Eunice Kim

The Peer Advocates’ Clothesline Project, which just happened last week, occurs once a year in Amherst College. The Clothesline Project raises awareness about violence against women and enables them to share testimonies about their traumatic pasts - this involves the women expressing their emotions by decorating a shirt and hanging it up on a clothesline for all to see. The passersby read the content on the shirts and it is almost inevitable that they become affected. They are overwhelmed by the gravity of the emotional damage that has been done on these women, they are inspired by the strength of the women who are willing to share their pain, or, lastly, they are depressed and/or disgusted. Whatever the effect, awareness is achieved in a most effective manner.

It would be safe to say that a significant part of the three-day event is geared towards heterosexual men. Concerning the clothesline display specifically, men can be positively affected in infinite ways - they learn to take seriously just how harmful sexual disrespect can be. They are prompted to take action and figure out ways to prevent sexual violence. Or, the most crude response of looking at it would be - they are less likely to rape a woman. So we can say the effect on men is largely positive, but what of that on women? Women should feel inspired and empowered by other women speaking out about their ordeals without shame. That is about the only good way a woman passing by Valentine Quad could be affected. The T-shirts bedecked with glittery letters spelling phrases such as “you pushed your dick into me” and “when you shoved your dick down my throat” - inspires women to face the objects of their torments with all the bitterness of their hearts. How empowering.

But, is that a good thing? Here’s another way to describe that same effect - old scars are reopened, painful pasts that have been overcome are reminded of once again, and the unpleasant details needlessly begin flooding into one’s mind. All of these reactions occur in the woman passerby who, out of curiosity, reads the contents of the shirts that are hung in the quad. But a reassuring email is sent to everyone who may feel this way - the display, though meant for healing, may only trigger painful memories, so those who wish to avoid the display may enter through a separate door when going to Val. But as a former victim of sexual abuse, I was far from charmed by the notion of having to go through a separate door to avoid something that was, literally, impossible to miss.

But of course my response towards this is purely subjective - whether or not anyone else felt this way is a risk I’m willing to take. The display is indeed disturbing - not only in my eyes but in the eyes of other colleagues (both male and female) who were never victims of sexual abuse as far as I know. But nevertheless, I hope to see the shirts put up again in Valentine Quad again next year because this method of raising awareness about violence towards women is very efficacious, well-intended, and has a healing effect on both the creators and viewers of the clotheslines. But there’s always another, darker side to raising awareness, especially when it is done in a very up-front manner such as this. There are those who will be reminded of what they wish to forget simply because the majority opinion decrees that forgetting is a way of running from life’s problems, and there are those who will be encouraged to hate the source of one’s troubles because it is okay to hate and to “let it out.” The Clothesline Project is not, in itself, harmful - but there is no doubt that the content, and the thoughts they evoke, are.

I walk out of the movie theatre with a couple of friends after watching “Religulous,” Bill Maher’s latest and most inflammatory documentary. “That was absolutely hilarious,” I tell them. My friend turns and looks at me, slightly surprised. “Really? I thought you’d be offended,” she says. And then I realize how offended I was supposed to be. Here I am, a very devout Protestant who has just been bombarded with an hour and forty minutes of one of the world’s most incisive satirists calling the entire moral basis of my life a farce of the most ridiculous sort, and yet I wasn’t offended? Indeed, I had been holding my sides with laughter as Bill Maher asked Christian U.S. Senator Mark Pryor how a politician could possibly believe in something as absurd as the Bible. “You don’t have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate,” Pryor responds. And yet as the movie ended and Maher dealt his coup de grace with the scalding phrase, “Religion must die for mankind to live,” my amusement turned into a slight nausea, and upon much thinking, I realized that this film had given me a sense of foreboding.

Sigmund Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents mainly because he was, well, scared to death. His book delineates the suppression of man’s drive to destroy and how mass aggression will occur once the reins of brotherly love (the principle of “love thy neighbor as yourself”) are removed. Ten years later, these reins were indeed losing their hold within the minds of the most powerful men in all of Europe - Freud was predicting the Holocaust long before it occurred. And this is important: that God was not a part of Hitler’s motives for annihilating the Jewish people - seemingly harmless words like “purity” and “progress” were.

Bill Maher asks for the death of religion in the world, and nothing less. Like many Americans, he cannot bear to live in a world so full of religious war and the shedding of innocent blood because of religious intolerance. Using the simplest logic possible, we could conclude that the death of religion is the birth of atheism. In Maher’s logic, people will no longer kill in the name of God, because there will be no God to kill for.

But it is not that simple. He calls religion a fairytale that is “dangerous” and “detrimental to the progress of society” and he ridicules religious people for suffering from “neurological disorders.” This leads me to wonder - do all the liberal and open-minded individuals who cheer at these statements - do they realize that they are encouraging an intolerance that is about as heinous as racism? If Maher plans to do away with religion, he is also planning (albeit unsuspectingly) to do away with religious people - human beings. If this is not yet clear to those of us who receive the benefits of education and middle-class comfort, there are people in various corners of the world who are the victims of the grossest injustices - the orphans, the slaves, the homeless - the list is endless. Naturally, they place their beliefs in God so that if they lose everything they have, they could at least keep their sanity. Therefore, referring to their religious beliefs as something absurd is equivalent to calling their hopes absurd. “Religulous” pushes the dagger even further into the wounds of the world’s most unfortunate people - that is, if we admit to ourselves that humanity consists of more than the “civilized” world. It’s enough to call these people unreasonable. Must we also take away their beliefs? Am I the only one who detects the hidden sadism in all of this?

But let’s suppose that the panacea of doubt manages to overcome dogma and thus all religious wars come to an end (by either killing and/or miraculously de-converting the religious, your choice). All of humanity is enlightened with the beacon of reason, and there is less war in general. And then we must hang onto the feeble hope that man, with his inherent knowledge of good and evil, will find a way to keep his destructive instincts at bay without utilizing the priceless instrument we call the guilty conscience - after all, that was what religion used for the last couple thousand years. What are our other options? After all, rational thinking isn’t something we all possess or are capable of gaining. Physical force? Surveillance? Doublethink? “Following your heart”? Do these sound like viable options? So what will change?  Will things even be better in our rational utopia?

Removing religion is removing a significant part of human culture, conscience, and idealism. We must put aside Maher’s eurocentric ideals of “progress” and “enlightenment,” and be a bit more open-minded for a change. Americans must escape the cage of the phony reason championed by Maher and realize that religion is not inherently destructive; it is only a sham excuse to destroy and to maim the innocent - it is also the only hope for millions of people all over the world. Believing in the impossible, like reasonable thinking, is a gift with which humanity has been endowed and must use in moderation. If we devote ourselves to faith only, we will become bigots. If we devote ourselves to doubt only, we will believe in nothing but the fact of our own existence. If we equate religion with ignorance and set apart the religious as a class of humans mentally inferior to the rest (which “Religulous” so obviously tries to convey), then what are we if not prejudiced? So we must be moderate and respect the beliefs of people around the world - beliefs that are truly harmless, like karma or immaculate conception. This does not mean we have to tolerate certain religious trends that go against our principles, such as terrorism, homophobia, or self-flagellation - what is meant is that we shouldn’t condemn the entire concept of religion as a whole simply because of the crimes of its followers. There is no sense in doing so.

After some thought, calling Bill Maher, as humorous and charming as he is, a close-minded individual, would be the furthest thing from a paradox.

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