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
and a priest:
Ordination -- the making of a priest
And they do this in other traditions too:
Ordination of a Buddhist Monk
Each of these pictures shows the ordination, that is, the ordering, of men to the role of holy man. Of course, some traditions now — only a very few – admit women into holy orders as well. The sacred is that which is set apart, set aside from mundane or profane use (which is why names for holy things can be used as swear words, as in French “Calice” (chalice), ‘Tabernacle!” (tabernacle: where the consecrated bread and wine is placed)). I can remember when the sanctuary of an Anglican church was considered holy ground (and when I even regretted that it was losing its sacred power). Women (and it was mostly women) who cared for the altar and its precincts had to cover their heads and wear coverings on their shoes and wear gloves to handle “holy” things. Roman Catholic altars are made altars by the insertion of the “altar stone” which contains (or is supposed to contain) the relic of a saint, memories of the early days of Christianity when worship was carried out at a martyr’s tomb, that is, on “holy” ground. Cemeteries are, in consequence, “consecrated”, set apart for holy use, and only the baptised are to be buried therein. Infants who died unbaptised were often buried just beyond the bounds of the cemetery, in unconsecrated ground (with what effects on their mothers it does not take a vivid imagination to divine); suicides were not permitted to be buried in holy ground, for they had committed an unpardonable sin. They had despaired, and in their despair, by killing themselves, had put themselves beyond God’s mercy, since they had not left time to repent and be saved.
But in the heightened reverence for holy things and persons, things and persons which had been set aside for holiness, there lay (and, indeed, still lies, even in our more secular world) an inherent danger. For persons who are set aside for holiness become, simply by virtue of the act of setting aside, larger than life, and, indeed, set apart from life, so that they are no longer regarded, as they may have been moments before, as merely human and fallible. Instead, they are looked upon — since they, in a sense, stand in, especially in Christian contexts, in worship as in life, for the transcendent in our midst — as elevated above the normal human plane, and therefore as less liable to human failings and peccadilloes. So, it is imagined, in the Roman Catholic Church, just by choice and ritual acts, one man is set above all the rest, as already sanctified and even — it is hard to say this without a sneer — infallible, in certain contexts, in matters of faith and morals.
During my years as a priest I was asked, on two occasions, to deliver a homily at an ordination, one for the ordination of a deacon, and one for the ordination of several priests. At the latter I tried to express, in such a way as to cause no offence, that what we were trying to do was impossible, that is, actually to separate someone from the crowd and make them holy, that we could not do it, because there is no way to separate a human being by means of ritual acts and make them different from all the rest, but that the most we might do is to indicate, by the attempt to do what we were attempting to do, the vocation of all Christians to be holy. I don’t think many people took from my words what I was trying to say, and now it seems to me that the very idea of a vocation to holiness, of separating oneself from humanity as a symbol of the end and purpose for which we were created, is itself, not only an impossible task, but itself an act of hubris fraught with great danger.
The idea that anyone is called and chosen, separated from the nations for a special vocation, is a particularly egregious failure of humanity. The failure of human beings, though a very general one, is exacerbated by the idea of holiness, and this has become particularly evident in the recent troubles through which the Roman Catholic Church has been passing. Of course, we all try to preserve our reputations. Even when we have done despicable things most people will reflexively defend themselves, although there is often something to be gained, when you are caught in the act, from admitting publicly that you are but a human being, and given to failure just as others are. But when you are part of a complex structure of holiness (of “set-apartness”), upon which your own mystique, power and credibility rests, then the defence of that structure becomes of overriding importance. This it is that separates the whole institution from the mean and grubby cesspool in which the rest of humanity is sunk, and to lose it is to lose, not only reputation, but the very mystique and power of the sacred itself.
If you go into a Catholic, an Anglican or an Orthodox church, you will often see that the very architecture and furnishings themselves reflect a hierarchy of holiness, and entering the church is, you might say, a ritual turning from the world towards that holiness. Churches are entered, very often, through the back door, which is, of course, the main door. You enter, very often, into a space filled with filtered light (from stained glass), and the light itself bespeaks the holiness of the space into which you enter, leaving the bright natural light behind — the brightness of which is thought, in itself, to be an illusion. And then you move, through a large area of ordinary space, where the faithful gather, towards the closed (usually East) end of the church, by stages — past the choir, perhaps, or the open crossing, if the church is cruciform — and then, often, through a screen, which may be, as in many Orthodox churches, a solid wall of sacred pictures (icons), or in other churches, a rood screen (though many Anglican churches have lost the rood, or cross), into the space where the sacred mysteries are performed.
Rood Screen
Iconostasis
Each step of the way takes you further from the profane towards the sacred, from the unhallowed, vulgar wickedness of the unredeemed world into the sainted holiness of the forecourt of heaven, often dim with mystery. And that is where the person, separated by the ritual of ordination stands, and performs the sacred mysteries – in persona Christi, as Anne Widdecombe so archly said in the Intelligence Squared debate with Fry and Hitchens – rehearsing the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, and recreating the holy sacrifice, whether in symbol or in very reality (as some believe), by which the holy are redeemed and made a holy people. And the hands of the priest, who handles such holy things, which, as in the Hebrew myth, have the power to kill, are anointed, and themselves turned to sacred uses, and become, in the act of consecration itself, the hands of Jesus, holy with their wounds.
To protect this sacred rite, made even more holy by antiquity, so that holiness clings to it like a shroud, the holy will do almost anything. A short reflection on the lengths to which bishops and archbishops, popes and cardinals have already gone in order to protect the church’s mystery of holiness, by covering up abuses, and even passing priests along to other parishes where they have gone on to abuse again, is enough to show this. They thought that by covering it up they could preserve the illusion of holiness, but all that they have done is to reveal holiness for what, in truth, it really is: a very elaborate illusion.
But it is more than just illusion. It is a danger to humanity, because it is founded on the myth that somewhere, in another place and at another time, there really was a man who had risen above the plane of the human and partook in genuine holiness. Whether in the Buddha’s enlightenment, the apotheosis of Jesus, the appearance of Gabriel to Mohammed, or the golden scrolls of Joseph Smith — they are all the same — we are asked to see the imagined more than human – that is, the holiness – of which we are all supposed to be capable. But, as Christopher Hitchens has reminded us, we are, each and every one of us, only a few evolutionary steps away from the ancestors of chimps and gorillas. We are animals, clever animals to be sure, but no more capable of real holiness, real transcendence than the dogs and cats we patronise. And the idea that we are so capable has provided a cover story for cruelty and inhumanity from the first glimmerings of experiences we now think of as religious until today. It is far more important to be human than to try to be holy. That doesn’t mean that there will be no atrocities, no inhumanity to other humans; but we won’t be able to conceal the truth by telling stories, and imagining there was a time when in first century Palestine, seventh century Arabia, or nineteenth century America, there were men who walked just slightly above the surface of the earth, and that these men conveyed similar powers to their successors.
Eric,
Thanks for this post; it says a lot that I have been trying to find words for for the last few years. I have had conversations about the abuse of children with Catholic family, and they all want to say that the abuse has nothing to do with the church as a moral body because of course the abuse does not flow from the moral teaching of the church. I had always wanted to say that the coverup was a directly result of a conflict of doctrine between morality on one hand and ecclesiastic hierarchy on the other, and that to the extent that there was doctrine about how to handle these kinds of problems within the church, hierarchy was winning. But you’re right — it isn’t just hierarchy per se, but the beliefs about the authority used to justify the hierarchies in the first place that are the problem. One is tempted to ask, given faith that the holy spirit is the steward of the church that has preserved and cultivated orthodoxy through the centuries, how the holy spirit could have let this happen in the first place.
I’m also reminded of this post by Fred Clark from June about conscience, torture, and hell, and what is meant by holiness in that context:
http://www.patheos.com/community/slacktivist/2011/06/22/quench-not-the-spirit/
Wow.
You really do need to write a book. This is stellar stuff.
Orwellian. Propaganda is the new journalism.
Today, my local newspaper published an op-ed by Rich Lowry claiming Rick Perry’s opposition to evolution is not anti-science. Perry just wants to restore god to creation – a god stolen by Richard Dawkins no less. Evolution robs the holiness from humanity
and global warming robs the oil companies of profits.Not only anti-science, Perry and Bachmann are also anti-history – claiming the US was founded on Christianity and the slave-holding founding fathers were really anti-slavery. Did you know that Africans actually volunteered to work for free just because the US was such a great place and the founding fathers were such great guys. History robs the holiness from the founding fathers and America.
One needs a god behind this stuff to justify the amount of evil perpetuated.
Thank you Kevin. That’s humbling.
Another Matt. Glad to oblige. Like all conspiracies it not obvious, and most people are chary of conspiracy theories — rightly of course. But the conspiracy of the holy (the righteous and the hypocritical) is of such ancient and noble lineage that I don’t think we need to worry about being classed with the global warming denialists, the creationists, or the JFK was assassinated by Cubans set. Holiness is a well-known cover for shysters and con men, and it really is a con, though there are many who are involved in it who do not think of it that way, and are, to be honest, good, honest people trying to make the world better. But holiness really is, I think, an illusion, and, as I think, a dangerous one to boot.
Michael (did you mean ‘perpetrated’ in that last sentence?). I worked as a priest in Bermuda for three years. When I first went to the church in Bailey’s Bay you could draw a line across the church almost in half. Behind that line sat all the black folks, in front of it all the white. The white folks didn’t much like receiving communion after the black folks (so I was told). But I said people could sit anywhere they liked, and that I didn’t like seeing the obvious segregation in the church. And with that, black folks began to sit where they wanted. One wealthy white woman phoned and said she would like to speak with me — “but not at my home,” she said, “I’ll meet you in the churchyard.” — so I went down to speak with her. What she had to say was basically something like this. “It’s not like you think, you know.” “Oh, how so?” “Well, you know, there was never really slavery here in Bermuda.” “The history says different,” said I. “Oh, no, the history is wrong. Oh, sure, they were slaves, but they weren’t treated as slaves. They were happy working for their owners. They were more like hired servants.” To which I said “Pshaw!” of course. But it shows the mind set of the truly blind. They see only what they want to see. Of course, we are all like that to an extent, but the lack of self-criticism of the very rich and the very conservative is almost total. What I can’t understand is why the American poor stand for it. Why should they be taxed and the rich run away with the millions? This I have never been able to understand. Do they really think they are going to join the ranks of the rich? And if they do, do they really think that taxation is theft (as Sam Harris seems to think)? (I admire Sam, and I agree with him that taxation is a necessity if the bills are to be paid, but why theft? Don’t we owe something to society for making our ordered lives possible? And shouldn’t we be expected to pay? That the society that they belong to did nothing at all to make their wealth possible?) By the way, the point I was making is that it takes more than just a god behind all of this. It takes the illusion that we ourselves can, to however limited an extent, be as the gods, be holy, set apart. Then, of course, we act and speak like gods.
As the excellent article and comments suggest, people aren’t all that interested in truth are they? All that is important in their minds is that they are on the side of right. That is why any justification is used to shrug off the idea that the culture they so love is in fact filled with lies, corruption or evil.
Right is a peculiar thing–since we all think we’re right, no matter what we do. Christians use the excuse of sin, or Satan, or redemption to justify their bad actions. If they did something wrong, then they only need to go confess and their sense of right returns again. Born again Christians simply shrug off their entire past in order to feel right, and when they do something wrong again, it’s only a weakness or lapse in an otherwise righteous life.
Atheists (the non-religious rational type) don’t have those mechanisms of denial for wrong actions, and so when they do something wrong, it’s a matter of pride or shame. They have to wrestle with it, and face it.
That is why I think religion is evil, because it is so corrupting. You can lie righteously if you’re religious, you can do evil and still be right in your mind. It keeps you in a child like state, because you don’t have any responsibility or any sense of facing your own actions, you can simply shrug away all the wrong and bad things you do.
And religious people go on about how can you possibly be moral and an atheist? Well it’s the other way around dear! How can you be moral AND religious?
Eric – I probably did as I was thinking about the word in my mind. I even looked it up to make sure where I was going – and I guess I was taken by the evil continuing in perpetuity.
Steve Fuller has claimed this is why evolution can’t be true or, if it is true, it shouldn’t be promoted. He believes it was only the sheer arrogance of the West in thinking we could understand and control the world – as God does and epitomized by Newton – that led to modern science. Science cannot survive unless we believe we can become like God through our study of the natural world. No god, no science.
Well, Steve Fuller is full of you-know-what! What an idiot that man is! Did he not notice that it is only by accepting human limitations that science can even begin to lift off?! Did he not notice that anyone who presumes to speak for God — and they are not a few! — is implicitly claiming godlike status? He’s really thick, as his appearance at Dover proved. He has no more idea how to think than a donkey! I really despise that man’s little little brain! An interesting sidelight on this is that the same publisher than publishes Fuller’s dreck also published James Hannams God’s Philosophers, and that’s indicative of the content and drive of the latter.
this is a very good article, it remembers me of an article of Dawkins (viruses of the mind) where he describes the illusion of power of Anthony Kenny on page 14 during a mass.
(By the way, why are my comments cancelled when i login with pittigemaki?)
It is interesting that Hannam is telling the same basic story as Alister McGrath – C of E upbringing, loss of faith and youthful atheism, and the return to faith as an adult.
I don’t know. I haven’t seen any of your pittigemaki comments coming through here. Must have something to do with wordpress.
Yup. Admitting the church can screw up (as opposed to merely “Her sinful children”) breaks the aura of holiness, and since the aura of holiness is the foundation of the whole endeavor, that breaks everything. They can never admit that the Catholic Church, in itself, fucked this up, or they give away the entire game.
“We are animals, clever animals to be sure, but no more capable of real holiness, real transcendence than the dogs and cats we patronise.”
In a way, I can see something good about the attempt at transcendence. I can respect the idea of people wanting to be better than humans are. But I also agree with you about the (terrible) danger, and I think that outweighs the potential, occasional good.
It becomes very personal and selfish, doesn’t it? No religious leader can afford to yield to (new/gnu) atheist arguments without admitting that they are only muggles after all — and who among them would readily do that?
Contrast that with the humility of the scientists who had been advocates of supersymmetry and are now faced with evidence from LHC Beauty at CERN that might well falsify that model. Dr Joseph Lykken:
/@
Yes, I agree, Ophelia, we should strive for transcendence, and I don’t think that, in itself, is a danger. What is dangerous is the assumption, made by those who speak of holiness, that the transcendence they experience, or the transcendence they claim, is something beyond the capability of animals, something that can only come “from above”. Holiness is always otherworldly, supernatural, beyond what evolved beings are capable of, and it comes down “from the Father of lights, in whom there is no variableness, nor shadow of turning.” (letter of James. somewhere)
I think that many people cannot accept that life is only going to work, and coming home, and doing chores, having a little fun now and then, and then getting up in the morning and going to work….No, there’s got to be something more, something special, a purpose to the world and their lives. And so, religion kicks in. To be successful, a religion must above all be false–ever hear of a true one?— and make people feel special and exalted. Then of course it helps to have secret handshakes, special underwear, special piles of bricks called temples and churches, and a few saintly bones to put inside of them. My girlfriend is a fervent Catholic, and nothing she sees on TV about priests raping children or that I tell her will ever convince her that Catholicism is anything but the best thing that ever happened in the whole world.
Perhaps the deception is mystery itself. It has to have a mystery that must not be transgressed, so as to have control. Once we become knowledgeable and less ignorant, our understanding banishes this mystery as the hoax it always was.
I’m watching the BBC News and it’s all about military repatriations and the ceremonies are drenched in religion and nonsense. Then it occurred to me–organized religion and the state are bedfellows and need each other to exist.
Steve (#15). I take your point, and to a certain extent I agree. Indeed, I recently posted on this very subject, which you can see here: The Old Creed and the New. We do seem to need something that makes us feel as though we were part of something bigger than ourselves. Just going to work, coming home, going to work, coming home, and going through the routines that are sometimes mind-numbingly dehumanising, are not enough. My problem is that religion is, for reasons which I try to outline again and again, simply dangerous, and also dehumanising. What we need is something which will give us purpose in this world, and religion is almost always directed away from it. It also has a tendency of finding meaning in interfering in other people’s lives. There must be better ways of finding meaning and community than this.
Eric,
Thanks for another excellent piece. You asked in the comments here what seems to be a rhetorical question. Why do the poor accept their lot? Why do we seem to seek humiliation? Why do we bow and scrape before higher rank and why do we treat them as holy?
I know that evolutionary psychological explanations are unpopular but there just isn’t another explanation for the phenomenon of sadomasochism.
Robert Sapolsky in one of his books about baboons points out that, though they are much like us, there is a crucial difference. Baboons live in troops with a social hierarchy but they don’t act in concert. For that to happen someone has to lead and everyone else has to obey. Higher ranking baboons bully the lower ranking ones but the lower ranking ones don’t grovel and try to propitiate, that seems to be a human speciality.
I just saw the movie Debt. In one scene the Nazi doctor sneers at his captors though he’s bound and in their power. “Why was it so easy to kill so many of you?” he asks.
Eric #17, I think purpose might be disguising something else–sacrifice. Why should we make sacrifices? And I think this is where ethics might come into play. If we are to take purpose at face value, then the only rational purpose in life is pragmatic and egoistic. I can’t help but be reminded about Nietzsche, who has traversed over this terrain in greater depth.
And thus, sacrificing to something else outside the ego, some ideal or goal, is maybe what we really mean. Religion persuades people to sacrifice by deception (if you sacrifice you will be rewarded in heaven) and by domination, extinguishing the self so as to turn into a slave.
And liberalism is really at heart an egoistic enterprise–freedom means my freedom, my equality and my justice. But Christianity has imposed it as an ideal, so we mean now social freedom and social equality and social justice. Can you see how we may have got things muddled?
That is why I do not think the political will behind liberalism can possibly survive the collapse of religion, because the ethic is contradictory–an egoistic enterprise that calls for self-sacrifice.
This maybe where the idea of honour may resolve this problem and its relation to family. Religion has replaced honour and corrupted the family, and made us all rather dishonourable in the process (Nietzsche’s reversal of morality). So it might the return to honour, as an ethical foundation, that could provide the positive we all need to replace religion, and give us our real reason for making sacrifices for our freedoms and for our justice.
Egbert, I think (and hope) that you are wrong. Liberalism is not in itself an egoistic enterprise. Libertarianism may be, but not liberalism. Nor is liberalism founded in religion. Quite the reverse in fact. It arose out of the breakdown of religion and the catastrophic outcome of its breakdown. People sought secular means of ordering society, and, while all societies are to some extent unstable, liberalism succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Concern for justice and equality was never an overriding one for Christianity, nor for any other religiion that I know. This is a wholly modern invention.
Indeed, in many respects, Nietzsche’s inversion of values would represent a return to the kinds of hierarchy maintained by religion. He saw liberalism as promoting servility, an oriental vice. For him the highest value was placed on the man who stood out from the crowd by his daring and spirit. It was the vir in virtue that he valued. But this is precisely the kind of thing that Christianity inflated too, even if there was a peculiar inversion in what Christianity apparently (but only apparently, I think) took as daring and spirit. Religion, as the Grand Inquistor in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment knew, is mainly for show. It conceals that lust for power and the flourish of the superman. Why else does the pope wear such finery?
Eric, These are philosophical musings of mine, but I hope you’ll understand why I’m beginning to question what exactly is motivating our political agendas.
If Liberalism is not egoistic, then what else could it possibly be?
Musings. Egbert, of course I understand. That’s what I’m doing too. What, other than egoistic, can liberalism be? Well, there are several things, but the most important one is to enable freedom, to contribute to human flourishing, and to reduce human suffering, on the widest possible scale, given the constraints of human nature, and to promote the greatest happiness and the least pain for the maximum number of people. Some of the heroes of liberalism are Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Godwin, Bentham, Mill, Smith, Helvetius, Condorcet, Keynes, Roosevelt, Rawls, even Churchill in his patrician fashion — etc. etc., just a quick grab bag. Of course, it includes concern for the self, but it is not centred solely on the self as the egoist is, for they want to see benefits share with rough equality, and burdens as well.
Liberalism is egoistic? In a way, yes. After all the golden rule is egoistic as in ‘I want my freedom and the best way to keep you from taking it from me is to promise not to try to take yours.’
Contrast that with the conservative version of freedom which is ‘You are free to do whatever god tells me you can do’
There must be better ways of finding meaning and community than this.
Yes, that’s the big question. In history most of the communities where secular and religious together. The problem is that both seek power, the one over the material and the other over the mind (so called as long as we don’t know if there is a difference between). Because we mostly feel happy in community (it gives safety and protection) we understand also that in these community there are always people who wants more. Giving these people power (if they don’t take it by themselves) is always dangerous. So there must even in community a balance between trust and distrust. It’s that what we are missing in religion because lay people are not allowed to control their “holy men”. It’s one direction traffic. After generations it’s possible we get nice people but these nice people has loosen control over their lives and wait for the answer by problems for the same “holy men” who has no solution. Never in history the church has given solution for war, illness, theft from the rulers, natural disaster or violence. The only answer was faith (you pray not enough ,you believe not enough, you don’t understand what God tries to tell you and so on). Instead they have always stand on the other side of ordinary people. Time is now ready for real democracy and that means that everyone has ONE voice not more. Trying to give meaning is so difficult that till now the only solution was myth. It’s science who should give meaning now but most of science is embedded in the war for profit. So after 50 centuries of history we still are very human with a little bit more understanding of what we are. We want meaning for our lives and hope. Recently a well known atheist in my country wrote in an article in a weekly (knack) “ an atheist is a man who shoot holes in his own boat” and he hoped (he is 75 now) that at least there was a god. So I think personally that community is only possible without power (look at your own family) and for the meaning we had to wait for science because this question is not for one man to unravel.
Eric, your answer is indeed a correct and rational one. If I am interpreting you correctly, you portray liberalism as an ideal of “freedom” that is held as more important than the self, as promoted by a long succession of modern philosophers.
But I don’t think liberalism today is at all patrician, in fact, it is far more pragmatic and based on economic self-interest (the natural results of democracy and deregulation of the markets).
I think both views are in error, and while I’m iconoclastic in my attitude to both religion and ideologies, I do not believe self-interest egoism is the solution either.
I see both interpretations, ideal or egoistic, as contradictory, which is why I put a question mark over liberalism and its ability to sustain political will, which is all that matters in the end within a nation or culture.
Again, these are musings and not part of an agenda. I simply don’t at the moment know of any solutions. I think Libya is perhaps an important test case scenario for how liberalism can manifest in the Arab world, but already I can’t help but be cynical about what comes after.
Kevin’s comment points out the dual nature of liberalism that I was trying to suggest. It’s like those who fight for liberalism are the idealists, and then once freedom is obtained, then liberalism changes to pragmatic self-interest, which ultimately collapses because no one is going to sacrifice themselves for freedom if their world view is based on egoistic self-interest. It’s like a cyclic process of revolution and decay. Something that appears to be reflected in history.
Egbert (#26), I think this is unnecessarily pessimistic. That is not to say that there is not a great deal of egoism around. That is one of the parameters of the human condition within which we must work. That’s one reason that liberalism is so important, because it keeps the worst aspects of this at bay — or at least it can be kept at bay where there is some sense of debt to and responsibility for the society from which we benefit. If Steven Pinker is right, while there is a cyclic quality to political processes, things have been getting better now for some time. He has a new book coming out in October entitled The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. I think he’s right, and I look forward to reading his book and considering his evidence. It’s a big book, some 900 pages or so, so it’s not for the faint of heart. But surely, in any case, the solution to our problems will be found in a cultural willingness to seek answers together, not to give up the possibility of finding any.
When I spoke of patrician, I was referring merely to Churchill. I said he was liberal in a partician manner. He was born to privilege, and while he knew the occasional bouts of financial problems, he had friends who always rescued him from them. However, I think he had a genuine sense of the common good, and did not seem to hold the poistion, so common amongst the rich, that the rich owe not debt to society and ought not to be taxed. He spent a lifetime of public service.
This is one thing that I cannot understand about the United States, for there even the poor think the rich ought not to be taxed, and have the peculiar idea that taxation is theft. The American colonists revolted over the issue of taxation, but it was taxation without representation that they deprecated, not taxation as such. America is no longer a frontier nation, and it’s almost time for its “self-made” men to acknowledge their debt to society. The desparity between rich and poor in the US is the greatest in the developed world. This is a scandal. Driving through the South a few years ago I was struck by the depth of poverty in evidence practically everywhere. I cannot understand how people can be content to live in protected communities for the rich, while around them their fellow citizens live in poverty.
Eric, I hope we can find answers together, it’s why I’m here in the first place. And thank you for your replies and your excellent articles.
Eric, another excellent article and I agree, you should write a book.
A few articles ago I posted a link to James McDonald’s tome, Beyond Belief, http://www.badnewsaboutchristianity.com. I would urge everyone to read it.
Almost the entire book can be read there and, although it is a bit dry in places it is an excellent read. But, just last night I finished the section entitled How Did The Priesthood Arise. The most interesting parts concern the Papacy. If you can look past the horrors or murder, rape, incest, buggery, torture, piracy, bribery and politics the antics of those who would be pope are nothing short of a French farce. In other words medieval popes were perfect role models for modern day RC priests.
One even more interesting fact is that there we two Pope John XXIII’s for first one is now included in the list of the 25 most evil men of the 15th C:
http://one-evil.org/people/people_15c_John_XXIII.htm
This should be compulsory reading in all faith schools.
Eric, I have to echo others: another great post. Time for a book.
***
Ian, some neat sites. The Pope site had this gem, the first of of Pope John XXIII’s is this:
“That Pope John XXIII did follow the tradition of Popes for over four hundred years and did commit repeated incest upon all his children, male and female and did father several illegitimate children by them.”
I don’t know much about the papacy, though the more tidbits I discover the more I want to find out, but one wonders how they can make claims about modernity being the cause of present-day child rape by priests if/when it is part of the very tradition of their holiest office !!! Granted, this was in the early 1400s and times have changed but it is (at the very least and I suspect it’s more than this) suggestive.
A late comment.
Eric #14:
I might add that the transcendence we should strive for requires striving. It’s difficult; it takes a lot of work, a lot of failure, a lot of cooperation, and a lot of time. What I find dangerous is the notion that it can be bestowed on a person through ritual or divine transaction, or (as is popular in the evangelical circles I’m familiar with) only possible — yet guaranteed — through “grace.”