Category Archives: Bible & Sacred Text

Sanctity of Life and its inviolability

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I have to admit that, before Scott McKenna proposed it, it seemed to me that you could not pry the sanctity and inviolability of life apart. As he says, quite clearly:

For me, sanctity of life does not necessarily equate with inviolability.   My argument is that God has given us moral responsibility.   We cannot ever say that God desires intolerable suffering of us and, in ending our life in such circumstances, we, as co-creators with God, are exercising compassion and God-given choice.   There are no ‘disastrous consequences’:  God is bigger than that.  It is precisely because God is compassionate that we have nothing to fear.    We have real moral choice:  we are not ‘sheep’.

This is, it needs to be said, contrary to what is normally meant by the sanctity of life, and, as for moral responsibility, religions have normally seen morality as a function of their belief in and loyalty to God, not something which can be separated from that belief or that commitment.

The Roman Catholic Church puts the point with its wonted bluntness. In its Declaration on Euthanasia it is quite clearly stated:

It is necessary to state firmly once more that nothing and no one can in any way permit the killing of an innocent human being, whether a fetus or an embryo, an infant or an adult, an old person, or one suffering from an incurable disease, or a person who is dying. Furthermore, no one is permitted to ask for this act of killing, either for himself or herself or for another person entrusted to his or her care, nor can he or she consent to it, either explicitly or implicitly. nor can any authority legitimately recommend or permit such an action. For it is a question of the violation of the divine law, an offense against the dignity of the human person, a crime against life, and an attack on humanity. [my italics]

Of course, there is a qualification, bringing the principle of double effect into play, namely, that one may not intentionally bring about the death of an innocent human being. This expedient, however, is simply a band aid where a battle dressing is required. In her book The Sanctity of Life Doctrine in Medicine: A Critique, the Australian philosopher Helga Kuhse defines sanctity of life as follows:

It is absolutely prohibited either intentionally to kill a patient or intentionally to let a patient die, and to base decisions relating to the prolongation or shortening of human life on considerations of its quality or kind. [11; italics in original]

In  the light of these considerations, how can Scott McKenna claim that he supports the principle of the sanctity of life, and yet does not consider this principle absolute?

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Is there a Christian case for assisted dying?

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Well, Paul Badham says that there is — see his book Is there a Christian Case for Assisted Dying? And a speaker at a recent conference in Edinburgh, by the Rev. Scott McKenna, of the Church of Scotland, says that there is. Indeed, he alleges that some claims to the contrary are “a gift to belligerent atheists!” Here is the whole of that quote:

The churches say that assisted dying is ‘a rejection of the rule of God’, ‘a violation of divine law’, ‘an insult to the dignity of the human person’ and a ‘crime against life.’ This rhetoric and line or argument are a gift to belligerent atheists!

In response to this rhetoric, McKenna tries to answer these religious claims one by one, hoping to counter the arguments of the churches

and persuade them and others that physician-assisted dying is morally sound and sits comfortably within Christian faith.

And while I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, I do not think that it is as easy as McKenna thinks to overcome the opposition of the churches.

Since the heart of the religious argument lies in the use of the sixth commandment in the way that St Augustine interpreted it, it is with this that we must deal first of all. McKenna takes exception to the claim that the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” refers to all killing, and points out, quite accurately, that there is a lot of killing in the stories in the Old Testament, so, it seems, this is not what the commandment means. It refers only, he suggests, to unlawful killing, and this seems to be an accurate account of the true meaning of the Hebrew word invoked by the commandment. Indeed, one commentary on the Torah points out that not only does this commandment not condemn all killing, it cannot be appropriately interpreted, as St. Augustine interpreted it, as a condemnation of self-killing, the source of the church’s condemnation of suicide for over 1500 years. Though, as the commentator Gunther Plaut points out (see The Torah: A Modern Commentary, p. 557), Jewish tradition frowned on suicide, it never considered it a punishable offence. In the Jewish tradition Genesis 9.5 was the source of its condemnation of suicide, not Exodus 20.13:

And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man.

It is clear that the words, “And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting,” can be more generously interpreted to justify suicide — for one might give a reasonable accounting for it — than the words, “Thou shalt not kill,” interpreted, as Augustine does, to include the self. Nevertheless, it needs to be added that in Jewish tradition “Jews are commanded never to hasten the process of dying” (see Gillman, The Death of Death. 80).

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A Vile, Intolerant Man

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Like my wife Elizabeth, I have deep regrets that the institution that brought us together, and provided the context within which we could have a rich and rewarding life together for nearly twenty years until her death in Switzerland, should now be one that I find it difficult to speak of with respect. But that is, not to put too fine a point on it, very much the case. I used to think that, as an Anglican, I could largely disregard what other Christians believed, and could, thus, separate myself from beliefs and practices which I then regarded as clearly immoral expressions of intolerance and hatred. But I was naive then, and thought that this was not characteristic of Anglicanism as I had come to know it. It is true that I began that way, holding, in a very conservative way, beliefs and attachment to traditions which effectively excluded from the church all but those who could understand Christianity according to a fairly narrow, Anglo-Catholic interpretation of what constituted true Catholicity and therefore true belonging in the church; but I gradually lost those hard edges, and, while still inveterately Anglican, began to think of Christianity as, at its best, a broad house in which believers and unbelievers, as well as adherents of other religions, could find a place of peace where they could explore their humanity together without prejudice.

When I had come to the end of my active ministry I was not all that far from being an unbeliever myself. I could no longer take seriously the central Christian affirmations of the supernatural birth of Jesus — well, from childhood I had never really accepted that — or his death and resurrection, or his miracles and bodily ascension into heaven (which makes no sense, of course, in terms of scientific cosmology). Nor could I make any sense of the claim that Jesus was both God and man. This became more and more unintelligible to me, especially when, considering the gospel narrative of the life, teachings and acts of Jesus, he came to seem to me not only not in any relevant sense a perfect man, but someone of his time and place whose claim to superior morality came to seem, almost daily, less and less convincing. While he never came to seem to me as morally reprobate as Muhammad, his moral failings are too prominent — especially his teachings regarding a place of eternal punishment, where the fire is never quenched and the worm never dies — to accord him even approbation as a good man. What is unique to him — say, his prescription that we should love our enemies — seems untenable, and what is worthy in his moral teaching is almost entirely borrowed from Jewish sources. I make no judgement, and do not intend to, regarding Jesus’ historical existence, for it seems obvious to me that the gospel Jesus is not a figure of history, whatever historical reality may lie behind it. The historical questions seems to me largely uninteresting. If gods do not come to earth as Jesus is said to have done, then the gospel Jesus cannot be an historical figure.

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Was Jesus Married? Probably

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A small papyrus fragment, preserved in the sands of Egypt for nearly two millennia, contains words referring to Jesus’ wife, and the whole world is agog with a sense of scandal. It’s a bit like the pictures of Kate Middleton topless, we are seeing something titillating from a great distance, and even scholars have no idea what to do with it — even though that won’t stop them, as the Royals unerringly did, from making fools of themselves. Tom Holland has probably taken the most politic and reasonable line when he says, in his Guardian article about the fragment:

What the fragment does not do is shed any light on the marital status of the historical Jesus – let alone whether he truly had a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene. … What it does give us, though, is a glimpse into an otherwise occluded moment in the evolution of Christianity, and a reminder of how effectively religions have been able to manufacture for themselves, in defiance of messy reality, a streamlined and authorised past.

This is important. When we look at Christianity or Islam we see them as somehow “ready-made” religions, but it took centuries before they took their present form, centuries of sifting and sorting, writing and rewriting, until they had attained an authorised form and had an authority that could authorise them. It helped that the Emperor was onside. Had he not been, I doubt that Christianity would have reached us in anything like its present form. It might not have reached us at all. The New Testament, for example, was not gathered together as an authoritative text until after Christianity had been made, by Constantine’s acceptance, the religion in waiting of an empire.

So, was Jesus married? Probably, and if he was, given the early history of the formation of classical Christianity, this is something that it would have been in the interests of those who had already accepted of the body as somehow unholy to suppress – as Jesus himself effectively does in the canonical gospels when he remarks that some are born eunuchs, some are made eunuchs by others, and some have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God (Matthew 19.12), and that his message about sex was hard for men to accept (for it is quite explicitly directed, as most religious messages are, to men) — to conceal the fact that Jesus was a man like other men, and that, like every faithful Jew, he had married. The story of Jesus told in the gospels is almost entirely mythological. If Jesus existed, he was not like this — which is why I am convinced that, even if Jesus was a real figure in history, the Jesus of the gospels is almost entirely an imaginative fiction. Whether there was a real, historical person at the centre of the story is largely irrelevant to the Jesus of Christianity.

What bemuses me is why anyone should think this fragment of a piece of papyrus religiously important. It cannot really tell us whether or not Jesus was married. It cannot plausibly be thought to confirm or disconfirm anything about the historical figure who has already been raised to the nth power and made to seem like a god once walked the earth. We can be assured that he was not like that, and since he was not like that, the likelihood of his having been married (or failing that, as some have suggested, following the hints about “the beloved disciple”, his having been gay) is, I should have thought, fairly high. Why should this surprise anyone? If Jesus was a man — and if he was an historical figure, what else could he reasonably be taken to have been — then he was like other men, and probably had a sexual relationship with someone. The only people who should be bothered by this are those, like the pope, who at least pretends to have been always celibate, and who still thinks that marriage is, somehow, not quite up to spiritual snuff, and such people we can safely ignore.

Dear Christians … or why Francis Spufford’s letter to atheists simply won’t do

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I find it difficult to understand why the New Humanist bothered to publish, and not altogether clear why Francis Spufford decided to write, his letter to atheists. Not only does it seem altogether to miss the point of non-belief, it doesn’t really account very well for the purpose or substance of religious belief either. So, when he begins with the following teasing, chastising sentence –

Allow me to annoy you with the prospect of mutual respect between believers and atheists.

– he succeeds both in annoying and misrepresenting the relationship that now exists between us. He forgets a very important fact: that most non-believers started out as believers, and ended up as non-believers for all sorts of reasons, but amongst them are reasons referring to the harm which religious belief now does on a massive scale. The question of respect is therefore not one that can be settled with a few anodyne phrases, or tactless efforts at being ironic or funny.

Nor, it seems to me, does Spufford do religion any favours by misrepresenting the way that most religious believers hold their faith. Indeed, he tries so hard to make it seem as though religious believers don’t really believe, that their having beliefs that can and are regularly cashed in in terms of social and political policies is made to seem like something entirely extraneous to the project of religious belief, that he looks more than slightly dishonest into the bargain.

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The Bible as Literature

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Jerry Coyne, over at Why Evolution is True, has been addressing himself, in a series of posts, to the literary value or beauty of the Old Testament of the King James Bible, which he has undertaken to read straight through (the latest of which has just been posted). Here I have to digress for a moment into one of the peculiarities of Bible worship. The King James Bible is widely thought, by fundamentalist evangelical Christians, to be in some sense the pure word of God in English. Yet the King James Bible, or, as it used to be called, the Authorised Version, is the translation of the Bible licensed (or “appointed”) to be read (“authorised”) in the Church of England, an ecclesial body and its offshoots (such as the Episcopal Church in the United States) which very few of these fundamentalist evangelicals consider with respect, even though they seem happy to receive its authorised version of the Bible as holy writ. Nonetheless, the question of the text’s literary quality is widely thought to be incontestable. As Jerry Coyne points out, Richard Dawkins has called the English Bible a masterpiece of English literature, a judgement which Jerry is now prepared to challenge, having reached roughly the midpoint of the Old Testament, and having found little in it that he considers to be of high literary value.

He has picked out a few passages – indeed, a very few — which, even then, do not, he thinks, measure up to high standards of literary beauty. There is a problem here, because the basis of aesthetic judgement is not entirely clear. What is it that makes a particular passage of English prose or verse beautiful? Is it just the sonorousness of the language? Or does it pertain to the details of the stories told or the feelings expressed? The language of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is strikingly beautiful, but the vision (perhaps opium induced?) is a bit of mess, and it has no clear relation to anything else written by him. So, the sheer beauty of language is not enough. Are the ideas in the text expressed clearly? Does the language stir the emotions? Is the language sensitive and precise, nuanced and emotionally rich? Does the language suit the context? For instance, we would not necessarily say, of every word spoken by a character in King Lear, that it is beautifully said, and yet the whole might be — in fact is — a powerful drama which strikes us as speaking truth to the human condition, truth that only literary artistry can produce, as I think we do want to say, in certain respects, of King Lear.

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Charleston “Post and Courier” publishes remarkably insightful, sane and thoughtful piece on “elective death”

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While the blogosphere has erupted into justified joy and admiration of NASA’s success in landing the Mars rover, Curiosity, on the red planet, which has occasioned so much exultation at human achievement, I have chosen to highlight an achievement of another sort: namely, the publication in a Charleston newspaper of a remarkable article on assistance in dying. Few newspapers have achieved this level of understanding or support for something that more and more people, despite the almost universal religious condemnation of assisted dying, are coming to recognise as an important human right. Nevertheless, in recognition of NASA’s achievement, here is a picture of the “sky crane” landing operation that was undertaken late on a Martian afternoon, which happened without a hitch, so we are told. Just imagine! Sending tons of equipment millions of miles and setting down a one ton nuclear powered vehicle without damage, after slowing it down from 20,000 kilometres an hour so that it could land gently on the surface of the planet (as in the artist’s rendition below).

Curiosity, the first full-fledged mobile science laboratory ever sent to a distant world, was scheduled to touch down inside a vast, ancient impact crater on Sunday at 10:31 pm Pacific Time. The landing was an outstanding success.

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Bill Thompson, who has been a feature writer for the Charleston Post and Courier since 1980, publishes a remarkably thoughtful, insightful, and positive article on what he calls “elective” or self-chosen death. Taking his inspiration from South Carolina author Richard Côté, and his new book, In Search of a Gentle Death: The Fight for Your Right, Thompson’s article — entitled “Are our lives our own? The ethics of ‘elective death’” – goes into some detail defining the different types of elective death, from assisted suicide to euthanasia, and is one of the very few writings on this topic that appears to understand the simple truth that pain and suffering at the end of life is sometimes not able to be controlled, even with all the wonders of modern medicine. Indeed, as Thompson points out, it is the fact that we are surrounded by such wonders that has brought us to the point at which we have arrived, where not only do people die more and more often in institutional situations, but where the ability to keep people alive has brought about vastly increased and increasing demand for the right to a self-chosen death.

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The odd biases of a scholar

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When I began reading Bart Ehrman’s new book on the historicity of Jesus, I expected that it would reflect the kinds of scholarly controls that I am familiar with in his other books. However, all one has to do is to turn the next page in his Jesus book to be confronted by another example of bias. I’m not really interested in the historicity of Jesus. To me the question is largely irrelevant. The sources are too tainted, and should be acknowledged to be so, to qualify as sources of reliable historical data. The idea that there was a man who was actually, as Christians have claimed for two thousand years less a decade or two, a representative of a god, is about as implausible as Santa Claus making his once yearly journey to the homes of all the boys and girls in the world. So, whether there was an historical person at the centre of the myth — and that needs to be stressed — at the centre of the myth – of the Son of God, is completely irrelevant to anything that should concern you or me. If there was such a person, he lived a long time ago, and is only loosely connected with the mythology that Christians built up around him. If there wasn’t such a person, the myths remain roughly the same, and have the same import. The mythical Jesus of miracles and profound teachings (most of them, as it happens, borrowed), and his questionable morals, is forever beyond the reach of history. If there was a man, he would not recognise the mythology that grew up around his single human life. The birth and the passion stories are almost entirely prophecy historicised. The rest of the story is composed of sayings and deeds which can only with difficulty be ascribed to a human being. The importance of Jesus is the importance of the mythology that grew up around the name of a man who may or may not have lived in first century Judaea. Trying to pin it on a man is a hopeless gesture of faith or faction. I see no point in it.

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The trouble with revelation

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I apologise: though I sometimes do edit text after publication, this time publication happened by accident. I must have pressed by mistake the appropriate key sequence, and there, suddenly, it was. There are a number of differences between this and the one thus so unexpectedly published to the web!

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Many, if not most, religions claim to be founded on revelation, a concept which harbours so many problems that it is astounding that some people still think it can be used unproblematically. Drive through the countryside anywhere in North America, but especially in the United States, and you are bound to come upon a large billboard containing some minatory word from the Christian scriptures: “The wages of sin is death!”, “Prepare to meet thy God!”, “Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life!”, and others of that ilk. I have never bothered to take pictures of them. They are execrable excrescences and a blot on the landscape, but they reflect an odd tendency that people have of taking texts written by men (and perhaps, very occasionally, women) and investing them with ultimate significance, by supposing that they come from a god or other supernatural source. The Qu’ran is supposed to come from God via the angel Gabriel, or Jibreel, but a more confused pastiche of texts from different identifiable sources would be hard to find. The claim is, of course, spurious, and is based, not on examination of the text or the validation of its source, but on the alleged claim of a man who could not possibly have written it. There is absolutely no reason for thinking that the Qu’ran as we have it (in its various versions and recensions) is the work of a man named Muhammad. Muhammad is as loosely related to the text attributed to him as is Jesus to the works he is supposed to have done, or the words he is imagined to have said.

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The Very Idea that Texts can be Sacred is Absurd!

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Our ancestors must have been amazed that they could actually write things down, and that their thoughts could be preserved in stone, on clay tablets, on sheets or scrolls of papyrus or parchment. Just think of how astonishing this must have been to the first humans who first realised that their words could live, in a sense, forever. Of course, their actual preservation would often depend on the vagaries of history, and it must soon have occurred to those first writers that they could also make sure that the words of their competitors would not live on, simply by destroying whatever they were written on. At first, though, the wonder of being able to preserve words which, until that time, could only be spoken, and were as ephemeral as the sounds which carried them, depending for their preservation on their own and others’ memories, must have been overwhelming.

No doubt, by that time, phrases and common expressions, and even stories and tales of heroism, would have come to be remembered and repeated. Perhaps the wonder of language itself led to the incantatory repetition of certain words and phrases, and language may have developed pari passu with deeper resonances of originally undifferentiated experience, where dream and reality, trance and chemically induced transformations of consciousness bled into each other in ways that improved people’s ability to cope with a new-minted world full of dangers and opportunities. When and how modern Homo sapiens became consciously language-using animals is probably hidden in the past and unrecoverable; but most of us, who have very little idea of how many of the things in daily use actually work, and why they work — think of things like computers and aircraft, skyscrapers and spacecraft, computer tomography and magnetic resonance imaging – live perpetually in a region of perplexity and wonder, may have at least some idea of how language must have appeared to our earliest language-using ancestors, and how, around ancient campfires, the mystery of living between dreamland, and altered states of consciousness, and waking, was lived out.

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