正文
Childhood, abuse and the escape from religion
上帝的错觉 第九章 童年，虐待和逃离宗教
There is in every village a torch - the teacher: and an extinguisher - the clergyman.
VICTOR HUGO
每一个村庄里，都有一把火炬：教师和一个终结者：牧师。
VICTOR HUGO
I begin with an anecdote of nineteenth-century Italy. I am not implying that anything like this awful story could happen today. But the attitudes of mind that it betrays are lamentably current, even though the practical details are not. This nineteenth-century
human tragedy sheds a pitiless light on present-day religious attitudes to children.
我从19世纪意大利的一件逸事讲起。我没有暗示这么恐怖的事情会发生在今天。悲哀地是，当今人们的思想依旧如昔，只不过使用的手段不同。19世纪的这场人间惨剧无情地揭示了当今宗教对儿童的态度。
In 1858 Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old child of Jewish parents living in Bologna, was legally seized by the papal police acting under orders from the Inquisition. Edgardo was forcibly dragged away from his weeping mother and distraught father to the Catechumens (house for the conversion of Jews and Muslims) in Rome, and thereafter brought up as a Roman Catholic. Aside from occasional brief visits under close priestly supervision, his parents never saw him again. The story is told by David I. Kertzer in his remarkable book, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.
1895年，意大利波罗尼亚的一个六岁孩子，Edgardo Mortara，和犹太父母生活在一起，由宗教裁判所受命，被教会警察合法抓捕，强行从哭泣的母亲和焦躁的父亲身边拖走，送到罗马的新学徒改造所。（那是专门用来强迫犹太人和穆斯林改变信仰的地方）。这以后，孩子被抚养成罗马天主教徒。除了在教士密切监视下的几次简短的探访，父母再也没有见过他。David I. Kertzer 在那本著名的《绑架Edgardo Mortara》中讲述了这个故事。
Edgardo\'s story was by no means unusual in Italy at the time, and the reason for these priestly abductions was always the same. In every case, the child had been secretly baptized at some earlier date, usually by a Catholic nursemaid, and the Inquisition later came to hear of the baptism. It was a central part of the Roman Catholic belief-system that, once a child had been baptized, however informally and clandestinely, that child was irrevocably transformed into a Christian. In their mental world, to allow a \'Christian child\' to stay with his Jewish parents was not an option, and they maintained this bizarre and cruel stance steadfastly, and with the utmost sincerity, in the face of worldwide outrage. That widespread outrage, by the way, was dismissed by the Catholic newspaper Civilta Cattolica as due to the international power of rich Jews - sounds familiar, doesn\'t it?
Edgardo的故事在当时的意大利决不是一个特例。而且神职人员绑架的理由是一样的。每一个例子中，孩子早先由天主教的保姆秘密受洗，然后宗教裁判所听到孩子受洗。罗马天主教信仰系统中的关键部分是，一旦孩子受洗，不管是非正式，或秘密地，孩子无可挽回地成为基督徒。在他们的精神世界，允许“天主教的孩子”和他们的犹太父母生活，是不可思议的。他们无比真挚地，即使面对全世界的愤怒，顽强地维护着这种古怪和残忍的立场。天主教的报纸Civilta Cattolica指出，这场大范围的暴行的取消，归咎于富裕的犹太人在国际上的影响。听起来非常熟悉，是不是？
Apart from the publicity it aroused, Edgardo Mortara\'s history was entirely typical of many others. He had once been looked after by Anna Morisi, an illiterate Catholic girl who was then fourteen. He fell ill and she panicked lest he might die. Brought up in a stupor of belief that a child who died unbaptized would suffer forever in hell, she asked advice from a Catholic neighbour who told her how to do a baptism. She went back into the house, threw some water from a bucket on little Edgardo\'s head and said, \'I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.\' And that was it. From that moment on, Edgardo was legally a Christian. When the priests of the Inquisition learned of the incident years later, they acted promptly and decisively, giving no thought to the sorrowful consequences of their action.
除了唤起了公众的注意，Edgardo Mortara 和许多人的遭遇没有什么不同。他曾经被一个14岁的，没有受过教育的天主教女孩Anna Morisi照看。那时，他病得如此严重，以至于保姆惊恐地认为他可能会死。从小被灌输愚昧的信仰，认为没有受洗的孩子死后将在地狱中永远煎熬，她询问天主教的邻居，得知如何施洗。回来后，她从桶中舀出一点水倒在小Edgardo的头上，说：“我奉圣子圣父圣灵之名为你施洗。”仅此而已。但从这一刻起，Edgardo成为合法的基督徒。多年以后，宗教裁判所的神甫偶尔得知此事，他们果断，迅速地采取了行动，丝毫不考虑随之而来的悲惨后果。
Amazingly for a rite that could have such monumental significance for a whole extended family, the Catholic Church allowed (and still allows) anybody to baptize anybody else. The baptizer doesn\'t have to be a priest. Neither the child, nor the parents, nor anybody else has to consent to the baptism. Nothing need be signed. Nothing need be officially witnessed. All that is necessary is a splash of water, a few words, a helpless child, and a superstitious and catechistically brainwashed babysitter. Actually, only the last of these is needed because, assuming the child is too young to be a witness, who is even to know? An American colleague who was brought up Catholic writes to me as follows: \'We used to baptize our dolls. I don\'t remember any of us baptizing our little Protestant friends but no doubt that has happened and happens today. We made little Catholics of our dolls, taking them to church, giving them Holy Communion etc. We were brainwashed to be good Catholic mothers early on.\'
惊异一个仪式就能给一个扩展的家庭带来如此深远的影响，天主教堂允许任何人主持洗礼，今天情况依旧，此人不必是神父。也不需要孩子，父母，或任何一个人同意。不需要签署任何文件。不需要有见证人。所需要的仅是洒点水，几句话，无助的孩子，和一个迷信，被教义洗脑的保姆。实际上，只有后者才是真正必要的，因为如果孩子太小，无法作证，还有谁能知道？一个以天主教方式抚养长大的美国同事写信给我， 说：“我们过去经常给布娃娃施洗。我记不清我们是否给属于新教的小朋友施洗。毫无疑问，这已经发生了，并且今天还在继续发生。我们将布娃娃变成天主教徒，带它们去教堂，一起领圣餐等等。很早，我们就被洗脑，要作一个很好的天主教母亲。”
If nineteenth-century girls were anything like my modern correspondent, it is surprising that cases like Edgardo Mortara\'s were not more common than they were. As it was, such stories were distressingly frequent in nineteenth-century Italy, which leaves one asking the obvious question. Why did the Jews of the Papal States employ Catholic servants at all, given the appalling risk that could flow from doing so? Why didn\'t they take good care to engage Jewish servants? The answer, yet again, has nothing to do with sense and everything to do with religion. The Jews needed servants whose religion didn\'t forbid them to work on the sabbath. A Jewish maid could indeed be relied upon not to baptize your child into a spiritual orphanage. But she couldn\'t light the fire or clean the house on a Saturday. This was why, of the Bolognese Jewish families at the time who could afford servants, most hired Catholics.
如果19世纪的女孩和今天的这位同事没有什么不同，一点也不奇怪Edgardo的遭遇如此普遍。即然类似的事情令人痛苦地经常发生在19世纪的意大利， 使人不由地要问一个显而易见的问题。既然要冒着如此恐怖的风险，在教皇教区里的犹太人为什么要雇用天主教徒作仆役呢？为什么他们不能更好地安排自己的生活，雇用犹太人呢？答案仍然和理智无关，牵扯的全是宗教。犹太人需要仆人不会因为他们信仰的宗教而被迫在安息日放弃工作。犹太女仆确实保证不会给你的孩子施洗，不会因此进入宗教孤儿院。但是星期六，她不能生火，不能清理房间。这就是为什么在波罗尼亚当时能雇得起仆人的犹太家庭，大部分都雇用天主教徒。
In this book, I have deliberately refrained from detailing the horrors of the Crusades, the conquistadores or the Spanish Inquisition. Cruel and evil people can be found in every century and of every persuasion. But this story of the Italian Inquisition and its attitude to children is particularly revealing of the religious mind, and the evils that arise specifically because it is religious. First is the remarkable perception by the religious mind that a sprinkle of water and a brief verbal incantation can totally change a child\'s life, taking precedence over parental consent, the child\'s own consent, the child\'s own happiness and psychological well-being . . . over everything that ordinary common sense and human feeling would see as important. Cardinal Antonelli spelled it out at the time in a letter to Lionel Rothschild, Britain\'s first Jewish Member of Parliament, who had written to protest about Edgardo\'s abduction. The cardinal replied that he was powerless to intervene, and added, \'Here it may be opportune to observe that, if the voice of nature is powerful, even more powerful are the sacred duties of religion.\' Yes, well, that just about says it all, doesn\'t it?
这本书中，我有意避免详细描述十字军的暴行和西班牙宗教裁判所那些在南美洲肆虐的征服者。残暴和邪恶的人在任一世纪和任一宗教中都可以看见。但是这个故事中意大利宗教裁判所的所作所为以及对儿童的态度，揭示了他们的宗教思想和由宗教激发的邪恶。首先，令人吃惊地是，在宗教的头脑中，确信几滴水，说一句咒语，就可以完完全全地改变一个孩子的生活，而不必考虑父母是否同意，不考虑孩子是否同意，不在意孩子的幸福，不在意孩子的心理健康等等， 这些仅凭基本常识和人类直觉就能感知是很重要的东西。当时，红衣主教Antonelli给英国的第一位犹太议员Lionel Rothschild的一封信中，清楚地阐述了这些。Lionel Rothschild曾经写信抗议绑架Edgardo的行为，而红衣主教回信说他无力去阻止，接着，他补充道“这也许是一个机会，让我们观察到，如果自然的力量是强大的，神圣的宗教义务就更胜一筹。”嗯，这就是他们的所有解释，难道不是吗？
Second is the extraordinary fact that the priests, cardinals and Pope seem genuinely not to have understood what a terrible thing they were doing to poor Edgardo Mortara. It passes all sensible understanding, but they sincerely believed they were doing him a good turn by taking him away from his parents and giving him a Christian upbringing. They felt a duty of protection! A Catholic newspaper in the United States defended the Pope\'s stance on the Mortara case, arguing that it was unthinkable that a Christian government \'could leave a Christian child to be brought up by a Jew\' and invoking the principle of religious liberty, \'the liberty of a child to be a Christian and not forced compulsorily to be a Jew . . . The Holy Father\'s protection of the child, in the face of all the ferocious fanaticism of infidelity and bigotry, is the grandest moral spectacle which the world has seen for ages.\' Has there ever been a more flagrant misdirection of words like \'forced\', \'compulsorily\', \'ferocious\', \'fanaticism\' and \'bigotry\'? Yet all the indications are that Catholic apologists, from the Pope down, sincerely believed that what they were doing was right: absolutely right morally, and right for the welfare of the child. Such is the power of (mainstream, \'moderate\') religion to warp judgement and pervert ordinary human decency. The newspaper Il Cattolico was frankly bewildered at the widespread failure to see what a magnanimous favour the Church had done Edgardo Mortara when it rescued him from his Jewish family:
第二个离奇的现象是神甫，红衣主教和教皇由衷地相信他们没有对可怜的Edgardo Mortara做任何可怕的事情。相反，超越了人类所有的理智，他们真心认为把孩子从父母身边抢走培养成基督徒，是给他一个好的起点。他们觉得自己有保护孩子的义务！美国的一份天主教报纸替教皇在Mortara事件上的立场辩护，争论到如果基督教组织听任犹太人抚养属于基督的孩子是不可思议的，并且呼吁宗教自由，“孩子可以自由地成为基督徒，而不必被暴力强制成为犹太人...面对各种各样的偏见和不信教的残酷狂热，圣父对这个孩子的保护，是有史以来最伟大的道德奇迹。” “暴力”，“强制”，“残酷”，“狂热”，“偏见”，你们见过有比这个更恶名昭著的误解吗？然而，所有迹象表明天主教护教者们，上至教皇，都真诚地相信他们做了正确的事：绝对的道德，对孩子的福利有益。这就是（主流，“非激进”）宗教的力量，扭曲了人的判断力，亵渎了人的尊严。报纸Il Cattolico 看到教会如此慷慨仁慈地将Edgardo Mortara 从他的犹太家庭中挽救出来，却导致了大规模的批评，不由地神志错乱了：
Whoever among us gives a little serious thought to the matter, compares the condition of a Jew - without a true Church, without a King, and without a country, dispersed and always a foreigner wherever he lives on the face of the earth, and moreover, infamous for the ugly stain with which the killers of Christ are marked . . . will immediately understand how great is this temporal advantage that the Pope is obtaining for the Mortara boy.
如果有人想稍微严肃地考虑这个问题，比较一下犹太人的处境—没有真正意义上的教堂，没有国王，没有国家，分散开来，不管住在地球上的任何地方，总是被当作外国人一样排挤，更重要的是，声名狼藉地背负着杀死基督的邪恶罪名. . .就会立即明白教皇给男孩Mortara 带来多么伟大的在世间的好处。
Third is the presumptuousness whereby religious people know, without evidence, that the faith of their birth is the one true faith, all others being aberrations or downright false. The above quotations give vivid examples of this attitude on the Christian side. It would be grossly unjust to equate the two sides in this case, but this is as good a place as any to note that the Mortaras could at a stroke have had Edgardo back, if only they had accepted the priests\' entreaties and agreed to be baptized themselves. Edgardo had been stolen in the first place because of a splash of water and a dozen meaningless words. Such is the fatuousness of the religiously indoctrinated mind, another pair of splashes is all it would have taken to reverse the process. To some of us, the parents\' refusal indicates wanton stubbornness. To others, their principled stand elevates them into the long list of martyrs for all religions down the ages.
第三就是狂妄自大。每一个宗教人士，不需要任何证据，确认他们出生时赋予的信仰是唯一正确的，其他的要么背离正道，要么百份之一百的谬误。上段的引用活灵活现地展示了基督徒的这种态度。如果认为当事双方是平等的，那就是带着有色的眼镜看待这件事。只有孩子们接受了神甫的恳求，同意给他们受洗，我们才有可能指出把孩子要回来，会给他们带来冲击。问题是Edgardo首先被几滴水和十来个无意义的字偷走。这就是被宗教灌输的脑袋的愚昧，另外几滴水就可以使这个过程逆转。我们中间有些人认为父母的反对显示了堕落和执拗。另一些人则认为他们对原则的坚持足以将他们列入自古以来所有宗教殉道者的长名单中。
\'Be of good comfort Master Ridley and play the man: we shall this day by God\'s grace light such a candle in England, as I trust shall never be put out.\' No doubt there are causes for which to die is noble. But how could the martyrs Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer let themselves be burned rather than forsake their Protestant Littleendianism in favour of Catholic Big-endianism - does it really matter all that much from which end you open a boiled egg? Such is the stubborn - or admirable, if that is your view - conviction of the religious mind, that the Mortaras could not bring themselves to seize the opportunity offered by the meaningless rite of baptism. Couldn\'t they cross their fingers, or whisper \'not\' under their breath while being baptized? No, they couldn\'t, because they had been brought up in a (moderate) religion, and therefore took the whole ridiculous charade seriously. As for me, I think only of poor little Edgardo - unwittingly born into a world dominated by the religious mind, hapless in the crossfire, all but orphaned in an act of well-meaning but, to a young child, shattering cruelty.
“Ridley主人，振作起来，像一个男子汉：今天，靠神的恩典，我们在英格兰点燃这样的蜡烛，我确信它永远不会熄灭。”无疑这是以献身为荣的那些人的原因。但是怎样才能使殉道者Ridley, Latimer和Cranmer宁愿被烧死而不放弃新教皈依天主教呢？难道从哪一头打开煮熟的鸡蛋如此重要吗？这是顽固不化的，或者从你的观点来说，令人敬佩的， 宗教头脑中的坚定信念。 Mortara们不可能自己抓住由无意义的洗礼所带来的机会。难道他们没有摆手，或施洗时小声说“不”。他们没有，因为在（非激进的）宗教的熏陶下，他们将整个荒谬的象征过程看到非常重要。对于我来说，我仅考虑可怜的小Edgardo—毫不知晓的诞生在宗教占统治地位的世界上，又不幸地处在火力交叉点上，经过充满好意的举动，对小孩子来说，是粉碎性的暴行， 几乎成为孤儿。
Fourth, to pursue the same theme, is the assumption that a six-year-old child can properly be said to have a religion at all, whether it is Jewish or Christian or anything else. To put it another way, the idea that baptizing an unknowing, uncomprehending child can change him from one religion to another at a stroke seems absurd - but it is surely not more absurd than labelling a tiny child as belonging to any particular religion in the first place. What mattered to Edgardo was not \'his\' religion (he was too young to possess thought-out religious opinions) but the love and care of his parents and family, and he was deprived of those by celibate priests whose grotesque cruelty was mitigated only by their crass insensitivity to normal human feelings - an insensitivity that comes all too easily to a mind hijacked by religious faith.
继续同一主题，第四点，假设认定6岁大的孩子就能够信仰某种宗教，不管是犹太教，基督教或其它的。换一种说法，给一无所知，尚不能理解的孩子施洗，就可以将他一下子从一种宗教改变到另一种宗教，这种想法太荒谬了，更荒谬的是将小小的孩子一开始就规定属于某一教派。对Edgardo真正重要的不是“他的”宗教，（因为他太小了还不能慎重考虑教义），而是父母和家庭的爱护和关心，这一切都被独身的教士们剥夺了。他们极度扭曲的暴行给对人类正常情感的全然冷漠稀释了—这种冷漠容易来自被宗教信仰绑架的思想。
Even without physical abduction, isn\'t it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about? Yet the practice persists to this day, almost entirely unquestioned. To question it is my main purpose in this chapter.
即使没有身体上的绑架，给太小还没有足够的心智考虑宗教的孩子规定一种宗教，难道不属于虐待儿童吗？现在，这种习俗依旧保留着，几乎没有人质疑。本章的主要目的就是要质疑这种做法。
上帝的错觉 第九章 童年，虐待和逃离宗教
There is in every village a torch - the teacher: and an extinguisher - the clergyman.
VICTOR HUGO
每一个村庄里，都有一把火炬：教师和一个终结者：牧师。
VICTOR HUGO
I begin with an anecdote of nineteenth-century Italy. I am not implying that anything like this awful story could happen today. But the attitudes of mind that it betrays are lamentably current, even though the practical details are not. This nineteenth-century
human tragedy sheds a pitiless light on present-day religious attitudes to children.
我从19世纪意大利的一件逸事讲起。我没有暗示这么恐怖的事情会发生在今天。悲哀地是，当今人们的思想依旧如昔，只不过使用的手段不同。19世纪的这场人间惨剧无情地揭示了当今宗教对儿童的态度。
In 1858 Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old child of Jewish parents living in Bologna, was legally seized by the papal police acting under orders from the Inquisition. Edgardo was forcibly dragged away from his weeping mother and distraught father to the Catechumens (house for the conversion of Jews and Muslims) in Rome, and thereafter brought up as a Roman Catholic. Aside from occasional brief visits under close priestly supervision, his parents never saw him again. The story is told by David I. Kertzer in his remarkable book, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.
1895年，意大利波罗尼亚的一个六岁孩子，Edgardo Mortara，和犹太父母生活在一起，由宗教裁判所受命，被教会警察合法抓捕，强行从哭泣的母亲和焦躁的父亲身边拖走，送到罗马的新学徒改造所。（那是专门用来强迫犹太人和穆斯林改变信仰的地方）。这以后，孩子被抚养成罗马天主教徒。除了在教士密切监视下的几次简短的探访，父母再也没有见过他。David I. Kertzer 在那本著名的《绑架Edgardo Mortara》中讲述了这个故事。
Edgardo\'s story was by no means unusual in Italy at the time, and the reason for these priestly abductions was always the same. In every case, the child had been secretly baptized at some earlier date, usually by a Catholic nursemaid, and the Inquisition later came to hear of the baptism. It was a central part of the Roman Catholic belief-system that, once a child had been baptized, however informally and clandestinely, that child was irrevocably transformed into a Christian. In their mental world, to allow a \'Christian child\' to stay with his Jewish parents was not an option, and they maintained this bizarre and cruel stance steadfastly, and with the utmost sincerity, in the face of worldwide outrage. That widespread outrage, by the way, was dismissed by the Catholic newspaper Civilta Cattolica as due to the international power of rich Jews - sounds familiar, doesn\'t it?
Edgardo的故事在当时的意大利决不是一个特例。而且神职人员绑架的理由是一样的。每一个例子中，孩子早先由天主教的保姆秘密受洗，然后宗教裁判所听到孩子受洗。罗马天主教信仰系统中的关键部分是，一旦孩子受洗，不管是非正式，或秘密地，孩子无可挽回地成为基督徒。在他们的精神世界，允许“天主教的孩子”和他们的犹太父母生活，是不可思议的。他们无比真挚地，即使面对全世界的愤怒，顽强地维护着这种古怪和残忍的立场。天主教的报纸Civilta Cattolica指出，这场大范围的暴行的取消，归咎于富裕的犹太人在国际上的影响。听起来非常熟悉，是不是？
Apart from the publicity it aroused, Edgardo Mortara\'s history was entirely typical of many others. He had once been looked after by Anna Morisi, an illiterate Catholic girl who was then fourteen. He fell ill and she panicked lest he might die. Brought up in a stupor of belief that a child who died unbaptized would suffer forever in hell, she asked advice from a Catholic neighbour who told her how to do a baptism. She went back into the house, threw some water from a bucket on little Edgardo\'s head and said, \'I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.\' And that was it. From that moment on, Edgardo was legally a Christian. When the priests of the Inquisition learned of the incident years later, they acted promptly and decisively, giving no thought to the sorrowful consequences of their action.
除了唤起了公众的注意，Edgardo Mortara 和许多人的遭遇没有什么不同。他曾经被一个14岁的，没有受过教育的天主教女孩Anna Morisi照看。那时，他病得如此严重，以至于保姆惊恐地认为他可能会死。从小被灌输愚昧的信仰，认为没有受洗的孩子死后将在地狱中永远煎熬，她询问天主教的邻居，得知如何施洗。回来后，她从桶中舀出一点水倒在小Edgardo的头上，说：“我奉圣子圣父圣灵之名为你施洗。”仅此而已。但从这一刻起，Edgardo成为合法的基督徒。多年以后，宗教裁判所的神甫偶尔得知此事，他们果断，迅速地采取了行动，丝毫不考虑随之而来的悲惨后果。
Amazingly for a rite that could have such monumental significance for a whole extended family, the Catholic Church allowed (and still allows) anybody to baptize anybody else. The baptizer doesn\'t have to be a priest. Neither the child, nor the parents, nor anybody else has to consent to the baptism. Nothing need be signed. Nothing need be officially witnessed. All that is necessary is a splash of water, a few words, a helpless child, and a superstitious and catechistically brainwashed babysitter. Actually, only the last of these is needed because, assuming the child is too young to be a witness, who is even to know? An American colleague who was brought up Catholic writes to me as follows: \'We used to baptize our dolls. I don\'t remember any of us baptizing our little Protestant friends but no doubt that has happened and happens today. We made little Catholics of our dolls, taking them to church, giving them Holy Communion etc. We were brainwashed to be good Catholic mothers early on.\'
惊异一个仪式就能给一个扩展的家庭带来如此深远的影响，天主教堂允许任何人主持洗礼，今天情况依旧，此人不必是神父。也不需要孩子，父母，或任何一个人同意。不需要签署任何文件。不需要有见证人。所需要的仅是洒点水，几句话，无助的孩子，和一个迷信，被教义洗脑的保姆。实际上，只有后者才是真正必要的，因为如果孩子太小，无法作证，还有谁能知道？一个以天主教方式抚养长大的美国同事写信给我， 说：“我们过去经常给布娃娃施洗。我记不清我们是否给属于新教的小朋友施洗。毫无疑问，这已经发生了，并且今天还在继续发生。我们将布娃娃变成天主教徒，带它们去教堂，一起领圣餐等等。很早，我们就被洗脑，要作一个很好的天主教母亲。”
If nineteenth-century girls were anything like my modern correspondent, it is surprising that cases like Edgardo Mortara\'s were not more common than they were. As it was, such stories were distressingly frequent in nineteenth-century Italy, which leaves one asking the obvious question. Why did the Jews of the Papal States employ Catholic servants at all, given the appalling risk that could flow from doing so? Why didn\'t they take good care to engage Jewish servants? The answer, yet again, has nothing to do with sense and everything to do with religion. The Jews needed servants whose religion didn\'t forbid them to work on the sabbath. A Jewish maid could indeed be relied upon not to baptize your child into a spiritual orphanage. But she couldn\'t light the fire or clean the house on a Saturday. This was why, of the Bolognese Jewish families at the time who could afford servants, most hired Catholics.
如果19世纪的女孩和今天的这位同事没有什么不同，一点也不奇怪Edgardo的遭遇如此普遍。即然类似的事情令人痛苦地经常发生在19世纪的意大利， 使人不由地要问一个显而易见的问题。既然要冒着如此恐怖的风险，在教皇教区里的犹太人为什么要雇用天主教徒作仆役呢？为什么他们不能更好地安排自己的生活，雇用犹太人呢？答案仍然和理智无关，牵扯的全是宗教。犹太人需要仆人不会因为他们信仰的宗教而被迫在安息日放弃工作。犹太女仆确实保证不会给你的孩子施洗，不会因此进入宗教孤儿院。但是星期六，她不能生火，不能清理房间。这就是为什么在波罗尼亚当时能雇得起仆人的犹太家庭，大部分都雇用天主教徒。
In this book, I have deliberately refrained from detailing the horrors of the Crusades, the conquistadores or the Spanish Inquisition. Cruel and evil people can be found in every century and of every persuasion. But this story of the Italian Inquisition and its attitude to children is particularly revealing of the religious mind, and the evils that arise specifically because it is religious. First is the remarkable perception by the religious mind that a sprinkle of water and a brief verbal incantation can totally change a child\'s life, taking precedence over parental consent, the child\'s own consent, the child\'s own happiness and psychological well-being . . . over everything that ordinary common sense and human feeling would see as important. Cardinal Antonelli spelled it out at the time in a letter to Lionel Rothschild, Britain\'s first Jewish Member of Parliament, who had written to protest about Edgardo\'s abduction. The cardinal replied that he was powerless to intervene, and added, \'Here it may be opportune to observe that, if the voice of nature is powerful, even more powerful are the sacred duties of religion.\' Yes, well, that just about says it all, doesn\'t it?
这本书中，我有意避免详细描述十字军的暴行和西班牙宗教裁判所那些在南美洲肆虐的征服者。残暴和邪恶的人在任一世纪和任一宗教中都可以看见。但是这个故事中意大利宗教裁判所的所作所为以及对儿童的态度，揭示了他们的宗教思想和由宗教激发的邪恶。首先，令人吃惊地是，在宗教的头脑中，确信几滴水，说一句咒语，就可以完完全全地改变一个孩子的生活，而不必考虑父母是否同意，不考虑孩子是否同意，不在意孩子的幸福，不在意孩子的心理健康等等， 这些仅凭基本常识和人类直觉就能感知是很重要的东西。当时，红衣主教Antonelli给英国的第一位犹太议员Lionel Rothschild的一封信中，清楚地阐述了这些。Lionel Rothschild曾经写信抗议绑架Edgardo的行为，而红衣主教回信说他无力去阻止，接着，他补充道“这也许是一个机会，让我们观察到，如果自然的力量是强大的，神圣的宗教义务就更胜一筹。”嗯，这就是他们的所有解释，难道不是吗？
Second is the extraordinary fact that the priests, cardinals and Pope seem genuinely not to have understood what a terrible thing they were doing to poor Edgardo Mortara. It passes all sensible understanding, but they sincerely believed they were doing him a good turn by taking him away from his parents and giving him a Christian upbringing. They felt a duty of protection! A Catholic newspaper in the United States defended the Pope\'s stance on the Mortara case, arguing that it was unthinkable that a Christian government \'could leave a Christian child to be brought up by a Jew\' and invoking the principle of religious liberty, \'the liberty of a child to be a Christian and not forced compulsorily to be a Jew . . . The Holy Father\'s protection of the child, in the face of all the ferocious fanaticism of infidelity and bigotry, is the grandest moral spectacle which the world has seen for ages.\' Has there ever been a more flagrant misdirection of words like \'forced\', \'compulsorily\', \'ferocious\', \'fanaticism\' and \'bigotry\'? Yet all the indications are that Catholic apologists, from the Pope down, sincerely believed that what they were doing was right: absolutely right morally, and right for the welfare of the child. Such is the power of (mainstream, \'moderate\') religion to warp judgement and pervert ordinary human decency. The newspaper Il Cattolico was frankly bewildered at the widespread failure to see what a magnanimous favour the Church had done Edgardo Mortara when it rescued him from his Jewish family:
第二个离奇的现象是神甫，红衣主教和教皇由衷地相信他们没有对可怜的Edgardo Mortara做任何可怕的事情。相反，超越了人类所有的理智，他们真心认为把孩子从父母身边抢走培养成基督徒，是给他一个好的起点。他们觉得自己有保护孩子的义务！美国的一份天主教报纸替教皇在Mortara事件上的立场辩护，争论到如果基督教组织听任犹太人抚养属于基督的孩子是不可思议的，并且呼吁宗教自由，“孩子可以自由地成为基督徒，而不必被暴力强制成为犹太人...面对各种各样的偏见和不信教的残酷狂热，圣父对这个孩子的保护，是有史以来最伟大的道德奇迹。” “暴力”，“强制”，“残酷”，“狂热”，“偏见”，你们见过有比这个更恶名昭著的误解吗？然而，所有迹象表明天主教护教者们，上至教皇，都真诚地相信他们做了正确的事：绝对的道德，对孩子的福利有益。这就是（主流，“非激进”）宗教的力量，扭曲了人的判断力，亵渎了人的尊严。报纸Il Cattolico 看到教会如此慷慨仁慈地将Edgardo Mortara 从他的犹太家庭中挽救出来，却导致了大规模的批评，不由地神志错乱了：
Whoever among us gives a little serious thought to the matter, compares the condition of a Jew - without a true Church, without a King, and without a country, dispersed and always a foreigner wherever he lives on the face of the earth, and moreover, infamous for the ugly stain with which the killers of Christ are marked . . . will immediately understand how great is this temporal advantage that the Pope is obtaining for the Mortara boy.
如果有人想稍微严肃地考虑这个问题，比较一下犹太人的处境—没有真正意义上的教堂，没有国王，没有国家，分散开来，不管住在地球上的任何地方，总是被当作外国人一样排挤，更重要的是，声名狼藉地背负着杀死基督的邪恶罪名. . .就会立即明白教皇给男孩Mortara 带来多么伟大的在世间的好处。
Third is the presumptuousness whereby religious people know, without evidence, that the faith of their birth is the one true faith, all others being aberrations or downright false. The above quotations give vivid examples of this attitude on the Christian side. It would be grossly unjust to equate the two sides in this case, but this is as good a place as any to note that the Mortaras could at a stroke have had Edgardo back, if only they had accepted the priests\' entreaties and agreed to be baptized themselves. Edgardo had been stolen in the first place because of a splash of water and a dozen meaningless words. Such is the fatuousness of the religiously indoctrinated mind, another pair of splashes is all it would have taken to reverse the process. To some of us, the parents\' refusal indicates wanton stubbornness. To others, their principled stand elevates them into the long list of martyrs for all religions down the ages.
第三就是狂妄自大。每一个宗教人士，不需要任何证据，确认他们出生时赋予的信仰是唯一正确的，其他的要么背离正道，要么百份之一百的谬误。上段的引用活灵活现地展示了基督徒的这种态度。如果认为当事双方是平等的，那就是带着有色的眼镜看待这件事。只有孩子们接受了神甫的恳求，同意给他们受洗，我们才有可能指出把孩子要回来，会给他们带来冲击。问题是Edgardo首先被几滴水和十来个无意义的字偷走。这就是被宗教灌输的脑袋的愚昧，另外几滴水就可以使这个过程逆转。我们中间有些人认为父母的反对显示了堕落和执拗。另一些人则认为他们对原则的坚持足以将他们列入自古以来所有宗教殉道者的长名单中。
\'Be of good comfort Master Ridley and play the man: we shall this day by God\'s grace light such a candle in England, as I trust shall never be put out.\' No doubt there are causes for which to die is noble. But how could the martyrs Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer let themselves be burned rather than forsake their Protestant Littleendianism in favour of Catholic Big-endianism - does it really matter all that much from which end you open a boiled egg? Such is the stubborn - or admirable, if that is your view - conviction of the religious mind, that the Mortaras could not bring themselves to seize the opportunity offered by the meaningless rite of baptism. Couldn\'t they cross their fingers, or whisper \'not\' under their breath while being baptized? No, they couldn\'t, because they had been brought up in a (moderate) religion, and therefore took the whole ridiculous charade seriously. As for me, I think only of poor little Edgardo - unwittingly born into a world dominated by the religious mind, hapless in the crossfire, all but orphaned in an act of well-meaning but, to a young child, shattering cruelty.
“Ridley主人，振作起来，像一个男子汉：今天，靠神的恩典，我们在英格兰点燃这样的蜡烛，我确信它永远不会熄灭。”无疑这是以献身为荣的那些人的原因。但是怎样才能使殉道者Ridley, Latimer和Cranmer宁愿被烧死而不放弃新教皈依天主教呢？难道从哪一头打开煮熟的鸡蛋如此重要吗？这是顽固不化的，或者从你的观点来说，令人敬佩的， 宗教头脑中的坚定信念。 Mortara们不可能自己抓住由无意义的洗礼所带来的机会。难道他们没有摆手，或施洗时小声说“不”。他们没有，因为在（非激进的）宗教的熏陶下，他们将整个荒谬的象征过程看到非常重要。对于我来说，我仅考虑可怜的小Edgardo—毫不知晓的诞生在宗教占统治地位的世界上，又不幸地处在火力交叉点上，经过充满好意的举动，对小孩子来说，是粉碎性的暴行， 几乎成为孤儿。
Fourth, to pursue the same theme, is the assumption that a six-year-old child can properly be said to have a religion at all, whether it is Jewish or Christian or anything else. To put it another way, the idea that baptizing an unknowing, uncomprehending child can change him from one religion to another at a stroke seems absurd - but it is surely not more absurd than labelling a tiny child as belonging to any particular religion in the first place. What mattered to Edgardo was not \'his\' religion (he was too young to possess thought-out religious opinions) but the love and care of his parents and family, and he was deprived of those by celibate priests whose grotesque cruelty was mitigated only by their crass insensitivity to normal human feelings - an insensitivity that comes all too easily to a mind hijacked by religious faith.
继续同一主题，第四点，假设认定6岁大的孩子就能够信仰某种宗教，不管是犹太教，基督教或其它的。换一种说法，给一无所知，尚不能理解的孩子施洗，就可以将他一下子从一种宗教改变到另一种宗教，这种想法太荒谬了，更荒谬的是将小小的孩子一开始就规定属于某一教派。对Edgardo真正重要的不是“他的”宗教，（因为他太小了还不能慎重考虑教义），而是父母和家庭的爱护和关心，这一切都被独身的教士们剥夺了。他们极度扭曲的暴行给对人类正常情感的全然冷漠稀释了—这种冷漠容易来自被宗教信仰绑架的思想。
Even without physical abduction, isn\'t it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about? Yet the practice persists to this day, almost entirely unquestioned. To question it is my main purpose in this chapter.
即使没有身体上的绑架，给太小还没有足够的心智考虑宗教的孩子规定一种宗教，难道不属于虐待儿童吗？现在，这种习俗依旧保留着，几乎没有人质疑。本章的主要目的就是要质疑这种做法。
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