“Belief, a theory of meaning, a philosophical convenience, is rarely far away from cruelty. Torture, has always been attended by explanations that vindicate it, and justify it, and even hallow it. These explanations, which are really extenuations, have been articulated in religious and in secular terms. Their purpose is to redescribe an act of inhumanity so that it no longer offends, so that it comes to seem necessary, so that it edifies. My victim of torture is your martyr.”
So belief is a philosophical convenience (i.e., intellectual laziness?), usually close to cruelty, used to justify torture. Without getting into a treatise of what religious belief is about, it is clear that Wieselter has a low regard for it. As for his point on its relationship to torture, he himself says its justification is articulated in religious and in secular terms. So what is the point then? So people try to justify their actions (not just when it involves torture), and sometimes they use religious explanations, and sometimes they don’t. What else is new? This is like saying that some people kill with gardening tools, and some people don’t. It tells us nothing about the connection between belief and torture. Maybe there is a connection, but this great, arrogant mind has failed to point it out.
The most obnoxious line is “My victim of torture is your martyr.” This contains several implications, one of them being the coarse idea that who is a martyr is all relative. He later adds that “all the religious traditions” have an “ideal of holy suicide.” This is totally false. Nowhere in Jewish or Christian scriptures is there a call for suicide to gain God's favor, and Wieselter provides no evidence of any such formal doctrine by any established religious creed. All we have is his apparent desire to believe that believers are morally inferior to him. The Judeo-Christian tradition is a call to stand for what is right, and to value what is good, above one’s own life. That in self-sacrifice, there is a value to the soul that cannot be discerned through our ordinary senses on this earth. Within this belief, the anti-Darwinian choice to die so that others may live becomes perfectly rational. That Wieselter sees no difference between risking your life to save a drowning man, or indeed, to stop the torture of a man, and driving planes into buildings full of innocent
