Category Archives: Christianity

An Unpopular Position: Ban the Burqa

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This post is now available in Polish translation over at Racjonalista: thanks, as always, to Malgorzata,

I believe, contrary to what seems to be the customary liberal consensus, that such things as the veiling of women should be forbidden, not only because it expunges women from public space, but because it is inevitably coercive for some (if not most) women – and it is, I think, meant to be coercive. Even those women who don the burqa as an expression of religious piety, I suspect, mean it to be coercive to other women in the same community. We have been having a rather long – yet, for all that, civil – discussion about this on the last post – entitled “The New Atheism and the Problem of Islam” – and while we are, perhaps, no further ahead than when we began, I think the different territories have been mapped out with some clarity.

I won’t repeat that discussion here, because in this post I want to use as an example something that happened recently at the University of Leicester. A sold-out talk by Hamza Tzortzis* on the existence of god was strictly segregated: brothers (male) and sisters (female) directed to one side or the other:

segregation signs on door

According to an article in the Guardian:

A message on the group’s [the university's Islamic Society] website says: “In all our events, [the society] operate a strict policy of segregated seating between males and females.”

Nothing could be clearer than that.

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Islamic Theology and the Criticism of Islam

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Some time ago I published a sequence of posts on Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great. (I never did finish the series, since other things got in the way. Perhaps one day I will return and discuss the remainder of the chapters of Hitchens’ book.) The one particularly in question is this one: Hitchens’ “god is not Great”: An Assessment: XI: “The Lowly Stamp of Their Origin”: Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings. Late to the discussion, yet very welcome, is Rahman, who set out to correct some of Hitchens’ errors. This discussion has now gone through several cycles. What I am going to do now is to post Rahman’s latest comment, then I will comment on that, and I invite others who are interested to join in the discussion.

At the heart of this discussion is the question, which arose very early on with the new atheists, when challenged by Terry Eagleton, whether an atheist critic of religion had to be thoroughly acquainted with the theology of the religion being critiqued before venturing a publish a public criticism of that religion. This was answered, as you may remember, by PZ Myers, in his “Courtier’s Reply.” There’s even a Rationalwiki, as well as a Wikipedia entry under this heading – here and here. Essentially, the question at issue was whether a thorough acquaintance of a religion’s theology was necessary in order to launch an effective critique of the religion itself. In his London Review of Books review of The God Delusion, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching,” Eagleton, you will remember, puts it in these rather high-flown terms:

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

Rahman’s concerns are slightly different, but not so different that there is no relation between his concerns and those expressed by Eagleton. One of the issues over which we have differed is as to the reliability of oral transmission. I will consider these points briefly below. You can always go back to the beginnings of the discussion, if you like, by clicking on the link above which will take you to the original post, and the later discussion prompted by Rahman’s intervention. John K has also been taking part in the discussion.

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A World Without Jews

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The title of this post comes from the theme of a book by David Nirenberg which explores the relationship between Western civilisation and what Nirenberg calls anti-Judaism. He deliberately avoids the usual terminology of anti-Semitism, because he is dealing with a cultural phenomenon which is characteristic of Western culture: not a racism, per se, but a culturally embedded idea of Jews which has nothing really to do with real Jews themselves. It is an intellectual anti-Judaism and not (as such) a racial anti-Semitism, and, according to Nirenberg, anti-Judaism “has been at the very center of Western civilisation since the beginning.”

The quotation comes from a critical notice of Nirenberg’s book in The Tablet, which summarises the theme of Nirenberg’s book as follows:

From Ptolemaic Egypt to early Christianity, from the Catholic Middle Ages to the Protestant Reformation, from the Enlightenment to fascism, whenever the West has wanted to define everything it is not — when it wants to put a name to its deepest fears and aversions — Judaism has been the name that came most easily to hand.

According to Nirenberg, anti-Judaism

should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifice of Western thought. It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.

This is obviously a startlingly new way of understanding, not only Western culture itself, but the complex historical role that the Jews have been forced to play in its development.

Of course, the central concern of Nirenberg’s book is taken up with the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, in which Judaism (or, rather, a conception of Judaism which has little to do with Judaism as this has been understood and lived by the Jews themselves) plays the role of “the Other,” the negation in terms of which Western civilisation has sought to understand itself.

While I have not read the book, simply reading the short review in The Tablet seemed to bring me into familiar territory. It happened to me, suddenly, without warning, one Sunday morning, as I was giving my homily for the day. In fact, so startling did it seem to me that I was caught in mid-sentence, and spent the remainder of the time speaking about what had just occurred to me, that Christianity explicitly defined itself in opposition to an imagined Judaism. Anyone who has spent much time attending Christian worship will be familiar with the theme. It is an indelible part of the imaginative picture that Christians have of the Jews, and it is written deeply into New Testament texts. It has to do, basically, with a fundamental dualism in terms of which Christians understand their faith. There is, on the one hand, Jesus, the messenger of love, gentleness and compassion; and then, on the other hand, there are the so-called Scribes and Pharisees, the people of the law, whose world is composed of dead rules and regulations, stultifyingly moribund and judgemental, which thinks of religious faithfulness entirely in terms of externals which do not touch the sensitive inner life of true spirituality.

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Are there any religious experts? “Religion experts” on euthansia

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This post is now available in Polish translation over at Racjonalista. Thanks again go to Malgorzata.

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The Ottawa Citizen has an advice column which puts questions to so-called “religion experts,” who give answers on crucial issues facing individuals and society. There is a big problem with this, because religion experts are, almost by definition, not religion experts at all. What is there to be expert about? They might be experts in their own religion, but there is no such thing as a religion expert who is qualified to give religion’s answer to any question. A recent column in the Citizen’s “Ask the Religion Experts” column, for 31 January 2012 — thanks to Veronica Abbass for the link – asks the two questions: “Is euthanasia right? Would God want us to suffer?” And then the religion experts weigh in on the side of their favourite god. The nonsense that this makes of the questions should be clear right from the outset. We ask the experts their opinion, and all they can do is refer to the “experts” of their religion. According to Z, this is the way it is; according to Y, the truth is such-and-such, and so on. And, around the edges, a little lie or two will take you over the hump when reason fails.

The first one is perhaps the funniest. It’s by a Bahá’í scholar, Jack McLean. Seeing him described as a scholar reminds me of the day I took my M.Div. degree diploma and cut it to shreds. I no longer consider that to be a degree at all. It qualified me as an Anglican priest, but it no longer seems to me that there was anything to know, except, of course, historically, for the church does have a history (or perhaps I should say the churches have a history, for there is no point, during the whole history of Christianity, where there was an unquestioned unity within Christianity), but it is impossible to be a scholar of religion itself, for religion has no subject matter. The “theo” part of theology (the word ‘theology’ meaning, roughly, the logos of theos, or the reason, knowledge of god) is simply UA (on unauthorised absence), having departed his post, or, rather, never having been there in the first place, for all the confident pretence of religious believers, especially its officer class, to which, largely, the Ottawa Citizen has appealed for enlightenment upon a subject which has no object.

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Drip Drip Drip – Fundamentalist Tory MPs in Canada Continue their Backdoor “Pro-Life” Campaign

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Canadians should be very concerned about the continuing intrusion of fundamentalist MPs in life and death issues. Not long ago Mark Warawa (Member for Langley, BC) introduced a motion to “condemn discrimination against females occurring through sex-selective pregnancy termination.” While there is some justification for his concern, the purpose of the motion is to reintroduce control over women’s reproductivity into the law, which was ended in 1988. Warawa wants us to think that he introduced the motion as a support for the rights and dignity of women, portraying his Motion 408 as a move to end violence against women and girls. But this is a smoke screen. If this apparently woman-friendly motion were to be passed, it would open the door to much more control over women’s right to abortion. As I have stated before, it is important to change the attitude of immigrants so that women come to be valued. Primitive ideas of women’s subordinate position should be erased from the ethnic memory of those who have chosen to make a life in Canada, where women’s rights are equal to those of men. In this we are clearly failing, since we refuse to address the issue at the level of individual communities and practices which continue to disadvantage women. But women in general, including immigrant women, cannot be equal if they have no control over reproductive decisions, which means that abortion must not be reintroduced into Canada’s Criminal Code as it had been before 1988 merely on the pretext of dealing with misguided immigrants.

There have been other motions from backbench Tory MPs attempting to limit the abortion rights of Canadians (for example, Stephen Woodworth’s Motion 312, for which he was thanked by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada – these guys are not subtle!), and now backbench Tories have added to these intrusions by requesting the RCMP to investigate some abortions as murders! They call them “post abortion killings,” but there is no evidence that there is a conspiracy to kill children who have been born. In fact, according to Statistics Canada, there have been 491 such cases, but a statement from Statistics Canada shows clearly that these are not cases of murder or post abortion killings. According to the account in the Globe and Mail, Statistics Canada made a statement about these cases as follows:

Statistics Canada said the 491 cases that it counted during the 10-year period referred to matters where “the cause of death or stillbirth is an abortion.”

“These are included in national cause-of-death statistics because when the aborted fetus is born alive and subsequently dies, each event must be registered,” the federal agency said in a statement.

Statistics Canada added it also included stillbirths when “the aborted fetus is born dead but meets the provincial requirements [birth weight and/or gestational age].”

Again we are faced with a Tory smoke screen, trying to hide fundamentalist Christian dogma behind something that they think will arouse the concern of Canadians. This continuous drip drip drip of Christian intervention in Canada’s secular law is to be deplored, and it is time for Canadians to let these antediluvian religious hacks know that their attempts to import Christian (and doubtless other religious) prejudices into the law is unwelcome, and contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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Definitely the Conclusion of the Liberal Christian Theist Series

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Under my last post in this series (which I thought I had ended!) The Philosophical Primate made this comment:Gorilla

Eric, I am… puzzled. Specifically, by this:

The short answer to the question, of course, is that there is. No one can reasonably deny it. There are liberal Christian theists. There are even liberal Christian atheists, though most of them do not put it quite so bluntly.

What is puzzling is that you spend most of the rest of this post talking about those Christian atheists — for, as you note, that is the only possible honest description of Freeman, Cuppitt, Spong, et al — without ever returning to support the claim that there is a liberal Christian theism. Given your prior posts on this subject, there seems to be an intrinsic problem of inconsistency between being genuinely liberal in one’s theology/theism and maintaining any sort of commitment to the scriptures as God’s Word. Frankly, I took that line of argument to be a quite reasonable basis for denying that there can be genuinely liberal Christian theism, because to be both Christian and theistic must at minimum require treating the Christian holy text *as* holy, with all the illiberal implications thereof — those implications being what makes Spong’s “sins of scripture” sinful in his estimation. Indeed, the only Christian theist you discuss in this post, C.H. Dodd, seems to be striving for theological liberalism but failing, because he cannot escape that traditional view of scriptures as being the authoritative “Word of God.” I fear perhaps that, desiring not to go on too long, you left out something important you’d intended to say.

So, is there a liberal Christian theism? I say yes, but then I have to qualify my yes. I was going to write this as a comment in response to our furry philosopher, but it seemed more appropriate to bring it up front and face it a bit more publicly.

Let’s start with Dodd, because I do not think that he fails to be a theological liberal. What I think happens in Dodd’s case is that he takes Christianity as being inherently liberal. The conclusions that he comes to in the course of his book on the authority of the Bible are liberal ones, not liberal so far as the idea of the inspiration and authority of the Bible goes, perhaps, but liberal insofar as the message of the Bible, as he understands it, turns out to lead to a religion with liberal values, broadly speaking. He takes the critical-historical conclusions about the Bible seriously, and then, within the parameters set by the “higher criticism,” endeavours to locate a liberal message of love and toleration, and finds it. You may say, if you like, that he is reading this message into the text, and that is true. But that is true of everyone who reads a text as a sacred text having authority. Christian doctrine cannot be read in the biblical text. It may have seemed natural to the first Christians to think of Jesus as divine, given what is said in the gospels, but at no point in the gospels is there a clear statement that Jesus is the Son of God. In fact, in Mark, Jesus goes to some trouble to stress that he is the Son of Man. So, if you want to take Jesus as the Son of God, or to understand God as Three Persons in One God, you have to do a lot of creative reading. Thus, reading a liberal message in the Bible is not all that hard, if you single out, for particular notice, certain developmental themes that run through the Bible as a whole, but I will let you read Dodd if you want to find out how he does it. Spong does essentially the same thing, though it is hard to think that Spong remains a theist, whilst Dodd certainly was.

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Another Anti-Modernist Pope

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The Syllabus of Errors was a catalogue of sayings, gleaned from earlier papal documents, issued on 8th December 1865, in which certain propositions were condemned as heretical. Amongst the propositions condemned were the following:

“The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.” (No. 55)

“Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.” (No. 15) and that “It has been wisely decided by law, in some Catholic countries, that persons coming to reside therein shall enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship.” (No. 78)

“The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with, progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” (No. 80)

Notice how these condemn precisely those freedoms upon which liberal democracies are founded. In his homily at a mass celebrated on the Epiphany (6th January), three new archbishops were consecrated in St. Peter’s Basilica, and the pope reiterated the last of these errors of modernism, firmly rejecting, in the words of the Reuters report, ”suggestions that the Church should change to suit public opinion.” He told the newly ordained archbishops that courage was needed to stand up to the “intolerant agnosticism.” According to the report the Pope Ratzinger said:

Today’s agnosticism has its own dogmas and is extremely intolerant regarding anything that would question it and the criteria it employs.

He went on to add that

the courage to contradict the prevailing mindset is particularly urgent for a bishop today. He must be courageous.

At the same time the pope denounced attempts “to push religion out of public debate” (which is a close relative of Error Number 55 above).

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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 Problem with the Sanctity-of-Life Doctrine

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One of the things that having Scott McKenna’s comments have done for me is to force me to focus more attention on assisted dying. Of course, this blog is about that, but it’s also about opposing the interference of the religions in the right-to-die, and sometimes my opposition to religion gets the lion’s share of attention. I don’t regret that, because I do believe not only that religion is one of the biggest obstacles to assisted dying, but that, in other respects, religion is a harmful influence on society, and we would be better off if the religions would take an appropriately marginal place in society, and stop trying to impose their priorities on the rest of us. But I also acknowledge that I have not done as much work on assisted dying as I should have done, so the last few days have taken up the slack a bit, and I have Scott McKenna to thank for it.

I think it is important to note that Scott has received complaints from “head office” about his speaking out in favour of assisted dying, as he mentions in a comment. So, his standing with those who support assisted dying has not been without some cost for him, but, as he says, “head office” isn’t the church. There are people who don’t hew to the party line, and they are part of the church too. Indeed, we know this is true, for, despite the fact that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops tried very hard in the recent election to convince their members to support Mitt Romney, a majority of them, going by exit polls, did not. So, some Christians are better than their “head office” with their more worldly concerns of power and influence, and it is only fair to point this out, since my temptation sometimes is to tar all Christians, indeed, all religious people, with the same brush, and it is good to remember that many religious people, while remaining, according to their lights, loyal to the best that they see in the message of their religion, do not support the more extreme stands of their leaders.

Of course, one problem with this is that, by remaining in the church, those who oppose the church’s policies give the kind of support, in terms of numbers, that gives weight to church leaders when they speak in public and insist on being taken seriously by politicians and others in charge of public policy. For the churches, remaining relevant, in the sense of maintaining a powerful lobby position with the powers that be, is very important, since once you are truly marginalised, and no one in civil authority is listening to you, the less likely it is that you will be able to help shape laws which reflect the moral preferences of your particular organisation. A lot of people right now are saying that the Church of England has fouled its own nest, and has lost credibility, because, after decades of effort, the bid to enable women to be consecrated bishops has failed. A lot of people will feel that the Church of England is no longer a place for respectable people, because persisting in its rather petulant opposition to women bishops, while allowing women priests, they are showing a kind of selective sexism for which there is no justification. Needless to say, the Roman Catholic Church is worse in this respect, because they won’t allow women to become deacons let alone bishops, and, what with the latest scandal in the form of allowing a woman in Ireland to die, instead of performing a therapeutic abortion (of a miscarrying foetus), the message of the Roman Catholic Church about the value of women has been made rather brutally clear. I’m amazed that people still belong. Hilary Mantel, a few weeks ago, said that the Roman Catholic Church is no longer fit for respectable people, and I’m inclined to agree. If the only way to force change in the church is to refuse to associate with it and its antediluvian beliefs, then disassociation should be the order of the day.

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Response to Scott McKenna on Christianity and Assisted Dying

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First of all, let me say how appreciative I am that the Rev’d Scott McKenna responded to my post, Is there a Christian case for assisted dying? In that post I took Scott’s arguments in his address to a conference at the Royal Society of Scotland, in Edinburgh, as a foil for the things that I wanted to say, and he has responded in detail. I have taken the liberty of linking a pdf version of that address here. I copy his response — a comment in the comment stream of the earlier post — here:

Eric, thank you for your comment on assisted dying.   I read it with real interest.   Let me respond with five brief points.   1)  As you know, suicide is not condemned in the Hebrew or Christian Bible.   Samson committed ‘suicide’ and is held up as a giant of the faith in the New Testament Book of Hebrews.   Samson pushed over the pillars in order to kill the Philistine kings and himself; he wanted to end his own suffering.   He is nowhere condemned.   2)  I enjoyed reading about  St Augustine and his handling of the sixth commandment.   Context is everything:  Augustine was responding to the situation in which Christians were volunteering for martyrdom (in order to enter the Kingdom sooner).   The saint wished to stop this and, through his handling of the sixth commandment, made it an offence to take one’s own life.    Augustine’s commentary is not concerned with the ending of human life for a terminally ill patient.   3)  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’.   4)   I do support the choice for ending human life in circumstances other than terminal illness.   I think of Tony Nicklinson and another recent UK case of a 23 year old paralysed from the neck down.   Again, for me, the issue here is the theological model.   God is not to be conceived of as sovereign, distant, detached and unloving.   It seems to me an act of the deepest faith to end one’s life, to honourably escape intolerable suffering, and let oneself go into the hands of God.   God knows intolerable suffering from the inside:  I cannot imagine that God would be anything other than merciful to one whose physical, emotional, mental and spiritual suffering was unbearable.   5)   Part of the churches’ problem at the present time is that, in many areas, the theology has not caught up with life.   This has been the case throughout history and, in the Bible, there are numerous examples of theology being forced to take a leap forward.   As in all disciplines, a theory or accepted practice exists until it breaks under the pressure of new knowledge or insight, so too in theology.   Eric, thank you for your hugely interesting blog!!

What follows is an expanded version of my response to this comment. I asked him if I might call him Scott, and then took the liberty of doing so. And then I continued:

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