Monthly Archives: August 2011

Holiness is a Dangerous Illusion

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The stories about child sex abuse in Ireland keep coming in. It’s a bit like water torture, drip, drip, drip, day after day new revelations of abuse, coverups, new ways of excusing the failures of the church, of blaming the victim, society, the relativist culture, the highly sexualised media, the 60s (!), anything at all so that the people who are truly responsible don’t have to examine themselves and their own religious culture, don’t have to try, at least, to discern the part that celibacy (in the case of the Roman Catholic Church), or just the forms of religion itself play in reducing “other people” — in this case kids, but others are reduced in the same way – to objects that can be exploited and used for illicit pleasure, profit or power. There’s another report about to be made public, from County Donegal in Ireland, which is expected to say that the Garda (the police) were complicit in the cover up, and that not only priests, but lay people, participated in using the kids for their own purposes and pleasure.

And, at the heart of all this? Well, take a look at this:

Ordination -- the making of a deacon

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Has it never occurred to Tony Blair that his church might just be wrong?

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In a BBC profile of the Philippines, where the government has been battling communist insurgents for decades, and where well over 100,000 people have died in the struggle with the mostly Muslim inhabitants who are seeking to create an independent Islamic state in the large southern island of Mindanao, the concluding two paragraphs read as follows:

The Philippines has the highest birth rate in Asia, and forecasters say the population could double within three decades.

Governments generally avoid taking strong measures to curb the birth rate for fear of antagonising the Catholic Church, which opposes artificial methods of contraception.

Yet Tony Blair (one time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, now religious huckster), in an Op Ed in today’s Guardian, “Faith and Globalisation in the Philippines  Hidden Civil War“, suggests that his Foundation (The Tony Blair Faith Foundation*) is going to help the people of the Philippines come together in mutual understanding. What is needed, he thinks — and he announces, in today’s Op Ed, that what is needed in this country, which is still waging the second oldest civil war in the world (or “tragic dispute”, as Blair calls it), after the Sudan, is “faith-based programmes that promote peaceful coexistence.”

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Michele Bachmann keeps good company

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Start with a video clip of Michelle Bachmann’s cringemaking speech where she claims that the recent earthquake in Virginia, so close to Washington, was an act of God, a warning to politicians to sit up and take note. And, of course, don’t forget the hurricane — now, if only that had been named Michele!

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Now cut to the past, 10th December 1944. President Roosevelt is writing to his ally, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain. The Wedemeyer mentioned in the text is General Albert Coady Wedemeyer, Chief of Staff to Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia, and subsequently, in October 1944, Chief of Staff to Generalissimo Chiag Kai-Shek. President Roosevelt wrote:

From the long-range point of view, other than the measures Wedemeyer is now taking, we can do very little to prepare China to conduct a worth-while defence, but Japan is suffering lossses in men and ships and materials in the Pacific area that are many times greater than ours., and they too cannot keep this up. Even the Almighty is helping. This magnificent earthquake and tidal wave [tsunami] is a proof. [Triumph and Tragedy, 271-72, my italics]

The earthquake in question — the Tōnankai earthquake – is one that struck southern Japan in the Wakayama Prefecture and the Tokai region on 7th December 1944. There were, in all, 1223 casualties. Not given the gift of prophetic foresight, President Roosevelt could not know that the Almighty had other things in store. Just six days later the Germans made their last desperate bid for success on the Western Front, and attacked in great strength through the Ardennes (Belgium) in a battle now known as the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans drove a salient deep into territory held by American forces, coming within a few miles of the Meuse river. Although a strategic reverse, the fighting quality of the American troops ensured that it would not remain so, and Rundstedt, the German commander, lost far more in manpower and equipment than he gained in military advantage. There were, roughly, 100,000 casualties on both sides in the Battle of the Bulge. While fierce fighting was still to follow, Hitler had, by his bold gamble, fatally weakened the forces available for the defence of the Reich. What message from God, I wonder, would Michele Bachmann have seen in these events? Bachmann’s managers are now trying to weasel out of this faux pas; couldn’t they just say, “Well, that’s what Roosevelt thought”? But it does show just how far we’ve come.

‘New Atheists’ Emerge From 9/11

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Kimberly Winston (since HuffPo didn't)

The title of this post is the title of an article over at HuffPo today [well, you can see it today, but it was published on 26 August 2011]. It can also be seen at Religious News Service. Although one who does not look for conspiracy theories everywhere, I wondered why Ms Winston’s picture was not put at the head of her article, or her curriculum vitae displayed, since HuffPo regularly includes them. So I went searching around for Kimberly, and unlike the Snark, she did not softly and suddenly vanish away. She even has a special corner at amazon.com, where you can look up her books. She’s written three: Fabric of Faith: A Guide to the Prayer Quilt Ministry, Bead One, Pray Too: A Guide to Making and Using Prayer Beads, and Faith Beyond Faith Healing: Finding Hope After Shattered Dreams. Now, this came as a bit of a surprise, since the Masthead of Religious News Service says: “The only secular news and photo service devoted to unbiased coverage of religion and ethics” — as you will see if you click on the link above. And here is her editorialteam picture and cv at RNS. You’ll have to scroll way down in order to find Ms. Winston.

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An important step towards legalised assisted dying in England

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Martin Green: Give patients ‘choice’ over when they die

Terminally ill patients who want to commit suicide should be able to receive   medical help to die, a government adviser on care for the elderly has said.

By , Social Affairs Editor

9:45PM BST 28 Aug 2011

Martin Green, a dementia expert for the Department of Health, said patients   who were too frail to take their own lives were being denied “choice” and   “autonomy” because assisted suicide is illegal in the UK.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, he urged ministers to review the law   and suggested that a referendum or a free vote in Parliament should be   called to settle policy on the issue.

“If you’re going to give people ‘choice’, it should extend to whether or not   they want to die,” he said. “If people have got the capacity to make an   informed choice then it is my view that they should be allowed to make the informed choice.”

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An interesting quotation from Don Cupitt’s “The Old Creed and the New” and a few Sunday evening thoughts

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… religious thought is also and equally out of place in faculties of theology. Theology faculties have for the last century or two been dedicated to the pursuit of technically proficient literary scholarship and the critical-historical method. In them people write bookish books about theology, but not books of theology. Scholarly detachment and rigour demand that one must distance oneself from any serious personal engagement with the subject, and indeed many highly academic theologians are nowadays conspicuously non-religious types. Real religious thought is visceral, troubled and often disruptive, and academics regard it with great distaste. There may be a few persons of that type of the syllabus (Pascal and Kierkegaard, Unamuno and Simone Weil), but there certainly should not be any persons of that type on the faculty. … Dead and existing only in writing, some of them are fine; but alive, they are a nuisance.

There is a further complication: the ideas about religious thought that I am trying to present will as usual be regarded as highly offensive and deserving of contempt, by many senior figures. The reason is that the authorities of any great institution invariably regard themselves and the orthodoxy that they defend as the perfection of rationality and wisdom. This was amusingly demonstrated when at the end of the year 2004, a number of senior figures in the Vatican issued statements denouncing Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code. One cardinal was even appointed to refute it. This popular work was enjoying extraordinary worldwide sales at the time, even though the fanciful theory it put forward, about a lineage of descendents of the union of Jesus with Mary of Magdala, was only a rehash of a similar book that had appeared twenty years earlier, called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. One might have thought that the main thesis was too silly to deserve comment, but the Cardinals’ statement expressed something like outrage. How could it be that for millions of people the absurdities of Dan Brown’s conspiracy theory were more interesting and attractive than the faith of the Church? And one saw that the Church authorities were utterly sure of the immensely superior rationality and intellectual weight of their own position.

Suddenly, the Cardinals were funny. They really had no idea that as an interpretation of the available evidence in the New Testament and in early Christian history, orthodox Roman Catholic doctrine — with St. Peter as, of course, ‘the first Pope’ — is if anything rather less rational than Dan Brown’s theory. ‘Less rational’, because Dan Brown is at least in a broad sense naturalistic; and ‘less rational’, of course, by strict and independent philosophical and critical-historical standards. Theoretically speaking, Dan Brown’s theory, though silly, could be true; whereas the Roman Catholic faith cannot be true, because it is supernaturalist, and there is no supernatural world. What was funny was that Dan Brown’s comically bad book almost inadvertently exposed the gulf between a great institution’s solid conviction of its own intellectual weight and of the justice of its claims, and their actual hollowness and absurdity. So vast is the great institution’s self-belief that it has been quite unable to digest anything of the critical theological scholarship of the last two hundred years. [pp. 61-62]

And remember folks, you heard it here first. Don Cupitt is, if the word means anything at all, a theologian, or, at least, a religious thinker.

I’m going to put this response to a comment up here, because what I said above is too terse, and doesn’t explain what I mean, and why I think Cupitt may be important. Of course, you may disagree, but here is what I was thinking when I quoted this passage from Cupitt, and ended with my very short comment. This is an answer to Gordon Willis’s question (comment #3 below), and I guess, if it comes to that, a response to Egbert’s concerns about the credibility of secularism:

Be fair, Eric. Cupitt was a theologian. It’s been a long time since he stopped being a believer, but like a lot of people he can’t just discard all that meant so much. It happens. Life’s like that.

Yes, Gordon, that’s true. And, I guess, that’s what I was trying to say in a terse way (unusually terse for me). It’s supposed to be, in a measure, but only partly, ironical. For if Cupitt is a theologian, or a religious writer — and he does make a stab at a kind of non-theistic “Buddhism” — see his Emptiness and Brightness — then, in a sense, anyone can be a believer.

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No Quarter

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I am going to raise one of my comments into a post, because, on rereading it, it seems to me to be a manifesto of sorts. It was in response to someone who was (I think) suggesting that the new atheists should cool it a bit, and live and let live. I do not mean, by putting these remarks here, to chastise the person concerned. There does seem to be a bit of intransigence in the new atheism that is deprecated by many people, and this results in the kinds of accusation that people like James Woods, Jeremy Stangroom, and so many others fling at us. For some reason it has seemed appropriate to many of them to berate the new atheism – in what can only be called the most strident and often plainly abusive terms – for any number of faults, chief amongst which, perhaps, is the notion that the new atheism is stridently simplistic, and because, being simpletons about religion, unentitled to their stridency. Well, if the new atheism is simple-minded in the way suggested, it is so for a very good reason: namely, that most religion just is simple-minded, and because it is simple-minded, dangerous.

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Here We Go Again!

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The new atheists seem to have hit a nerve. But it’s not like hitting your thumb with a hammer. When you do that, before long the pain dissipates, and, though sore, you can go on with whatever it was you were trying to hit with the hammer. Being hit by the new atheism isn’t like that. It produces a weeping sore that never heals, something like the wounds that phosphorous weapons make. Once they’ve been hit by the new atheism, the pain just won’t go away. In fact, it’s hard to find a newspaper nowadays that doesn’t have someone telling the new atheists what they are doing wrong. The new atheists – my, oh, my! – misunderstand religion, they don’t recognise that religion is so much more subtle than they imagine it, that, in fact, some religious people don’t have a clue as to what it is that they really do believe. And besides, all that shrillness and stridency! Will it never cease?! If people are that worried, the new atheists must be doing something right. There has been a continuing outpouring of complaint about the new atheism for well over five years, and almost every one of them begins by saying something like: “I agree with their conclusions, …. but.”

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Work in progress — natural law morality

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Lobster Dories at Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia -- for Rick!

This will be only a short post, a promissory note, as it were. I have been working, lately, on trying to understand the natural law morality of the Catholic church, as it is explained by people like Edward Feser, in his book The Last Superstition, or as it is put in David S. Oderberg’s essay, “The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Law” (a paper in which Feser is thanked for his contribution and advice), which you can download in pdf format from Oderberg’s homepage. I am reading Feser and Oderberg at the same time that I read Derek Parfit’s magnum opus, On What Matters – a book of two volumes which, in thoroughness and detail of argument, reminds one of Aquinas.

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I have said it all along … Jesus was a man, like any other

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I have been saying this for years. I’m not sure when it began, but I think it was one day, when I was giving my homily — I never said that I was “preaching” a “sermon” — one Sunday morning, sometime in the early to mid 90s, and I caught myself saying the standard Christian thing about the Pharisees, and how they were just — and this is how Christians have been taught to think about them –  going through the motions of faith, as it were, in a rule-governed, implacable way, and I thought: “No, this is simply not true. Jesus is more like a Pharisee than he is like, say, a prophet like Isaiah or Amos.” Jesus was, quite simply a man, and, in some ways, not a particularly admirable man either. And you know, once you’ve said that, there’s no going back to the gentle Jesus, meek and mild.

Keith Ward, in his book, Ethics and Christianity, in the first chapter, entitled, tellingly, “The Case Against Theistic Morality,” has this to say about Jesus:

If one grants the existence of God and the unique status of Jesus in relation to him, these characteristics of his reported life [e.g., arrogance and intolerance] become quite natural and appropriate; but to those who reject such suppositions and seek only an example of a perfectly moral but completely ordinary human being, Jesus would seem to be one of the last men on earth to qualify as an ideal. [28]

In fact, I read those words shortly after being brought up short in the middle of my homily, and from then on it became more and more difficult to square the ”facts” about Jesus — if anything recorded about him can be taken as reliable historical fact — with the Christian claim that Jesus was, somehow, an exemplary human being. David Jenkins, onetime Bishop of Durham, spoke of Jesus in the title of one of his books as The Glory of Man, but once you’ve accepted that Jesus was, after all is said and done,  just a man, this is not only hyperbole, it is unacceptable and invidious.

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