He moves in implausible ways

There’s an oddly lovely exhibition at Wellcome Collection at the moment of ‘Mexican Miracle Paintings’ – votive offerings from people in small towns in Mexico, dating back over a century, expressing thanks for the assistance of God and his saints in times of trouble.

The art isn’t world-class and nor is the prose of the messages that go with each picture, but the whole point is that these are heartfelt expressions of ordinary people’s hopes and fears – and the whole effect is quite touching.

That said – and far be it from me to judge other people’s faith, especially at Christmastime – a few of the stories didn’t leave me completely convinced that divine intervention really was at work:

I thank Our Lady of Zapopan for giving me back my health. I was suffering cancer of the face and on 17 September 1936 it was considered to be incurable. I pleaded to the Holy Virgin of Zapopan and on 17 March 1941 I was completely cured through the intervention of the Holy Virgin and the doctor Edmundo Aviña.

Miracle granted by Our Holy Mother of San Juan to Antonia Lopez on that memorable 18 January 1888…while, during the flooding in Leon, seeing herself and her family in great danger along with 15 other people, implored with all her heart to the Holy Mother of San Juan. On hearing her prayer, our Divine Lady intervened and they were miraculously saved by climbing a tree and for such a great miracle she dedicates this retablo.

In Matehuala on 7 January 1937, Juan Hernández became so drunk that he completely lost his senses, to the point of walking into the mountains where he passed out all night. The following morning he returned and headed for the train station, but before getting there he felt so ill that he kept thinking he was going to die. Nevertheless, he managed to get back home. His wife Lazara Alonso, noticing what a serious state he was in, pleaded with all her heart to Saint Francis of Assisi of Catorce to restore his health as he had to support her and her child. If he would intervene then she would commission a retablo for such a great favour and, because it was granted exactly as asked, she presents this retablo giving a truthful testimony of the work of his divine majesty in this evident miracle.

Thanks to God All Mighty Saint Francis of Assisi, the Seraphim I thank you with all my heart for this miraculous accomplishment: a warehouse with multiple uses. “Potrero del Moro” Ranch, C del Oro, Zac. For the resistant structure (foundations, columns, walls, internal structure, window frames, beams and paving slabs). He thanks you with all his heart.

Hmm.

Merry Christmas!

Cameron’s bad faith

This is (some of) what David Cameron had to say about religion and secularism yesterday:

The Bible has helped to shape the values which define our country. … Responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-sacrifice, love, pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities - these are the values we treasure.
Yes, they are Christian values. And we should not be afraid to acknowledge that. But they are also values that speak to us all – to people of every faith and none. And I believe we should all stand up and defend them.
Those who oppose this usually make the case for secular neutrality. They argue that by saying we are a Christian country and standing up for Christian values we are somehow doing down other faiths. And that the only way not to offend people is not to pass judgement on their behaviour.
I think these arguments are profoundly wrong.
…those who advocate secular neutrality in order to avoid passing judgement on the behaviour of others fail to grasp the consequences of that neutrality or the role that faith can play in helping people to have a moral code. …for people who do have a faith, their faith can be a helpful prod in the right direction.
And whether inspired by faith or not – that direction, that moral code, matters.

And this adapted version illustrates how utterly wrong he is:

The Conservative Party has helped to shape the values which define our country. … Responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-sacrifice, love, pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities - these are the values we treasure.
Yes, they are Conservative values. And we should not be afraid to acknowledge that. But they are also values that speak to us all – to people of every party and none. And I believe we should all stand up and defend them.
Those who oppose this usually make the case for secular neutrality. They argue that by saying we are a Conservative country and standing up for Conservative values we are somehow doing down other parties. And that the only way not to offend people is not to pass judgement on their behaviour.
I think these arguments are profoundly wrong.
…those who advocate secular neutrality in order to avoid passing judgement on the behaviour of others fail to grasp the consequences of that neutrality or the role that party politics can play in helping people to have a moral code. …for people who do have a party, their party can be a helpful prod in the right direction.
And whether inspired by party politics or not – that direction, that moral code, matters.

Cameron’s abuse of the term “secular neutrality” is striking: it means religious neutrality, not – as he seems to think – moral neutrality. This isn’t a petty point about semantics, much as I enjoy those. I’m actually trying to take him at his word and offer some helpful advice (he’s a regular reader here, and he knows I’m a big fan).

The final sentence of the quote (in either version) is, I agree, the most important. But it’s crippled by the rest.

If what you’re trying to promote is a moral code, a set of values that most of us agree are pretty sound even if we often don’t live up to them, you do not do it by branding those values with a sectarian label that lots of people don’t accept.

Yes, he litters the speech with polite caveats that of course people who aren’t religious can be moral. But his central argument rests on the opposite (and false) assumption that you can’t steer clear of religion without also abandoning morality.

Christianity has been a huge factor in British history. It’s still a big presence, but it’s fallen a long way. In terms of what British people today believe and practise (or don’t), it’s hardly accurate or helpful to say we’re “a Christian country”. If he can’t think of a way to promote morality without talking about “Christian values”, he’s doomed to fail.

God is a Lib Dem

Either that, or the Pope has been getting spin lessons from Nick Clegg:

God is always faithful to his promises, but he often surprises us in the way he fulfils them.

Behead those who insult atheism!

Oh dear:

One of the Pope's senior advisers has pulled out of the papal visit to Britain, after saying the UK is a "Third World country" marked by "a new and aggressive atheism". Cardinal Walter Kasper, 77, made the remarks in a German magazine interview.
The Vatican said the cardinal had not intended "any kind of slight", and was referring to the UK's multicultural society. It added that he had simply pulled out of the Pope's visit due to illness.

Or, perhaps, rather than beheading him, we could send his eminence our condolences on falling unwell and our best wishes for a speedy recovery.

‘Did the earth move for you, darling (you foul temptress)?’

Iranian Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi has been doing his bit to make the Vatican look sane:

Many women who dress inappropriately... cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity and incite extramarital sex in society, which increases earthquakes.

(Hat tip: NWW)

Condoms: 0.0000003% more mass murder

It’s the turn of Vincent Nichols, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, to try to say something about condoms that’s consistent with dogma but not obviously atrocious. Never an easy task, and another reminder that organised religion has more in common with party politics than it likes to admit.

Just to be helpful, I thought I’d make a chart showing how very much damage condoms cause to potential human lives:


And now, those of you familiar with my sense of humour may be able to guess which song is on the other end of this link.

Infallibility means never having to do the right thing

And so, as the Vatican’s treatment its own paedophile priests makes David Cameron’s and William Hague’s incuriosity about Lord Ashcroft’s tax status look like waterboarding, my mind is drawn to a recent study in Psychological Science, on the concept of ‘moral balancing’.

Sonya Sachdeva and colleagues “tested the idea that a sense of moral superiority might limit additional future moral behavior”. The results of their experiments “suggest that affirming a moral identity leads people to feel licensed to act immorally”.

That is, if people feel “too moral,” they might not have sufficient incentive to engage in moral action because prosocial behavior is inherently costly to the individual. For example, people might not feel the need to donate blood or volunteer if they have already established their reputation as a moral person. This type of response can be thought of as moral licensing. People may be licensed to refrain from good behavior when they have accrued a surplus of moral currency.

I wonder.

Orders of magnitude: Usshering Ussher

The age of the universe, I have discovered, is 23 hours 4 minutes and 6 seconds.

Well, obviously not. That’s a bizarrely small and bizarrely precise number. Even if you’re a young-Earth creationist, you should be looking at this and thinking that I’d have to be out of my mind to seriously believe that.

Now you know how the rest of us feel about you.

Archbishop James Ussher notoriously calculated the date of creation to be 4004 BC, just 6014 years ago. The best current science, using observations of cosmic microwave background radiation, puts the age of the universe at 13.73 billion years (plus or minus 120m). So Ussher was out by a magnitude of around 2.3 million times.

So here’s where my 23 hours 4 minutes and 6 seconds comes in. If you take how wrong Ussher was, and then apply the scale of his mistake to his own number, this is what you get. From a young-Earther point of view, this age would look as ridiculous as the young-Earth notion looks to anyone who respects science rather than guesstimates based on mythical genealogy.

(You think I’m kicking a straw man? In the UK, about a third of people think young-Earth creationism – less than 10,000 years ago – is either definitely or probably true. In the US, over 40% believe in it. That’s a lot of straw.)

Organised religion tends towards politics

Does this sound like the relationship between two groups who have differing views on the interpretation of God’s will and on the route to salvation of our immortal souls?

The former archbishop of Canterbury criticised the Roman Catholic Church this weekend, branding as "inexcusable" its failure to consult leading Church of England clergy on the Pope's invitation for Anglo-Catholics to join him.
Lord Carey gave a cautious welcome to the proposals from Rome but said he was "distressed" that his successor had received just two weeks' notice of them.
He said that the move by Pope Benedict XVI could help clergy in the Church of England who were unhappy with the ordination of women bishops.
However, he urged the current Archbishop, Dr Rowan Williams, to protest at the lack of consultation.
…
Under the proposals, announced on Tuesday, Anglican congregations could join the Catholic church en masse rather than forming small, breakaway churches.
Married Anglican priests choosing to convert to Catholicism would be permitted to be ordained as Catholic priests but would be unable to become bishops.

Or does it sound like a political pissing contest between a couple of institutions vying for territory?

Taking God’s name in vain – the musical

I don’t know what Karen Armstrong is talking about. Which makes two of us:

One of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp. We constantly push our thoughts to an extreme, so that our minds seem to elide naturally into an apprehension of transcendence.

As part of her ongoing campaign to convince us that religion is best defined by postmodern academics rather than by churchgoers, she tells us:

Because “God” is infinite, nobody can have the last word.

Very reasonably, Ophelia is unimpressed, demanding: “how does she know God is infinite?” and rolling her eyes at the scare-quotes.

But Armstrong may have a point here, in a way. If we take the quotes as meaning that she’s talking about the word ‘God’ rather than any putative being with that name or job title, then we can read her as claiming that because postmodern academics can use ‘God’ to mean anything at all, then we’ll never be able to get them to shut up.

Which is true enough.

But I suspect that’s she’s not trying to make this point. She’s actually using “God” to stand for “transcendence”, “divinity”, “inexpressible otherness” and “the sacred” – all terms that she also uses, to equally obscure effect. It’s as though she’s doing her damnedest to prove her claim that “Language has limits that we cannot cross.”

But my favourite passage in the article is this one:

Music has always been inseparable from religious expression, because, like religion at its best, music marks the “limits of reason”. Because a territory is defined by its extremities, it follows that music must be “definitively” rational.

I can only see five things wrong with this.

1. Of course music is separable from religious expression: there’s plenty of irreligious music and plenty of unmusical religious expression. I refer you to the Taliban’s banning of music, to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and to every deaf religious person who has ever lived.


2. Music doesn’t mark the “limits of reason”: it has both rational and non-rational aspects, but by the same token you might as well say that music marks the limits of unreason, or that a cheese and wine party marks the limits of dairy produce.


3. For the same reason, religion (at its best or otherwise) doesn’t mark the limits of reason either.


4. The (less-than-inseparable) relationship between music and religious expression doesn’t hold “because” both have rational and non-rational aspects: plenty of other art forms also have these properties (dance, sculpture, poetry, stand-up comedy), as do non-art types of human activity (sport, parenting, conversation). No pair of these are especially related simply because of this commonality. Religion has used music (among many other methods of expression) because it’s very effective.


5. A territory is delineated, not “defined”, by its extremities: Britain is mostly not coastline. A territory is defined by its extremities and what’s contained within them. Even a geometric figure as simple as a straight line is defined not by the two points at either end but by those points and the fact that there’s a line between them.

But, if we ignore these small cavils, I reckon it probably would follow that music must be “definitively” rational. Although I’m not sure what that would mean.

What’s new about ‘new atheism’?

HE Baber says (via Ophelia):

Most people I know are atheists. But they're atheists of the old kind who have no particular interest in proselytising because they do not believe that anything of importance hangs on whether or not people believe in God and because they recognise that theological claims are controversial. Unlike the New Atheists they don't think they have discovered, or invented, something new and interesting.

Ophelia thinks that this is obviously false, and she’s right. But there is something new afoot.

So, what is ‘new atheism’? The phrase, apparently coined in 2006, seems mostly to be used pejoratively by critics, often accompanied by the words ‘strident’, ‘shrill’, ‘aggressive’, ‘intolerant’, ‘arrogant’ and ‘dogmatic’.

But what the term seems to refer to is people (there’s no coherent ‘new atheist’ movement) who believe, and are not afraid to say out loud, most if not all of the following: there is no god; belief in god is irrational; irrational faith is not good for the individual; religion is not good for society; religion is not good for government. Obviously, none of these positions is remotely new. But what’s new is the prominence of a few people taking these positions publicly and robustly (most notably Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins – see this article and this video). What’s also new, crucially, is the context in which they do so.

As far as I can make out, ‘new atheism’ is a fairly small cultural phenomenon, existing primarily in parts of the media and academia, which is largely a response to the changed dynamic between Christianity and Islam in Western countries over the last decade or two. The UK story, very roughly, runs as follows:

From around the Rushdie fatwa, Islam in the UK has been increasingly willing to assert itself as a social and political force. Muslims in the country had been and remain mostly of south Asian origin, facing prejudice and often great poverty. Until the late 1980s, though, talk had been more of ‘Asians’ than of ‘Muslims’. This was to change, and of course the religious aspect of their identities became more prominent and more politicised after 9/11.

The political mainstream - mostly Christian and post-Christian in culture if not religion – has mostly responded by seeking accommodation with non-extremists. Islamic organisations were nurtured and listened to eagerly, religious ‘community leaders’ sought out and put on official task forces, and visible efforts made to promote Islam as part of a ‘multi-faith’ society.

Many Christian leaders and commentators, though, didn’t like the way this was going. It seemed to them that their (majority) religion was being ignored, taken for granted and even demoted, and so they made the effort to speak out on political and cultural matters from a more self-confidently Christian perspective. No doubt they had always said such things, but they took advantage of a new climate in which religion – in the form of Islam – had become much more of a talking point, and of a press that was keen for another twist in the story of the decade.

Some of these ‘new Christians’ (as it’s equally absurd to call them) were openly critical of Islam; others were conciliatory, focusing on the need for people of faith to come together.

All of which left people of no faith out in the cold.

The rise of political Islam in the UK – sometimes in the slipstream of extremists abroad, sometimes in opposition to them – presented Western critics of religion with something new. There had been little mileage in taking on Christianity, which had usually seemed an inoffensive, unremarkable default setting: near-omnipresent yet barely visible.

But Islam, brought to public attention through the worst atrocities of its vilest adherents, created scope and appetite for discussing the flaws of religion afresh. For most Brits, it was an alien religion: people wanted to know more, they were inclined to greater suspicion, and it had no stock of cultural goodwill to draw upon.

Then the Christian reassertion came, and the government felt bound by even-handedness to listen to all ‘faith groups’ alike. Religious influence over public policy – most notably in education – grew, and a political fightback became more pressing. Atheists, secularists and humanists spoke out, saying that religion shouldn’t get special treatment in politics, that most ‘religious hatred’ is inspired by rival religions against each other, that people with ‘faith’ aren’t thereby more virtuous or insightful than those without, and indeed that this whole god idea is deeply suspect.

The reaction to that, of course, was righteous indignation at these strident, shrill, aggressive, intolerant, arrogant, dogmatic atheists for daring to disagree without pulling their punches.

There wasn’t a ‘new atheism’. There was a new need for atheism, and for the humanist values and secular politics that often go with it.

Outside the instructions of some supervisory being

I don’t usually want people to persist in their mistakes, but I do hope that Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, keeps up his belief in God. The trouble is that he doesn’t seem able to conceive of how to be ethical without some big invisible bloke who runs a tablet-carving factory. This means that if Nichols ever lost his faith, he could well end up quite a nasty person.

This is occasioned by his comments on assisted suicide – a horrible enough issue without the Church wading in to further complicate (and oversimplify) it. But, believing that “life is a gift” from God, Nichols can straightforwardly say that this should never happen.

But without that assumption, he’s unable to stop himself slipping from the idea that it’s sometimes justifiable for someone who’s terminally and agonisingly ill to take their own life, possibly with assistance, to “an absolute moral entitlement to have whatever kind of death we choose” to “the philosophy that proclaims individual rights above all other considerations” to “the relativist insistence that what is good is a matter of personal judgment”.

And from there he can’t help but slide on to:

Is human life just something we produce, whether by sexual intercourse or in a laboratory, and ultimately to be created, aborted or disposed of at will?

And:

Once life is reduced to the status of a product, the logical step is to see its creation and disposal in terms of quality control.

And:

If my life has no objective value, then why should anyone else care for it?

Alas. Without God, he can’t distinguish between the views that (a) the individual human being is the fundamental unit of what matters and so we should be allowed to do with our lives what we judge to be best, taking into account the effects on others; and (b) nothing matters and we might as well treat ourselves and each other as commodities.

It’s a sad case in support of GK Chesterton’s view that “When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing – they believe in anything.” If so, the safest thing would be to not believe in God in the first place. That’s hardly useful advice for the existing believer, but it does suggest that it’s damnably risky to bring up children to base their morality on religion.

On a much lighter note, Mitchell and Webb’s Abraham puts it thus:

Like I have any chance of forming an independent basis of right and wrong outside the instructions of some supervisory being! No, Lord, I am your bitch!

Armstronging Armstrong

Karen Armstrong says:

The extraordinary and eccentric emphasis on "belief" in Christianity today is an accident of history that has distorted our understanding of religious truth. We call religious people "believers", as though acceptance of a set of doctrines was their principal activity…
All good religious teaching – including such Christian doctrines as the Trinity or the Incarnation – is basically a summons to action. Yet instead of being taught to act creatively upon them, many modern Christians feel it is more important to "believe" them.

But of course we’re not meant to believe that religion isn’t really about belief, because if we did that then we’d be wrong, as all the religious people who believe things could attest; instead, Armstrong’s piece is basically a summons to action, specifically to nod sagely to ourselves as if in recognition of some amorphous wisp of ineffable wisdom. To take her literally would be extraordinary and eccentric.

She goes on:

Stories of heroes descending to the underworld were not regarded as primarily factual but taught people how to negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche. In the same way, the purpose of a creation myth was therapeutic; before the modern period no sensible person ever thought it gave an accurate account of the origins of life.

The purpose of this passage is therapeutic: it teaches us how to negotiate the obscure regions of the Guardian’s website. No sensible person thinks that such articles are to be regarded as primarily factual. Rather, they are insatiably self-consuming metaphors. As Wittgenstein so ably put it: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must throw together boilerplate faux-profundities until one’s wordcount is reached.”

And she goes on:

Religious doctrines are a product of ritual and ethical observance, and make no sense unless they are accompanied by such spiritual exercises as yoga, prayer, liturgy and a consistently compassionate lifestyle. Skilled practice in these disciplines can lead to intimations of the transcendence we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Dao. Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd.

Discussions of religion make no sense unless they are accompanied by such mental exercises as thinking, and knowing that religious doctrines are also the product of things written in ancient books that people hold to be true and then try to convince other people of. Without a factual belief in God’s existence, the concept of praying to him remains incoherent, incredible and even absurd.

And on:

But during the modern period, scientific logos became so successful that myth was discredited, the logos of scientific rationalism became the only valid path to truth, and Newton and Descartes claimed it was possible to prove God's existence, something earlier Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians had vigorously denied.

And during the post-post-(I lose count)-postmodern period, woolly hand-waving became so successful that rational thought and historical knowledge were discredited, convolutedly empty pick-n-mix mysticism became the only valid path to truth, and Armstrong claimed that pre-Newtonian theologians had denied it possible to prove God's existence, something that the 13th-century Thomas Aquinas and 11th-century St Anselm had vigorously denied.

(See also Norm and Shuggy on Armstrong.)

Paradise Lost, literature admired, humanity demoted

I really enjoyed Armando Iannucci’s BBC programme on Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ last week (available to watch here until Tuesday).

I’ve never read or even dipped into it, even though I picked up a copy in a second-hand bookshop some years back, which has been sitting on my shelf ever since, making me feel slightly more cultured by its mere presence.

The great thing about the programme was that it mostly consisted of an intelligent person being really enthusiastic about something he adored. Very good to watch. I think my two favourite parts were when he went through the ‘darkness visible’ passage, stopping every few words to remark on the ingenuity of the construction, and when he sat down with a first edition and said that it might not make very good television but that he just wanted to read it!

My only critical thought – and I say this, perilously, as someone who hasn’t read the thing and who dropped out of English lit A-level after three weeks – was his discussion of the last few lines:

Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Most of what Armando says about these seems fair, but he claims that the ending is “intensely secular” with “no mention of God”.

Not directly, but think about how two people, “hand in hand”, could be said to take “their solitary way”. The paradox equates godlessness with solitude; Milton suffuses these last lines with God’s absence.

It’s a terribly sad attitude, and a common one - voiced more recently and more feebly by a preacher that Ophelia Benson heard on a radio programme:

Then the preacher goes off on a little rant… of the 'how do atheists do it?' variety. He can't even conceive of it - it must be so bleak - if this is all there is - with no one to turn to. Davidson [the programme’s host] says, mildly, 'We have each other.' The preacher says, in a pitying voice, 'But human beings are not...dependable.'

I think that attitude is one of the enduring tragedies of humanity: that we aren’t good enough for ourselves or for each other.

If it weren’t a beautiful sunny day that I wanted to be out in, I might now launch into a rhetorical riff about how the invention of religion was our own Fall – when we ate the fruit of the tree of fantasy, and came to imagine that we could be newly clad in divine silk, like the fairytale emperor.

But that would be a bit glib, and a bit combative. Milton was no fool, and ‘Paradise Lost’ is clearly far more than a clever and elegant piece of Christian PR. Well worth a read, methinks.

Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed

I don’t mean to sound violent, but can somebody please blow those Saudi theocratic child-abusing bastards off the face of the Earth?

“In good Catholic eyes a person's sexual orientation does not matter” my arse

Vincent Nichols, the new Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, talking this week about advertising for condoms and abortions:

One of the things I regret is that too often in our society a person's whole identity is shaped by their sexuality, or by their sexual orientation. In good Catholic eyes a person's sexual orientation does not matter.

And yet:

Before new sexual orientation laws, guaranteeing equality in goods and services for the gay community were introduced in April 2007, Archbishop Nichols said the legislation contradicted the faith's "moral values". Speaking at a mass at St Chad's Cathedral in Birmingham, he said: "It is simply unacceptable to suggest that the resources of the faith communities ... can work in co-operation with public authorities only if the faith communities accept not simply a legal framework, but also the moral standards at present being touted by government."
He failed in his attempts to get the Catholic adoption agencies exempted from sexual orientation regulations, which forced them to consider gay couples as parents.

By pure chance, yesterday I was watching the Father Ted episode ‘A Song for Europe’, in which Ted and Dougal get picked as Ireland’s entry in the Eurosong Competition:

Charles Hedges, the producer of the show talks to Ted in their dressing room. Ted mistakes the show’s host as being Charles professional partner…
Charles: No, he’s my lover
Ted: (dumbfounded) … he’s, he’s quite a catch! This is my partner, Father Dougal McGuire – not my sexual partner! I mean my partner that I do the song with.
Charles: Yes, I guessed that
Ted: Of course you did – not that there’s anything wrong with that type of thing
Charles: I thought the Catholic Church thought that type of thing was inherently wrong
Ted: Yes, it does. The whole ‘gay’ thing. I suppose it’s a bit of a puzzle to us all. It must be fun though – not the… you know, but the night clubs and the whole rough and tumble of homosexual activity. You know, having boyfriends when you’re a man! Anyway, don’t mind what the church thinks – it used to think the Earth was flat! You know, sometimes the Pope says things he doesn’t really mean. We all get things wrong – even the Pope.
Charles: What about Papal infallibility?
Ted: Yes… Is it for everything? The infallibility, do you know?
Charles: I don’t know
Ted: Right, anyhow, nothing to do with me…

And, in other news, ‘Panicked, Sweat-Covered Pope Reverses Longstanding Ban On Abortion’.

The scourge of Keplarism

The latest post from Alonzo Fyfe deserves a wide readership. Not that I can give it one, of course, just doing my bit:

I consider it to be a moral imperative that we take action to combat the habit of teaching, in our public schools, the doctrine that the sun, and not the earth, is the center of the solar system.
…
This theory was first proposed by Johannes Keplar. Since then, Keplarists have taken control of the scientific community, driving out all other competing theories. These days the scientific community is involved in its own crusade to demand that all scientists adhere (or, at least, publicly profess) allegiance to the Heliocentric theory.
…
Unfortunately, when we teach children that the earth is a mere speck of dust circling the sun, and not the center of the universe, they cannot help but draw the conclusion that neither they nor the rest of humanity has any special significance. …
We can see the problem by simply noting the historical fact that, throughout history, no regimes have killed as many people or done as much harm to their fellow human beings then those regimes that were lead by Keplarists. Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, every one of these leaders – responsible, between them, for hundreds of millions of deaths – were Keplarists. …
I want to remind the reader that Keplarism is just a theory. It is known, even among scientists, as the heliocentric THEORY of the solar system. It is not a fact, and it should not be taught as if it were a fact. …

Read it all.

Because all roads in life lead to Spaghetti Junction

Paulie is concerned that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is being outpaced by the recent atheist bus adverts, and the Christian ones that followed it. He’s asking for donations to set up a Pastafarian bus ad campaign.

Already taken care of, my brother:


(This piece of guerrilla advertising has been brought you by the fundamentalist al-Dente network. With some help from here.)

Papal bull and corporate manslaughter

Ratzinger’s been at it again…

Pope Benedict XVI, who is making his first papal visit to Africa, has said that handing out condoms is not the answer in the fight against HIV/Aids. The pontiff, who preaches marital fidelity and abstinence, said the practice only increased the problem.

When will the religious right understand that it’s beside the point whether abstinence or monogamy prevent AIDS better than condom use? The point is that public programmes to promote abstinence or monogamy prevent AIDS less well than public programmes to promote condom use.

It’s a rhetorical question, of course. For the importance of public health evaporates when there’s an opportunity for a good bit of moralising. And who cares about a bodycount when you can claim a soulcount?

God, Judge Death and original sin

(Pictures by Brian Bolland and Michelangelo)

When I was younger, I was a fan of the comic 2000AD, which featured Judge Dredd. The nastiest of Dredd’s enemies over the years was Judge Death. This superfiend and his followers were undead law enforcers from another dimension, and worked on the twisted logic that, because all crime is committed by the living, all life should therefore be a crime.

As a result, they went around killing everyone: “The crime is life – the sentence is death!” Unreasonable and not very nice at all.

The similarity to original sin has only just occurred to me. Let me take a step upmarket from Wikipedia and go to the Catholic Encyclopedia, which describes it as “a consequence of [Adam’s] first sin, the hereditary stain with which we are born on account of our origin or descent”.

Adam and Eve were created in a state of grace; by their actions, they forfeited this, falling into physical and spiritual mortality; the rest of us, though, don’t get this initial benefit of the doubt (a sort of spiritual Lamarckism: the descendants inherit not the innate condition of the parents but an acquired characteristic). It seems unfair on the rest of us, though.

The Encyclopedia explains:

by the sin of Adam [man] has been deprived only of the Divine gifts to which his nature had no strict right, the complete mastery of his passions, exemption from death, sanctifying grace, the vision of God in the next life.

So it’s not that we’re being positively punished for original sin; rather, we’re deprived of a set of privileges because of it. But the lack of these privileges does expose us to harm, though. It seems a rough deal. As Shaggy once protested, in a slightly different context: “It wasn’t me.” I didn’t eat any apples. I didn’t listen to any serpents and/or rib-women. I didn’t disobey any commands. And I have an alibi: it was, as James Ussher can confirm, a good 5981 years before my birth.

Apparently, though, there’s a perfectly good sense in which we can all be held responsible on this count. The Encyclopedia quotes Thomas Aquinas:

An individual can be considered… as part of a whole, a member of a society… an act can be his although he has not done it himself, nor has it been done by his free will but by the rest of the society or by its head, the nation being considered as doing what the prince does… Thus the multitude of men who receive their human nature from Adam is to be considered as a single community or rather as a single body… If the man, whose privation of original justice is due to Adam, is considered as a private person, this privation is not his 'fault', for a fault is essentially voluntary. If, however, we consider him as a member of the family of Adam, as if all men were only one man, then his privation partakes of the nature of sin on account of its voluntary origin, which is the actual sin of Adam.

And it adds:

Being a distinct person I am not strictly responsible for the crime of another; the act is not mine. Yet, as a member of the human family, I am supposed to have acted with its head who represented it with regard to the conservation or the loss of grace. I am, therefore, responsible for my privation of grace, taking responsibility in the largest sense of the word. This, however, is enough to make the state of privation of grace in a certain degree voluntary, and, therefore, "without absurdity it may be said to be voluntary" (St. Augustine).

With all due respect to the intellects of Aquinas, Augustine and others… How can anyone accept this reasoning, except when they’re wanting to paper over one of the cracks in the belief system to which they’ve already committed?

It may have been (and in some circles still is) culturally common to blame subjects for the conduct of their rulers, or children for the dishonour of their parents, and that fact no doubt lends some superficial credibility to Aquinas’s account. But why should this standard be the right one for God to hold? Outside the realm of original sin, Christianity treats souls individually: if your parents and grandparents committed a huge number of awful sins, you are judged no more harshly than the offspring of good people.

To imagine that my role and yours in the Fall are “voluntary” is an “absurdity”. This “responsibility in the largest sense of the word” is empty, and to treat it otherwise stinks: the doctrine can’t get off the ground without taking a base human prejudice, elevating it to the level of moral principle and then nailing it to God’s mast.

Sin entered the world with human life; we’re all human, so we’re all sinners, and the sentence is death.

(Don’t get me started on why it’s wrong to eat fruit that gives you knowledge of good and evil, nor on why God needed the elaborate incarnation/self-sacrifice routine to save us from the fallen nature he’d imposed on us.)