Category Archives: Archbishop of Canterbury

How to Justify Religion by Making it all about You

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Mark Vernon is one of the most squishy writers out there, anodyne, non-committal, given to bland generalisation and the empty phrase posing as profound. Reminds one a bit of the Bloomsbury Group, who were given to large romantic gestures and faux profundity largely based on Clive Bell’s theory of art focused on the concept of “significant form” and G.E. Moore’s intuitionism in ethics. Lawrence captured the pretension at the core of the Bloomsbury Set’s shallowness in Women in Love, the movie version of which caught well the sexual tension and brittle intellectuality in this vignette:

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(The woman eating the fig is based on Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose salon in Bloomsbury (Bedford Square) was host to many of the Bloomsbury Group, for many of whom Lady Ottoline was an influential patron. “The way to eat a fig in society” is one of Lawrence’s poems.) Vernon’s latest Guardian op-ed does not disappoint in this respect. He takes two books, one by Rowan Williams, the departing Archbishop of Canterbury, the other by Francis Spufford, historian and science writer who has written or compiled a number of light-weight books on a variety of topics. But the point of Vernon’s piece is not, really, to say anything substantive about the books under consideration. Instead, he wants to carry further his Christian apologetics which began to pick up speed a couple of years ago. From being an ex-priest agnostic, Vernon has been climbing back onto the bandwagon of faith now for some time. In order to do that, and retain some intellectual respectability, he has to show that faith is not about those things that led him, many years ago, to abandon Christianity; there must be a not-entirely-graspable-something at the heart of Christianity that is peculiarly life affirming, and so he casts about for others who share this sense of a diaphanous something, and finds them in Willams and Spufford.

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Trying to keep up!

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It’s really quite hard to keep up with the misdoings of religion around the world. Everyday brings forth its daily quota of horrifying outrages against decency, humanity, and plain common sense. What is so worrying about this is that the numbers of offences seem to get larger every day, as though religion were like a pressure cooker, with the top threatening to blow off any moment! How can the religions keep up this steady drip, drip, drip of perfidy without simply self-destructing? How is it that they can hold onto people’s commitment and loyalty? What is it about religion that seems to make it impervious to the normal attrition that wrong-doing, especially wrong-doing in high places, would impose upon any organisation daily implicated in scandal?

A couple days ago it was the British High Court’s judgement in the case of Nicklinson and AM, then the next day we have the culmination of the story of the death of the pregnant Dominican teenager with leukemia, and then, following closely on its heels is the conviction and sentencing to two years in a labour camp of three young Russian women protesting the oligarchy of Vladimir Putin. Then there is the bishop in France who had a letter read out in church which uses language deliberately to denigrate gay parents and their kids. And, of course, they would, wouldn’t they? The Vatican sprang to the bishop’s defence.

What, you might ask, is the account of the Pussy Riot singers’ conviction for hooliganism doing amongst a list the offences of religion? Or you might ask that about the Dominican teenager, or even about Nicklinson. Each of these are not offences by religion. They were all conducted by courts, government officials, and not by the church at all. Of course, that’s just the problem. Religion insinuates itself everywhere, and in these three situations the role of religion is paramount, even though it may look otherwise, and those who have commented on the these tragic stories note the part that religion plays in each of them.

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Misrepresenting Religion

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Over the last few months both the Archbishop of Canterbury, episcopal head of the Church of England, and the Archbishop of Westminster, as well as Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the senior Roman Catholic cleric in Britain, have come out in strong opposition to gay marriage. Keith O’Brien, according to the Daily Mail, went so far as to suggest that “same sex unions were the ‘thin end of the wedge’ and would lead to the ‘further degeneration of society into immorality’.” (I cannot forbear remarking that this always seems to be the Roman Catholic reaction to moral change. Accordiing to its bishops and archbishops and its moral ”experts”, the seem to see every moral change as a decline into immorality and sheer chaos. They seem unable to see that many of the changes they deplore have improved life for many who were once excluded and unjustly victimised by what the religious guardians of morality think of as the moral law.) According to Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, in a letter to be read in every church in the archdiocese:

Changing the legal definition of marriage would be a profoundly radical step. Its consequences should be taken seriously now. The law helps to shape and form social and cultural values.

A change in the law would gradually and inevitably transform society’s understanding of the purpose of marriage. It would reduce it just to the commitment of the two people involved. There would be no recognition of the complementarity of male and female or that marriage is intended for the procreation and education of children.

This was reported in the Guardian. The Archbishop of Canterbury, on the other hand, holding, as he does, a post in the national church, said that the government had no mandate to change the definition of marriage, not having included this in its party manifesto. There were some members of the church, however, who felt it was high time for the church to desist in its opposition to gay marriage: a priest from Derbyshire sent a petition to the archbishops of York and Canterbury, signed by 4,000 church members, objecting to the church’s refusal to endorse same-sex marriage.

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PD James, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope

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Roya Nikkhah reports, in the Telegraph, that PD James, the author of detective fiction for the discerning, and a conservative Peer, has revealed, in an interview with The Tatler, that she would

   … help a friend or family member die if there was “nothing to be done” and they “wanted to go”.

On the other hand she does not think that the country should change the laws of murder to accommodate such acts. You have to have the courage to act, she suggested, apparently comparing it to coming to the defence of a loved one being attacked.

“If I saw someone attacking one of my grandchildren in a way that was going to   kill and I had a knife, I’d stop it,” she said. “And maybe I’d stop him straight away by sticking the knife in. And I think the better so.”

All very dramatic, but it is not really the same thing, and it is unfortunate that James takes this particular line on assistance in dying. Baroness James apparently does not think that a person has a right to be assisted to die, and that it should be left to the courage of a person’s friends or relations to provide assistance, and then defend their decision in law.

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John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, lies

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Let’s start with the following statement of belief from the archbishop:

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Despite all the attempts of Christians to scurry away when faith is equated with belief without evidence — in Boghossian’s terms, pretending to know things they don’t know — when push comes to shove religious faith is stated in terms of such belief. That’s why some things can contradict faith, and why churches and church leaders are waging a constant battle with those who govern. Sometimes, no doubt, they get it right, and oppose things that should be opposed in the name of justice and right; but, with the religious, this is only a chance occurrence, since their primary allegiance is to the basic religious beliefs upon which their faith is grounded. Whether faithfulness to such beliefs promotes justice or injustice is not much more likely to happen than the actions of the Mafia, who also have their codes of honour and sense of fair play.

This comes out clearly in the case of the present occupant of the See of York, the Primate of England, as he is sometimes called, to distinguish him from the Primate of All England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a curious historical contingency which we do not need to address here. The Archbishop of York may think that the kingdoms of the world will become the kingdoms of god and his christ, but meanwhile he is beavering away trying to undermine the kingdom of god and his christ from within by lying, which is against one of the commandments which the archbishop no doubt numbers one to ten, the ninth of those things prohibited by his god.

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Faith is a Cognitive Sickness

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I’ve been listening to some of Peter Boghossian’s public lectures about the nature of faith. Here are a couple of examples, and they’re worth watching straight through. Here’s the first — entitled “Jesus, The Easter Bunny and Other Delusions: Just Say No!”

That is quite long, and there is a shorter version, dealing with roughly the same things, accessible here — entitled “Faith: Pretending to know things you don’t know”

Now, as most of you will know, when philosophers and others begin to criticise faith as believing things, people of faith will immediately turn round and claim that faith has nothing to do with believing. They will begin, as the Archbishop of Canterbury did with Richard Dawkins, talking in poetic language, which, no matter how you read it, simply cannot be understood as belief about things “out there,” but become, instead, about things “in here” — “in my head,” “conformable to my feelings,” and so on.

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We are puzzled along with Dawkins. What could Rowan Williams actually mean by nature “opening itself up to its own depths”? But by slipping off into poetic language it seems as if he is no longer talking about things “out there,” and so the language of faith seems to escape the epistemic conditions necessary for us to be talking about “the same thing,” about something that could claimed with justice to be true.

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One More Kick at the Can (before he goes): The Right to Die and the Archbishop of Canterbury

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Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is going; by the end of the year he will be presiding over a Cambridge College. The newspapers in Britain are full of reflections on his achievements and failures, and putting their fingers to the wind to sense its direction for the next archbishop. Who will he be? Will he be a liberal or a conservative? Almost certainly a conservative. There are very few liberals left in the English Church. When Rowan Williams was appointed, I believed, following on the heels of possibly the most conservative archbishop of the last forty or fifty years — George Carey — that Williams would usher in an era of liberal good sense. I was wrong. I once saw a cartoon of the consecration of a bishop. The man (well, it was always men in those days) was lying anesthetized on a table in the operating room, surrounded by the consecrating bishops (at least three), the archbishop of the province triumphantly removing the candidate’s backbone! Sometimes it has seemed to me that Rowan Williams was the victim of the same mad surgery.

Perhaps that’s a little unfair, since, after all, the weight of responsibility and administrative duties soon overcome the initial enthusiasm of a new bishop. Perhaps he’ll manage a little excitement for the first year or so, but soon he will be dragged back to political reality by the fact that he (or occasionally she) now presides over an organisation that is divided along practically every possible axis of opinion or belief, and that he (or she) is responsible for maintaining not only the unity of his (or her) own diocese, but maintaining the unity of that diocese with the rest of the church. As a consequence, even women bishops, in my experience, who, if the scriptures be taken literally, should have no authority over men, tend to be conservative in their theology and in their understanding of their episcopal role.

Of course, the episcopal role is an interesting one in itself. In the Roman Church bishops are simply stand-ins for the pope. They represent the pope’s universal jurisdiction, and are, in that sense, his vicars in the same way in which popes claim to be vicars of Christ. In the Anglican Church, while subject to the democratic ways of synods, bishops are, to a significant extent, absolute rulers. (I should qualify that, since bishops in the Church of England are not elected, but appointed by the government, in a complex appointments process.) Once elected they serve, so to speak, at God’s pleasure, not at the pleasure of the forum that elects them (at least until they are required to retire). They are — or at least they were traditionally called — “Fathers in God”. (I have to admit that I do not know what a woman bishop is called in this regard, in the few Anglican provinces which have them.) It is, arguably, an unsuitable mode of government for the twenty-first century. Yet it is the spiritual authority of the bishop, handed down, in unbroken succession, so the theory goes, from the hands of the apostles themselves, whose preservation is considered crucial for the spiritual authority of the church itself, and its ministers. In the Anglican Church this authority is shared equally by the bishops. The Archbishop of Canterbury is the Primate of the Anglican Communion, but he terms himself only the first amongst equals, and has no authority, though enormous respect, outside his own diocese and province.

That brief introduction to the episcopal structure of the Anglican Communion is not strictly necessary, but it does explain why bishops tend to speak in tones of unquestioned authority. Cathedrals are bishops’ churches, and they are called cathedrals because they contain the bishop’s cathedra or chair (from the Greek ‘kathedra’ or ‘seat’), and bishops speak, therefore, ex cathedra, from the chair, with special authority. The present Archbishop of Canterbury, while often not making himself entirely clear, has that gift of authoritative speech, so when he speaks, people take notice, especially when he speaks in the House of Lords, and that day, the day they defeated Lord Joffe’s Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill bill, the bishops were there in force.

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Sociopathology and the prohibition of Assisted Dying

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Yesterday I read out, for my daughter and her partner, the paragraph from Allison Pearson’s oped in the Telegraph on Tony Nicklinson’s right to die, where she expresses the opinion that, since his life is too horrible to live, he shouldn’t mind dying horribly in order to escape such a fate. The first comment I got was, “She’s a sociopath.” And so she is, or near enough that it makes very little difference. Here is the paragraph in question:

None of us would want to be shut up in the prison of ourselves with only a blinking eyelid to communicate with the world. Even so, I’m afraid I think that Tony Nicklinson’s desire to change the law of the land so he can be killed in the comfort of his home is wrong. Others suffer as he does – Professor Stephen Hawking comes to mind – but they make the best of the   dreadful hand that fate has dealt them. Tony Nicklinson could refuse food, but his wife objects that starvation is a horrible way to die. Yet isn’t Tony Nicklinson’s argument that his life is too horrible to live?

It really doesn’t get much more unfeeling than this.  As someone has pointed out, Stephen Hawking is a special case. First, he has a very unusual form of ALS. Most of them die fairly quickly in a few years. Some of them die as miserably as Diane Pretty (and see here as well) feared she would. But then Diane Pretty, like Tony Nicklinson, fought for her rights in court, and the legal ground has shifted considerably since Diane took her case to the High Court in Britain, and then to the European Court of Human Rights. Both of them turned her down, and she died as she feared she might. But, hey, what difference does that make? After all, her life was a misery. That’s why she wanted to die. So, why not go out miserably too? That’s the logic of the sociopathic journalist Allison Pearson.

Allison Pearson: A Smiling Face, a Sociopathic Journalist?

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The Church of England on Assisted Dying

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Well, here I am back from my enforced “holiday”, which is mainly down to Bell Alliant for failing to do a number of things, turning off my services before they were supposed to, failing to leave the other cable line into the house, and just generally making my transition back to Eastlink an unhappy experience. But I am up and running now, with a new router, which still is having some growing pains, and a tangle of wires behind my desk that makes it something of a miracle that anything actually works. I assume that the wires are all connected to the right places, but I will spend the rest of the day (after finishing this post first, of course) trying to bring some order out of the chaos — sort of a God of the wires, rather than of the trumpet blast.

During my down time I began doing some housekeeping on my computer, and came across the following video — which I have divided into a number of shorter clips — in which the Bishop of Carlisle (for those of you who don’t know, it’s a diocese in the North of England, on or near the West coast, just across the border from Scotland). James Newcombe, the bishop, is speaking about assisted dying on behalf of the Church of England. As usual, of course, and consistently with his boss, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, he opposes assisted dying, and suggests that things are fine just as they are, which is where the video begins:

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The law on assisted dying, says Newcombe, is adequate, despite the fact that in England there is no law on matters of assisted dying at all. There are prosecutorial guidelines, which were drafted in response to a decision of the high court in the Debbie Purdy case, which indicated that people who assist someone, at the suffering or dying person’s choice, who is living in severe or chronic pain and disability, to die, should not suffer the full rigours of the law of assisted suicide, which, like Canada’s similar law, prescribes a maximum of 14 years imprisonment for anyone assisting a suicide. The fact that the courts have not, in recent years, imposed this penalty on anyone acting in good faith in respect of a person’s request for assistance to die, left the law uncertain and of dubious authority, at the same time that it left persons requesting assistance to die in a sort of “no man’s land”, without any clear legal markers for their actions. To call such a law adequate is sheer misrepresentation and bluster.

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Let’s keep on topic for a moment longer… Islam is a danger, and we need to cut the nerve that makes it so

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Rosie the Riveter

I have been told that we in the wealthy, liberal West have nothing to fear from Islam, no existential threat, no reason to be on our guard against a force that seems, to me, anyway, an imminent threat to the freedoms that so many struggled to win. Just think of the freethinkers who were sent to jail in 19th century Britain, for speaking out plainly about their disbelief. Think of the suffragettes, who went to jail, and faced contumely, in a staunch defence of their liberties and rights as women. I can still remember a time – can you remember it too? — when radio and TV were dominated by men’s voices. If women worked in radio or TV, it certainly wasn’t in front of a microphone or camera. I recall how much offensive, misogynistic language was hurled at women who wanted to work in “men’s” fields, like engineering, science, law, and other fields dominated by men. Women were expected to observe the three Ks, Kinder, Kuche, und Kirche — how convenient for German to have three words beginning with K that summed up the whole duty of woman — though teaching and nursing and secretarial careers were open to women. Wasn’t that enough? I remember, too, how men returning from the war, took up where the women left off, sending them scuttling back to their homes after having run industry for five years, as welders, riveters, and other things that were thought to be solely the province of men. It was a long, hard struggle, and, as some have observed in the comments, there is still a long way to go. Over at Butterflies and Wheels Ophelia has let out all the stops in her campaign against the stupid, sexist denigrating language of the gutter that is used just to put women in their place, language which reduces women to their sexual parts, as though women were only warm vehicles for men to stick their willies in. So when we are talking about the subordination and repression of women in Islam, it takes in a lot of ground. These things are so deeply rooted in most cultures that it is well-nigh impossible to root them out, especially if they are written in that indelible ink called religion.

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