Giving God the credit

O.K! This is an unashamedly trivial post on a trivial point about the way many genuinely decent religious believers betray their (often unconscious) double standards when it comes to the influence of God in their lives.
I caught an episode of the I.T.V game show Tipping Point in which contestants win money by answering multiple choice questions for tokens which are then played in a giant “Penny Falls” machine. Each token that falls out of the machine being worth £50.
The game is played in two rounds; the first where contestants compete to gain the highest amount of money, and a second jackpot round where the winner plays for a £10,000 token. Overall the game is a good combination of skill, strategy, general knowledge and dumb luck.
On the show I watched one contestant was introduced as a lay preacher and he quite convincingly won the first round. The host congratulated him on getting through to the jackpot round to which the contestant responded that he must have benefited from some “divine intervention”, pointing heavenwards as he did so.
I thought at the time that he was holding something of a hostage to fortune as there was no guarantee that his luck would hold out for the rest of the show and I wondered how he would explain that if it happened, given that he had publicly credited God with his success so far. I must also confess to the rather uncharitable hope that his game would indeed fall apart so that my curiosity could be satisfied.
Well, as things turned out his jackpot round was disastrous; he failed to answer most of his questions (including one in the religion category, ironically) and the tokens he did win refused to fall in his favour in the machine so that although he came out of the game with a reasonable cash prize the £10,000 jackpot eluded him
So what was his reaction? It was priceless: “I guess my brain and luck deserted me,” he said. Well of course it had, but where was his divine intervention? Had God deserted him at the final moment, or decided he had won enough? Maybe Yahweh was narked at being casually associated with the earlier success or just possibly some other god’s noodly appendages were upon him. But that is not really the point of this.
You can of course do a lot of theological hand waving about what a putative god’s role in all this would be for a true believer participating in a game show, but the telling point is this lay preaching contestant’s response: God is credited a hand in his successes but failure is down to random forces and personal inadequacy, which is an all too typical example of the cognitive dissonance of theists generally.
I even doubt whether this was a conscious distinction on the contestant’s part and whether he even connected his two statements at the time (although if he watched the show back I would hope it would strike him the same way it did me) because to exercise rational thought about “divine intervention” exposes believers to awkward questions that sophisticated theologians have conspicuously failed to answer (to anyone’s satisfaction but their own) for millennia.

Not just culture: It's religion!

It is a fact of the world that there exists a diversity in cultural practices surrounding all sorts of human behaviour; from how food is prepared and shared, to dress styles and rites of passage and one of the pleasures of travelling, either in reality or vicariously via television documentaries is being exposed to this diversity. It is also true that, in the main, such diversity adds colour and richness to the world and for that reason alone is worth preserving, at least as long as the people practicing it want things that way.
However, not all cultural practices are so benign that they can be experienced or enjoyed with total equanimity.

I’ve been following Chinese chef Ken Hom’s Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure the latest episode of which saw him in Yunnan province, Southwest China sampling the food of the ”minorities”. In particular Ken and his co-traveller Ching-He Huang were attending a celebratory meal with the local Hui Muslims. This Chinese minority group follow the same dietary laws as Muslims the world over and appear to share their misogyny and patriarchal pretensions too.
Ching’s reaction to be being shuffled off to a separate party with the rest of the women was at first one of mild but obvious surprise and offence, but then in the voice over, she excuses it as “their culture”, and no further reference to the implied status of the women is made, either within the context of the meal, or in the direct to camera portions of the program.
Immediately prior to this Ken and Ching were witness to the Halal slaughter of a goat, to be roasted for the meal. In this ritual preparation of food the animal is blessed in the name of Allah, its jugular slit and so bled to death. Now, I am aware that the jury is still out on whether this is a more or less humane way to slaughter meat animals than the western preference for stunning first with a captive bolt. The scientific evidence is conflicted at best. However the program managed to gloss over the controversial aspects, mainly by making the process appear much quicker than it is and not showing the reflexive struggle that the dying animal always displays when killed this way.
When Ching comments to their host that in her culture the blood (which is Haraam according to Islam) would be soaked up with rice and eaten, she was responded to with a terse “No!”
Of course people can choose what they are prepared to eat, but the finality of their hosts reaction brooked of no further conversation on even the possibility that other culinary options existed.
The reason the program doesn’t question these cultural attitudes is because, well, it’s not just cultural: Its religious. Almost any other quirk of indigenous or local behaviour could be politely commented on and compared and contrasted with what obtained elsewhere in the world. One could even imagine having a civilised debate about which if any of such practices were ‘better’ however that was defined. But once culture and religion become conflated conversation stops and even comment is seen as inappropriate.
It’s bad enough when this stops us criticising sexual segregation, or debating the merits of animal rights. But religion provides cover for the most egregious of cultural practices and discrimination from denying women’s rights to education or franchise, to genital mutilation, forced marriage, violent exorcism of ‘possessed children’ and stonings.
In twenty-first century Britain we should not let program makers get away with portraying discrimination as quaint and culturally relative without at least passing comment on whether this should be appropriate to any culture anywhere today. And we should not be shy of exposing the role religion plays in perpetuating such violations of basic human rights.