speech laws.
The debate is a bit meaningless without examples, and Folau gives us one. I don’t think his right to express what he genuinely believes is a command from God should be curtailed, because dumb speech is best ignored or mocked.
Mocking is probably more effective, but it runs into a tricky area at a time when we are expected to respect the customs and beliefs of all.
Folau is not an outlier. His views and interpretations are very similar to those espoused by many other respectable faiths, including traditional Islam and Judaism. If we deride him for his views, we are also mocking a whole range of religious people who hold a similar stance.
American essayist and commentator H L Mencken is famous for saying that ‘‘one of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected . . . that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly’’.
So we now find ourselves in a situation where we must be careful to be respectful and inoffensive when a healthy dose of ridicule is just what is required, especially in Folau’s case.
We have some interesting times ahead of us as we negotiate our way through dealing with these issues. One of the most vexed questions will be just how far respect goes.
We now find ourselves in a situation where we must be careful to be respectful and inoffensive, when a healthy dose of ridicule is just what is required, especially in Folau’s case.