Blog 9: Heading for the fall

In blog 9, Sardar moves on to 2:30-39. You may or may not know that the Islamic version of Adam and Eve is slightly different from the Jewish and Christian one. For a start, Eve isn't named. Secondly, the Islamic version is actually a branch of quantum physics.

For otherwise, why would Sardar say this?

First God informs the angels he intends to add a new order to creation. So what are angels? They too are part of creation, they praise God and act in total obedience. We know the angel Gibreel (Gabriel) was the intermediary who brought God's word to Muhammad. Beyond that I have no knowledge of angelic hosts and am quite content; although others may know better. If I can accept the need for the quarks and gluons of quantum theory and the string theory universe of umpteen dimensions, I can happily live with the concept of angels.

He seems to be saying that even though the idea of angels is a bit weird, it's no weirder than quantum physics. Unfortunately, the main objection to angels isn't their weirdness, it's the total lack of any evidence for them. Of course, to the religious mind that's hardly a barrier. Instead, concepts are rated according to their subjective qualities. The idea of angels feels weird, quantum physics feels weird, therefore they must be equivalent somehow.

I'll tell you what really is weird. The idea that God created the entire universe, then waited twelve billion years, made a man on the previously mentioned small planet orbiting a star stuck on the far end of a spiral arm of an entirely unremarkable galaxy and then made the angels bow down to him. That's weird. And not weird like quantum physics, so much as weird like human sacrifice or the divine right of kings. The weirdness being that it's surprising to see people still discussing it seriously.

Or is it just another of those slippery metaphors? Not that it says so in the text, which presents it as a straightforward factual narrative, but perhaps it's metaphor because it just is, same as all the bits which are true because they just are.

Sardar avoids any clear judgement on the historical truth of the story, referring to it at different times as symbolic, allegorical and an incident, and instead moves on to the fall. To save your time, it's made up entirely of the kind of statements that regular readers of religious guff on the Internet might refer to as The Kind of Thing They Say. I would just point out that Adam and Satan's great crime, the central crime of the story, didn't actually hurt anybody. Worth reminding people of that when they talk about the ethical basis of religion.

He rounds off with an attempt to reclaim the narrative for feminism, and indeed there is none of the oppressive misogyny of the Genesis version. This is because Adam's wife hardly appears. It's not her the angels are being asked to bow down to though, but Adam, so the patriarchy appears intact after all.

The Qur'an rounds this section off with its favourite subject as well. Yes folks, it's the traditional Islamic human pyre. But those who reject Faith and belie Our Signs, they shall be companions of the Fire; they shall abide therein, it says, charmingly. Once more, despite Sardar's regular protestations that punishment is for evil people, not Hindus or atheists, the threat is explicitly aimed at the faithless.

Bunting, meanwhile, has her own comment. She points out how confusing the text is, with its ambiguous use of pronouns, and asks if it's a problem with translation. If it is that it's that everywhere. I've checked out five different translations (grippping, that was), and it's confused in all of them. If I didn't know it was the perfect word of God, I'd say it was just bad writing. Or writing by committee. How did they put the thing together? Oh yeah.

Not that confusing her is hard. A few weeks ago she seemed to find the first few verses of the Qur'an quite baffling, then recently she had this exchange with Richard Dawkins, in a recorded Guardian debate. Commenting on her liberal interpretation of Catholicism, Dawkins asked her I take it you don't believe in the virgin birth?, to which she replied well, we'll get into very complex territory, because I'm not sure what belief is. Let me put it simply for you Madeleine. Let's assume we all agree that first century Palestine existed. Let's forget the debate about whether there was or wasn't a historical Jesus, and assume that there was. You remember his mother, Mary. Did she or didn't she get pregnant in the usual way? Honestly, it's not rocket science.

What a triumph for human progress, though. After the Spanish Inquisition, after the shackling of Parisian philosophers in the thirteenth century, after the Crusades and the Teutonic Knights, the irresistible march of science reduces one Catholic to I'm not sure what belief is. I'm no longer young, and I've not got much chance of very heaven, but frankly in this long-awaited dawn it's bliss just to be alive.