This and That

In the early 70s when I worked at Warren Gorham & Lamont, we used to send out literally millions of pieces of junk mail.  Most of them included a letter that would be addressed “Dear Sir.”  Since we were advertising to bankers, lawyers and real estate developers this seemed like the appropriate way to address a business letter.  Over the years there was at first a trickle and then a flood of letters complaining that this was a sexist form of address and that we should change our ways.  Because I’m a fairly stubborn person and because I couldn’t think of a good alternative, we simply ignored them.

In his book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins links his quest to break the conspiracy of silence about religious truth to the consciousness-raising efforts of early feminists.  He makes the point that we have an unwritten rule that we won’t criticise other peoples religious beliefs and that we won’t make a fuss about our own disbelief.  His book is, in part, an effort to get people who disbelieve in God to speak up in the same way that the early feminists were speaking out about the implicit assumptions  behind a phrase like “Dear Sir.”

My first reaction to Dawkins was perhaps similar to my first reaction to the letters complaining about “Dear Sir:”  What was the harm in letting people go their own way if they chose to believe in God?  I have found, however, that in the weeks since I read Dawkins’ book my consciousness has, indeed, been raised.  Now I notice the pervasive assumption in our society that everybody believes in God, and the almost total lack of discussion of the question.

One way to see the hypocrisy involved is to think about the following joke (not mine, and I’m not sure where I heard it):  George Bush is widely reported to have been influenced by his conversations with God; this raises no eyebrows.  Now suppose that he had claimed to have been talking to God on the telephone; that would surely raise a huge fuss.  But what what difference does the intervention of the telephone make?

The point here is that talking to God on the telephone is surely no less likely than talking to God directly (after all, Moses used a burning bush).  Yet the intervention of the telephone pierces the conspiracy of silence around religion and we see the absurdity.  So, I now find that my conciousness has indeed been raised and I suspect that I am more likely to speak out about my views than I was before.  Oh, and about those letters, we did eventually change them to read “Dear Reader.”