Following is a short clip from the North Carolina Christian “pastor” fulminating against gay and lesbian people. If you haven’t seen or heard Pastor Charles “Let Them Fry or Die” Worley speaking about his “final solution to the homosexual problem,” then this is for you.
And then, just to show that ”pastors” have an effect on their parishioners, even though they do not understand, and would rather stand somewhere else, here’s a clip from an Anderson Cooper interview with a woman from Worley’s congregation — loyal as a puppy dog, but obviously conflicted, more humane than her pastor, but corrupted by Christianity.
The key is in the Bible, but fundamentally the foundation of the key to this attitude is to be found in disgust — like this:
Poor Pastor Worley! The problem is that he can imagine kissing some man and the imagination revolts and disgusts him, and because of that revulsion he thinks a good solution is to intern all homosexuals behind electrified fences, drop food supplies to them, and let the die off.
One might have thought that the nightmare of Christianity had learned enough from the Holocaust to recognise that this is not a human solution to our sense of alienation from each other, our sense of disgust at the very being of the “Other,” but clearly Christians have not learned, Christians are ready to do the same thing that the Nazis did to the Jews — for how long, do you think, would it take Pastor Worley’s inhumanity to ramp up to the act of killing? Not long, I suspect. It might take Stacey a bit longer, but even she is not immune to the kinds of inhumanity represented here — all of it based, as the participants in this inhuman drama insist, on the Bible and Christian tradition.
But someone will say: this is only a marginal expression of a demented and fundamentalist Christianity. Well, perhaps. But it was this demented form of Christianity, expressed at the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops in 1998, that led Richard Holloway, then Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, to back away from Christianity, and to begin to call himself post-Christian. There is something valuable at the heart of religion, he thinks, something deeply and poignantly human, that we should value, but the religion itself cannot be saved. It is in thrall to its past, and it cannot escape its worst impulses.
It was in fact this, over a period of a few years, that forced me to say my categorical “NO!” to Christianity, as I watched it overtaken by high church traditionalists, and the saccharine fundamentalism of the Alpha programme. Religions cannot escape their past, and however liberal they become, in a part of themselves, that past remains to infect and corrupt the whole in successive swings of the pendulum of history.
But more important is what is unsaid in the spectacle of the mad pastor from North Carolina. These people think they have solutions to what they perceive as social problems, solutions that involve state power. This is becoming more and more clear as the years go by, and religion begins to feel that its centrality to culture is being threatened. Listen to Pastor Worley once again:
This is a bit less cultivated than some of the things the Roman Catholic bishops are saying, but it parallels the Roman Catholic bishops’ lust for political clout — and the intellectual content is roughly the same.
A headline in Friday’s National Post reads:
Church blindsided by Ontario government over gay-straight alliances: Catholic sources
Here is part of the article beneath the headline:
But late Friday afternoon, Ontario Education Minister Laurel Broten said there would be no compromises.
“Schools need to be safe places for kids to be themselves — and for some kids, that means being able to name a club a gay-straight alliance,” Ms. Broten said. “I don’t think there’s anything radical about allowing students to name a club.”
Church sources said they were blindsided and disappointed by the announcement. Cardinal Thomas Collins, the head of the Archdiocese of Toronto, is expected to make a statement on Monday.
The change in the provincial Liberals’ new anti-bullying bill — the Accepting Schools Act — is part of a government initiative to create a “safe and accepting climate” in schools, including Catholic schools, Ms. Broten said.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says homosexual behaviour is “intrinsically disordered” and “under no circumstance can it be approved.” However, the Catechism also teaches that homosexuals “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”
Earlier this year, Teresa Pierre, who is part of a group of Catholic parents opposed to Bill 13, said forcing gay-straight alliances into the school would erode Church teaching.
No one has explained how it is possible to say of someone that acting according to one’s nature is a matter of “grave depravity” — for the Catechism of the Catholic Church acknowledges that gay and lesbian people “do not choose their homosexual condition” (2358) — and that basing itself on Scripture
tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,” [2357]
and at the same time to accept people so afflicted ”with respect, compassion and sensitivity.” It simply does not compute. Calling someone depraved is already to treat them with disrespect and insensitivity. It’s the kind of disrespect and insensitivity that leads people like Worley to say unpardonable things. This is an aspect of Catholic teaching that should be eroded. The problem is that it is part of “sacred tradition,” so the Catholic Church is bound to continue treating homosexual persons with the contempt they do not deserve. And for this reason the Catholic Church and others who believe as they do should be treated with the contempt that they do deserve.
Unless churches can do better than this, they are a danger to the peace and good order of society. Of course, we mustn’t forget that this is not only a Christian problem. It is a Jewish and a Muslim problem as well. Muslims are regularly quoted as saying that homosexuals should be thrown off cliffs, or killed in other imaginative ways. Religion itself, it seems to me, is, broadly speaking, a form of certifiable mental pathology. It is not only given to delusions, it is also characterised by paranoia, and experiences bouts of sudden and catastrophic violence. People who act like Worley or the Catholic bishops are a danger to us all, because we know that wherever they are given political power they misuse it, and people get hurt for the sake of beliefs which have no foundation. I am quite prepared to say that people should have the right to believe whatever they like, but they should not be given the freedom to have favoured tax status, and at the same time to seek to impose their mad designs on the rest of us. They should not have a privileged position in a society whose values they continue to try to undermine.
Yeah, I think the primary difference between Christianity and Islam with respect to homosexuality is that Islamic governments actually follow through on their threats and kill homosexuals for the mere fact of their existence. Outside of the barbaric spectacle of Uganda, you don’t see much officially sanctioned physical harm to homosexuals in Christian countries. Christian countries just marginalize; deny rights.
Sadly, right-wing Christians in the US would do exactly the same as their Islamic brethren given the authority. This is one reason why they need to be opposed at every step.
Now if I were to propose that we erect a 100 mile electric fence around a compound, drop food in by air, and put all the pastors in it… people would say that I was being extreme and suggesting the unthinkable.
As an ethical project, Christianity has failed dismally, and I would add also all organized religion. But then when it comes to politics, governments of all types have had their terrible failures, including supposed Enlightened Democracies like America, and far worse are secular dictatorships.
So if we are to have our own ethical project, it ought to be ethical not political.
It should be noted that Christians will always fail to learn any lessons from the Holocaust as long as they insist on pretenting that it was the result of atheism.
Stonyground, I can point you to a number of books by Christian theologians where the Christian part in the persecution of the Jews which led, ultimately, to the Holocaust, is acknowledged, analysed and regretted. At the same time I can point you to Jews who accept the support of American fundamentalists who support Israel because they believe that the end of the world is nigh and that the Jews will get their deserved condemnation for killing their messiah. Religion, sadly, is a two edged sword, and it is indiscriminate in its hatreds and in its brutalities. Relligion also has also a gentler side, and I have known many people of very different religions who were people of grace, dignity and good will. I think that antisemitism is deeply embedded in Christian scripture and theology, and may be impossible to eradicate. It is also so for Islam. No religion, and certainly none of the monotheisms is innocent. All of them have bloody borders. We would be better without them, but I suspect that there is something in the religions which is integral to our humanity. The problem will be to find it, and to distinguish it from the dangerous nonsese which comprises so much of it.
Any bets on whether Thomas Collins, in order to prevent any further erosion of church teachings, will instruct the Ontario catholic school system to cease accepting public funds.
Presumably as a non-publicly funded organization, Ontario catholic schools could promulgate their repulsive ideology unfettered by atheistic, secular values.
I don’t know if you’ll be able to access this outside the UK (probably), but you may be interested in a series of 20 15 minute radio programmes Richard Holloway is about to broadcast – “Honest Doubt” – each weekday at 1345 BST.
Muriel, whether I can get the BBC podcast here remains to be seen, but thanks for the “heads up”!
“I suspect that there is something in the religions which is integral to our humanity.” Should this not be formulated in the reverse, ie: there is something in our humanity which is integral to the religious? It is almost as if “religion” is an organism of its own, rather than a technology utilized by people to manufacture meaning within their lives. It is people who may be “given to delusions”, at times “characterized by paranoia”, and at times expressing themselves in “bouts of sudden and catastrophic violence”. There is something dangerous in the definition, it seems to me, of religion belief as mental pathology, not least of which risks diagnosing most of the world’s population (either now, or in the past) as insane, and in need of corrective (removal of superstitious beliefs) medicine. The road to dehumanization begins with defining other people as lesser, or diseased, as the pastor above does. I think we should be cautious of doing the same. There should be separation of religious person (a human) from religious expression (an act).
Maybe Eric means spirituality, or at least something to fill the nihilism left behind. My own thoughts are that nihilism may be as bad as religion. Our focus that religion is evil ignores the evil within us, and we begin to think ourselves superior and pure. In a way, nihilism and religion are the same thing.
Northstar. Just a quick comment. The only point I was trying to make regarding the “I suspect …” comment was that religions are great all-encompassing sorts of things, which ring the changes on all sorts of social relationships, social organisations, personal and community values, etc. It would be exceedingly strange if these incredibly complex cultural expressions did not also include things which are integral to our humanity.
Religion itself, insofar as it is the expression of belief in supernatural beings with the rather bizarre supernaturalist practices and superstitions which go along with them, is, it seems to me, while readily explicable on naturalist lines, itself a mental or at least cognitive pathology. Religion is. That doesn’t mean that religious people are insane, nor would I suggest this. For many people the religious pathology is a fairly small part of their personal life. For some, their mental world is chiefly composed of religion and its various pathologies. These are more difficult cases, though in many respects even they may be able to govern themselves in ordinary life without stumbling. I daresay that the homophobic pastor in the clips above gets along pretty well in ordinary life, so he is neither insane nor necessarily unintelligent. It’s hard to tell from these snippets. But I do not mean to dehumanise anyone by speaking of religion as a pathology.
Eric, thanks for the clarification. It was not my intent to imply that you were dehumanizing people. I have found that some people (such as some of the gnu atheists) use language describing religion as being a pathology and it’s adherents being pathological, in a rather dismissive and insulting way, which is worrisome. It is also rather absurd, in a way. Religious expression is so common place, it at times seems a very natural type of human behaviour, even if not universal. Do people have a pathology, which goes away when they lose their religious belief? Anyway, thanks again for the clarification.
Eric: Not sure if they’re podcasting it or not. If not I can send you the mp3 files if you want.
Clod, I noticed that after I had written the comment. I’d appreciate the mp3 files, if it’s not too much trouble. Thank you.
Oh, hey! You’ve got your name back!
The internet baffles me sometimes! Send me your e mail address to sirlancsallot@gmail.com
…..or leave it in a comment here: http://sirlancsallot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/doubt.html
Regarding the Holocaust. I was not aware that theologians had discussed the culpability of Christianity in this matter, so I am happy to have learned something new. However, religious leaders and regular believers seem to be less enlightened. Both CofE clerics and the Pope have tried to shift the blame for the Holocaust onto “Secularism”, which in their view is the same as atheism. As for the regular believers, I have lost count of the times I have had to point out that Hitler was a Catholic and not an atheist. Most of the atheists that I communicate with online are very rational and scientifically literate. Apart from generally being Christians, the Nazis believed in all kinds of other superstitious woo as well.
Doubt #3 Commentary on Richard Holloway’s series ‘Honest Doubt’
http://sirlancsallot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/doubt-3.html
northstar: There is something dangerous in the definition, it seems to me, of religion belief (sic) as mental pathology, not least of which risks diagnosing most of the world’s population (either now, or in the past) as insane, and in need of corrective (removal of superstitious beliefs) medicine.
That looks a lot like the “slipery slope” argument to me. I appreciate what you are driving at but I find your argument not fully convincing.
northstar: The road to dehumanization begins with defining other people as lesser, or diseased, as the pastor above does. I think we should be cautious of doing the same.
Well yes, caution is probably advisable. However there are people with genuine identified diseases, physical and psychological, for which they are treated. On the whole they are not dehumanised (though I dare say it does happen). I am not suggesting that religious people should be “treated” but it might help if they were better educated. I think that any sort of “treatment” is highly unlikely in my lifetime given the preponderance of religious people.
northstar: There should be separation of religious person (a human) from religious expression (an act).
That I think is a good idea, however religious expression is the product of religious people. If there were no religious people it is unlikely there would be any religious expression. How can we possibly hope to curtail religious expression without addressing religious people? They squeal enough about “freedom of religion” as it is now when challenged. We shouldn’t dehumanise them but we need to tell them to keep their silly ideas to themselves (not including their children!). It is after all religious belief that is the root problem, and that is the defining feature of religious people. If they can tell us we’re going to hell we should feel free to say they are deluded.
I am in the uncomfortable position of sometimes thinking that the hijackers of 9/11 were somewhat subhuman (or at least not well developed humans), but then altogether too human. What other beast would perpetrate such evil?
phil
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