Monthly Archives: December 2012

Behold, I make all things new

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Behold I make all things newA Happy and Prosperous New Year to you all!

 

A favourite homiletic trope is the idea that Jesus makes all things new. It is the theme running through Rowan Williams’ last Christmas homily before he leaves Lambeth for Cambridge at the end of this year — which, of course, is close at hand! (Courtesy of the Telegraph you can read his sermon in full here.) The biggest problem for someone who today who wants to claim that Jesus makes all things new is that it is now nearly 2000 years later, and Jesus is pretty old news. Try as they might, the leaders of the church can’t transform the “news” about Jesus into news. In fact, perhaps we need to coin a new word and speak of “olds” in this case, which is reasonably thought to be what news becomes when it ceases to be new.

Nevertheless, the good archbishop does his level best to present Jesus as being fresh and new, worthy not only of our attention, but new enough to be transformative. It’s really hard, though, to be convinced, especially given the deadliness of the olds that Jesus has become. In the same newspaper (in which the ABC’s homily is printed in full) there is a report about Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, and leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, and his campaign to put a stop to the government’s plan to legalise gay marriage. He used his sermon at midnight mass, according to the report, “to accuse ministers of acting to legalise same-sex marriage in defiance of public opinion.” Not to be upstaged by the pope, Nichols’ Christmas message was like the pope’s a denunciation of gay marriage, and a reaffirmation of his church’s stand that gay marriage is unnatural and defective. (Did the pope encourage his minions to address this issue in their Christmas homilies as he was planning to do in his own? I wonder.) In another report, we hear that Nichols is urging parishioners to write to their MPs, encouraging them to defeat the bill.

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And the Real Turkey Is?!

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Christine Odone, whom I once called the most rebarbative journalist published in English newspapers today, has crossed the line in an article that flew under my radar a few days before Christmas, not only expressing her views in her familiar, constipated prose, but this time tipping over into outright abuse. It all stems from an interview given by Richard Dawkins to the Muslim Mehdi Hasan for Al Jazeera. Hasan had an op-ed in the Guardian (as long ago as last July), which makes a nice companion piece to Odone’s childish tantrum regarding some incidental remarks made by Dawkins in that interview. The key issue being discussed seems to be the old chestnut of whether religion does more good than evil in the world. That’s really a roundabout way of getting at the real point at issue; namely, whether religion can be reasonably criticised. For the strange thing is this. Criticism of religion is taken as a blanket denial of any value in religion whatsoever, and defenders of religion are very quick to pick up on anything, any little word or expression which can be taken to be a chink in their opponent’s armour, and by then putting the Schwerpunkt of their argument at that point, they give the impression of having overturned their opponent altogether.

One thing that nonbelievers have to remember is that religious believers have been at this business of apologetic defence of their religious beliefs for much longer than nonbelievers. They have been hardened and inured to criticism, because the religions themselves have been constantly at each other’s throats for millennia. If you listen to the Mehdi Hasan interview straight through, you will notice how unfazed he is by Dawkins’ expression of amazement that Hasan should actually believe that Muhammad rode to heaven on a winged horse. It is in the Qu’ran, so he believes it. He asks Dawkins if he is abusing his children by telling them the story of Muhammad’s night journey to heaven, and Dawkins says no, of course not. Here is the story, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Muhammad travels on the steed Buraq to “the farthest mosque” where he leads other prophets in prayer. He then ascends to heaven where he speaks to God, who gives Muhammad instructions to take back to the faithful regarding the details of prayer.

I happen to disagree with Dawkins. I think it is abusive to teach such stories to children, if they are led to believe that they are true. It encourages them to believe in fantasy as truth, which must have an effect on how they regard truth itself. Hasan was actually successful in getting Dawkins to give way on this point, clearly because Dawkins did not want to appear insensitive and strident. If Hasan tells these stories to his children as part of the mythology of Islam, then perhaps no harm is done, but if he tells these stories as confirming the immediacy and reliability of Muhammad’s revelation, that is certainly a form of child abuse. Fairy tales are one thing, since children know that fairy tales are not true; but telling children tall tales in contexts that are heavy with religious significance and seriousness is another matter altogether. This kind of story telling is only a very short distance away from the sources of religious violence, and this is a practice that needs to be acknowledged and opposed.

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If it is so important to live according to one’s nature: Castrate the lot of them, I say!

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Available in Polish translation here. Thanks again to Malgorzata!

Here’s a picture of the Clown of the Vatican giving Christmas greetings to a room full of celibate fundamentalists who have made a new year’s resolution to oppose gay marriage with all the power supposedly vested in them by the Ruler of the Universe. Indeed, Christmas, for the pope and his henchmen has become the occasion of the most virulent anti-gay campaign ever to emanate from the frowsty halls of the Vatican. Instead of peace and joy, and the sentimentality of cribs and cowsheds and a sacred baby, we have the pope in attack mode. The overly ornate hall is meant to intimidate us, but don’t let the pictures of angels dupe you. These guys know all about realpolitik.

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To be quite frank, it now simply makes me angry, that a bunch of celibate men should gather together and tell the rest of the world what sexuality is for, and how people should act with respect to their nature, as though human nature were a fixed datum which cannot be varied or further defined. If the Jesus they pretend to worship were to walk into this hall, they’d have him arrested and sent packing. But the thing is that here is a room full of contradictions, every man jack of them acting contrary to his nature (or at least pretending to do so). And yet they have the unmitigated gall to define how the rest of us are to live. According to a Reuters report, the pope (along with his gang of overdressed “virgins”) is forming a coalition of religions to defend “real” marriage and to oppose the legalisation of gay marriage, and it’s high time we told this geriatric failure of a human being that we don’t think this gathering of men sworn to celibacy has anything to teach the world about sexuality or the family. About love, clearly, they have nothing to teach, the pope’s hateful “Christmas” message having gone out to all the world. You know the pope thinks he’s in trouble when the substitutes gay marriage for the manger and the holy mother and child.

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Higgs lambastes Dawkins but does not make himself clear

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In the Guardian this morning there is a report of an interview given by Peter Higgs (of Higgs’ Boson fame) to a Spanish Newspaper, El Mundo. In it he takes Dawkins to task and calls him an embarrassment to science, saying (without apparent justification) that religion and science are compatible. Higgs seems to think that Dawkins’ strictures against religion and religious believers apply only to fundamentalist religion, and that Dawkins himself is something of a fundamentalist, and, as such, an embarrassment to science. Indeed, the title of the piece is “Peter Higgs criticises Richard Dawkins over anti-religious ‘fundamentalism’.” Though not a believer himself — a fact which he puts down to his upbringing — he thinks that lots of physicists are religious believers, and, he says, so long as you are a convinced but not a dogmatic believer, religion and science are perfectly compatible.

Let’s put what seems to be the heart of the matter here so that we can consider Higgs’ position more thoroughly. He puts it this way:

The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that’s not the same thing as saying they’re incompatible. It’s just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

But that doesn’t end the whole thing. Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past.

Now, I’m not quite sure that I get the point of what he is saying. If, in fact, the traditional reasons for belief going back millennia are “rather undermined” by science, what does it mean to say that being a convinced but not dogmatic believer is still perfectly compatible with science? Higgs is coming to this discussion rather late in the day. This was frequently said about five years ago, but people seem to have come to the recognition, despite Higgs’ lateness on the scene, that (i) Dawkins is not a fundamentalist, since you have to have a prescribed text in order to be so, and (ii) there is no very clear distinction between what Higgs is calling “convinced” versus “dogmatic” believers. One would like to say, “You either believe or you don’t.” There aren’t any very convincing half-way measures when it comes to faith, and Higgs certainly hasn’t explained very clearly what he intends by drawing this distinction between conviction and dogma.

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Sensitivity in its place, but not always sensitivity

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My title could apply equally well to the overly sensitive people in Pakistan who are too often urged to mob violence by any perceived insult to Islam or its prophet. However, I mean it to apply to those engaged in the sort of mindless religious violence that got a man beaten and then burnt to death by an outraged mob in Sindh province in Pakistan. Jerry Coyne justly quotes Steven Weinberg’s famous remark that

[w]ith or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Clearly, free speech is a fantasy in a country where this happens so frequently, and it raises very serious questions about the ability of Islam to adapt to the modern world. I think this is something that needs to be faced very bluntly. While I am aware that there are those like Irshad Manji and Ed Hussain who think that Islam can moderate itself, and fit comfortably with democratic forms of governance, the evidence so far is not at all promising. I recall the televised conversation between Manji and Salman Rushdie in New York, where Rushdie’s dissent from Maji’s views, though politely expressed, was very clear. It was obvious that he did not think that Islam and democracy were easily compatible.

Many Muslims come to this country, sequester themselves in ethnic communities where women have almost the same status in a free democracy that their sisters have in Muslim majority areas of the world, and the Supreme Court has just muddied the waters as to whether a person’s freedom of religion permits her to wear the niqab, or the accused have a right to see their accuser. The question, to my mind, is whether people have the right to live in a democracy and yet practice age-old misogynistic customs which directly imply women’s secondary place in society and in the home, and whether other citizens are forbidden from raising the question of the conflict between these customs and democratic governance and the equality of citizens. Does sensitivity necessarily forbid criticism and distrust of those who practice customs so at odds with the presumed equality of all people which is enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms?

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Steve Lopez on the right to decide about the end of life

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In a comment Michael Fugate referred us to a new article by Steve Lopez, the Los Angeles Times correspondent who has taken on assisted dying as an issue of pressing importance (thanks Michael). You can read the article, and watch an accompanying video, here. It is highly recommended. The title of the article is “Chorus of voices grows stronger for ‘death with dignity.’ The article brings out some important aspects of the discussion about assisted dying, and I will enumerate what I think are the important ones here.

First, there is a clear sign that even born again Christians, and ceteris paribus, other religious believers, may be able to see asking for and receiving assistance to die not as an act of unfaithfulness, but as a decision as reasonably and faithfully made as other life decisions. Generally speaking, religions have seen assisted dying as consisting in acts of suicide. This is a mistake. Suicide is an act of desperation taken in the midst of an otherwise normal life. It may or may not be justified by circumstances, but it is an act completely different from that of the person who seeks, because of suffering, to end life (themselves), or to have life brought to an end (by another), because there is no other way to meliorate the suffering involved either in a terminal illness, or in some other condition that leads to the degradation of a person’s quality of life to the point where, for that person, suffering has become intolerable.

(This is one reason, by the way, that I oppose laws which specify terminality as a necessary condition for assisted dying. For others may suffer as much or more than a terminally ill person, and may suffer for a much longer period of time. Another consideration is that, by specifying terminality, assisted dying laws implicitly state that terminality is a condition of life which may, almost by definition, include intolerable suffering. Since assistance in dying should be a choice, the issue of choice should be in the foreground of such laws, not specific conditions. It is for the individual alone to decide when life has become, for them, intolerable.)

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Slaughter of the Innocents Trope and William Lane Craig

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I have been waiting for someone to make the connexion. All along I have been speaking of the Newtown murders of little children as ”the slaughter of the innocents,” because, coming just before Christmas, it should be almost impossible for a Christian not to notice the parallel between the Newtown massacre and the story of Herod’s killing of the male children of Bethlehem, in his efforts to kill the child Jesus, who, Matthew tells us, so clearly, was born to be king of the Jews. And, finally, someone has made the connexion. But he hasn’t carried it far enough, which shows how shallow people’s appropriation of their own myths really is. Of course, we’ve had the predictable but stupid idea that the murders were God’s judgement on America for turning its back on God, as well as the usual run of the mill stuff about punishment for abortions or entertaining the notion of gay marriage. Leave it to William Lane Craig to make the connexion! Here he is talking about the slaughter of the innocents, and its congruity with the meaning of Christmas.

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Craig’s interpretation of this is so simple-minded, it’s hard to think of the man as a scholar of some repute. I’m not sure I’d go as far as Jerry Coyne, though, in his interpretation of what Craig has to say. Here’s what Jerry says over at Why Evolution is True:

Apparently the recent slaughter is God’s way of reminding us of “what Christmas is for, what it’s all about.” And it’s almost as if Craig thinks that God engineered the murders to that end.

I don’t think that’s Craig’s point. I think Craig is just saying that we should take it as a reminder that we live in a world in which unspeakable evils occur, but there’s no sign that he thinks that God precipitated the murders as a reminder.

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The Pope’s Theocratic Challenge – Time to Revisit Vatican Statehood

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The other day, feeling not so well, I went on a righteous rant against the Roman Catholic Church, the pope, and other idiots who think they have the right to limit women’s freedom to make their own reproductive decisions. It is vital that we see it in this light. Forget the intrinsic or sacred value of the foetus, which, the Roman Catholic Church claims, is equal to that of the “mother’s”. This is the usual religious smokescreen laid down so that we won’t notice what the church is really trying to do. It is trying its damnedest to control people, to make them dance to the Roman Catholic tune, suggesting that only the Roman Catholic Church really knows what is right and good. No one else really knows. That’s the bottom line for the pope and his coterie of conservative bishops, archbishops and cardinals around the world. They’re not prepared to discuss this. Their minds are made up. They know what the truth of morality really is, and the rest of the world should just bend to it and follow their direction. Most of all, women have no choice in the matter. They should just shut up. Women are, really, nothing but walking time bombs of emotional instability, and they should be made to shut up and produce babies. It doesn’t matter how they got pregnant. It doesn’t matter how much psychological trauma they undergo in the process. They may be pregnant by rape or sexual abuse. Pregnancy may lead to death, disability, breakdown, the termination of plans and projects and hope for the future. It simply doesn’t matter, and women should just shut up and bear children. That is their assigned lot in life. It’s simply a matter of natural law.

Zoe Williams has a hard-hitting piece in the Guardian today, where she points out how simply out of touch today the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland is on the issue of abortion. It’s time to stop taking these people seriously, she suggests. It’s time simply to reject the mindless repetition of the old certainties. And she says something that really needed to be said:

The tendency with the abortion debate is to consider the anti-choice lobby as more sensitive, more governed by their consciences and anger than the pro-choice lobby. It’s true in some respects – the Roman Catholic church certainly has a tendency toward hysterical overstatement. And yet we pander too much to anti-abortionists, taking whatever scraps of reproductive rights they’ll throw us, stopping the fight as soon as our immediate pragmatic needs have been met.

Yes, and a thousand times yes. It’s the same with the anti-assisted dying movement too. The attempt is always being made to paint their opponents as crass and cruel, as baby-killers, murderers and representatives of a culture of death. How many times have I heard Peter Singer characterised as immoral, because he thinks that easing a defective baby out of life is better than simply allowing it to die of starvation and dehydration? John Lennox said precisely this in his debate with Richard Dawkins, and Dawkins rightly responded by saying that Singer is one of the most morally conscientious persons he knows. Lennox is like the pope. He no longer seems to know what is morally relevant in today’s world, because he lives so much in the past. Christians have to live in the past, almost by definition, because the writings that they consider authoritative were written, some perhaps four, some three, and others around two thousand years ago.

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The antics and words of the religious are an argument in themselves against their beliefs

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I have been going the rounds of various stories about the antics and words of religious leaders and believers over the last few days. Not feeling quite up to snuff, but able to wander around the internet reading stories about Christians’ reactions to the slaughter of the innocents in Newtown, Connecticut, about the polio workers in Pakistan being killed because they were doing infidel work, about the Irish government’s new legislation that will clarify (is the way it’s put) when an abortion may be provided when a woman’s life is at stake (and Christine Odone’s stunningly stupid response to the way this was, she thinks, driven by media hype instead of for the right reasons), or about the woman in Mali sentenced to 60 lashes for “adultery of the tongue,” and then there’s the story of the pope blessing the “Kill the Gays” Minister from Uganda, or telling his followers that gay marriage is a threat to peace in the world, and various other droppings of religious idiocy and nonsense, I think it’s safe to say that these things, in themselves, argue against the truth of religious beliefs. No doubt saying that is a garden variety informal fallacy, but it’s hard to see how the truth about the universe and the reason for our being here could lead to such completely unhinged nonsense. I mean, just think about it for a moment. God specially intervened — that’s what John Lennox (a professor of mathematics at Oxford, no less) thinks, and that’s what Pope Wojtyła believed — to make us somehow distinct from other animals, so that we alone get to go on living after we die (now there’s a conundrum in itself), and the result of god’s intervention is the nonsense that is spouted in his, her or its name, and that litters the most sophisticated communications media ever devised by the brains of human beings. And, it seems to me, it’s just a bit loopy to suppose that all this — well, call it what it is — bullshit is not an indication that religious belief is just as loopy as the things that religious believers say and do.

Let’s just go through a few of those things as a for instance… Take, first, because I can’t stand the woman, Christine Odone’s view about abortion in Ireland. She titles her Telegraph piece, “Is Ireland’s abortion U-turn based on a mistake?” And then she tries to hoodwink us by talking about the case of Savita Halappanavar, like, maybe neither she nor her husband asked for a termination, or perhaps she died from septicemia, of some other complication unrelated to her pregnancy. But she’s already said this:

I’m a Catholic but I believe abortion has to be legal. Yes, it is a sin; and yes, there are women who use it as contraception. But the risk of having a long roll call of tragic deaths like Savita’s is too cruel to contemplate. Like divorce, abortion should be available, but reserved as a last-resort nuclear option – and when the mother’s life is in danger is precisely such a scenario.

So, what’s her problem? Well, maybe the Irish government was pushed into it by bad information about Savita Halappanavar. Perhaps it responded to pressure that wasn’t warranted by the case, so they did the right thing for the wrong reason. Now, doesn’t she see a fault in her logic? She’s given a good reason (and the European Court had told them to anyway) why abortion should be available in extreme situations — even though it is a “sin”! — Christ! This woman irritates the hell out of me! — so the Irish U-turn (as she calls it! — U-turn? — it’s not even a swerve!) is based on the right reason. Of course, it doesn’t go far enough. It’s still going to force raped women to bear their rapist’s child, and various other intolerable implications of the “nuclear” option. But, the provision that will save a woman’s life should have been there from the beginning, whatever the Vatican and its demented inmates think. So, it’s not being done for the wrong reason. Can’t be. It’s not being done for Savita Halappanavar. They killed her already! They did it to save the next woman who’s in a similar situation. And all the speculation about what went wrong with Savita Halappanavar is completely uncalled for and unacceptable from this interfering Catholic freak at the Telegraph. Don’t they edit their copy?

You see? Now, how can this be the outcome of religious belief, if religious belief is anywhere near true? Sure, I know people can be wrong. But she’s toeing the Vatican line, and they think everyone on earth should be forced to abide by their narrow-minded idea of what is right and wrong. And they don’t even want to see an exception made in the case where the woman is going to die. She should die. That’s their god’s decree. Does this make sense to anyone? Well, it doesn’t to me. And it makes me angry, I tell you, angry, that idiots like Christine Odone, who used to be the editor of the Catholic Herald, get to sound off in such mind-bogglingly stupid ways.

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Called Home?!

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When tragedy strikes: that’s when people start talking nonsense about god (let’s keep that lowercase). In a HuffPo piece on the Newtown tragedy, Edward Blum suggests silence:

Perhaps in this moment “sigh” is better than childish theology; perhaps to remain attentively quiet is what God would ask of us — because that is what God seems to do too.

And who can doubt that silence in the face of the incomprehensible is better than lies or nonsense? But what is this “that is what god seems to do too” doing here? What sense does this make? After all, has Blum ever heard god speaking on other occasions? Why is god silent when things are going badly, but good fortune is taken as a good word from god? Yesterday, the religious idiots got in their silly words about god’s unwillingness to protect children, because we don’t pay him his due. According to them, god is not being silent at all. His message is loud and clear. Start praying in your schools or else!

Now, it’s interesting that everyone has their own take on what god’s message is in situations like this. Blum thinks god has gone silent. All he has is a sigh. Huckabee thinks that god is a figure of malice and violence, who kills children if we don’t worship him by setting aside a moment or two each morning to pray for the children’s welfare. Otherwise, the kids are in danger of god’s wrath.

The problem is that no one really hears god at all, in good or in ill fortune. They either make up these stories to make a political point, or to comfort people who cannot be comforted, or just to keep our attention focused on our own failures, so that we don’t notice that god is really just an empty vessel which we fill with our own hopes and hatreds. But god never acts at all. In the video of the Dawkins-Lennox debate which I mentioned yesterday (and from which I took Lennox’s convenient lie), Lennox expressed his unwillingness to believe that god didn’t intervene at some point in the evolutionary process so that we are toto caelo distinct from the other living things that populate this earth. It’s a bit like Pope Wojtyła’s ontological saltation. At some point in the evolutionary process, he suggested in his address to the Pontifical Academy of Science, god intervened and injected a soul into human beings. When Dawkins asked Lennox at what point god might have done this, whether at the time of archaic Homo sapiens or more recently, Lennox, of course, had no answer. But his belief in eternal life requires that it must have been done — what would be the point of granting eternal life to bugs and bacteria? – so it has to be posited. There must be an ontological difference, detectable or not.

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