Category: Religion

WTF is going on in the UK? According to Terry Sanderson in CiF:

In an obscure little debate in the House of Lords last week, the Bishop of Carlisle, Graham Dow ((We’ve encountered him before, here and here. He’s clearly a lunatic, but that doesn’t prevent him from speaking in the House of Lords.)), let slip in passing a few of the things that are going on between the church and the government that maybe we ought to know about.
Dow revealed that the government had, for more than two years, “been in conversation with church leaders about the possibility of the church providing extensive welfare services, rather in the way that the church plays a major part in education”. Part of this, apparently, is a 20-year contract for “Christian groups bidding to deliver dentistry”.
Not only does the bishop envisage the church taking over welfare provision with the use of public money, he doesn’t want that provision to be regulated. “Church projects of course would be audited, but not controlled. My opinion is that, recently, we have been building a society that is very low on trust and very high on inspection and control,” said his reverence.

From Stephen Law:

According to today’s Observer (p5), the Catholic Bishop of Lancaster, Patrick O’Donoghue (illustrated), has said in a document written for schools in his diocese that:
“Under no circumstances should any outside authority or agency that is not fully qualified to speak on behalf of the Catholic Church ever be allowed to speak to pupils or individuals on sexual or any other matter involving faith and morals”
O’Donoghue also called for any books containing polemics against the Catholic Church to be removed from school libraries.

Clearly the Catholic Church doesn’t want children that it’s indoctrinating teaching to learn about the use of condoms to reduce the risk of STDs. Nor should they be allowed to see any criticisms of ridiculous medieval ideas like the Pope’s plans to set up exorcism squads. ((Let’s see: which is the more pressing problem in the world today – HIV/AIDS or demonic possession?))

Greta Christina look at the recent Jane Fonda-Ted Turner divorce. The turning point was Fonda’s sudden religious conversion, about which she said:

“My becoming a Christian upset him very much — for good reason. He’s my husband and I chose not to discuss it with him — because he would have talked me out of it. He’s a debating champion.”

As Greta put it, Fonda…

would rather get a divorce than allow my faith to be seriously questioned.
Or to put it another way:
I know that my faith probably doesn’t stand up to reason. I know that I could be argued out of it. But I still want to have it — even if it means divorcing my husband of ten years. I’d rather get the divorce than be convinced that my faith is mistaken. I’d rather get the divorce than even take a chance on being convinced that my faith is mistaken.

Regular readers will know that I’m a pretty hard-core atheist. It’s not just that I disbelieve in god; I find the whole concept of god incoherent.
However, having observed the rituals and manifestation associated with this particular deity, I might be persuaded to make an exception:

Cricket pads look rather good on an elephant, don’t you think?
😉 🙂 😉

John Wilkins has just posted an elegant take-down of that silly “science depends on faith” op-ed piece in the NYT:

I have a rule (Wilkins’ Law #35, I think) that if any scientist is going to draw unwarranted metaphysical conclusions, it will be a physicist, and in particular a cosmologist. Witness Paul Davies in the New York Times.
Davies wants to argue something like this:
Premise: there are laws of the universe and we cannot explain the existence of laws
Premise: the assumption that laws are to be found is the basis for doing science
Conclusion: Ergo, science rests on an act of faith

As Wilkins points out,

This is what Alfred North Whitehead once called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, also known as the Fallacy of Reification (by me, anyway). Take words and declare them properties of the universe.

I’ve always felt that this fallacy lies at the heart of the Bible-based religions Christianity. Take, for instance, the very first sentence in their book. “In the beginning was the word.” Rubbish. In the beginning was the world, or the cosmos, or whatever you want to call it. Recently, certain organisms evolved a capacity for language, and used words to describe the world. Sometimes the descriptions work well enough that we can treat them as law-like. Mostly not. Their accuracy, or otherwise, doesn’t affect the facts of the world. Wilkins again:

As Maynard Smith used to say to lunchers in his cafeteria, “Are you discussing words, or the world? If it is the world, I will stay, but if it is words, I will go”.

Earlier this month I wrote about the resignation of the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent, Stephen Bates, and his poignant essay Demob happy. And now I read in Reuters that William Lobdell of the LA Times has also quit. Read his farewell essay, “Religion beat became a test of faith“, in which he explains how his experiences destroyed his faith and left him feeling “used up and numb”.

From the BBC:

Archbishop Tutu referred to the debate about whether Gene Robinson, who is openly gay, could serve as the bishop of New Hampshire.
He said the Anglican Church had seemed “extraordinarily homophobic” in its handling of the issue, and that he had felt “saddened” and “ashamed” of his church at the time.
Asked if he still felt ashamed, he said: “If we are going to not welcome or invite people because of sexual orientation, yes.
“If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn’t worship that God.”

Seems kind of obvious to this atheist, but then what do I know about such matters? Shouldn’t textually obsessive Christians be stoning the adulterers and divorcees rather than the gays?

Next Tuesday, November 13, Nova is showing a program about the Dover, PA creationism “Intelligent Design” case. Apparently the IDiots are already squawking, so it’s likely to be good. Here’s the trailer for Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial:

(Hat tip to Ed.)

“I never wanted to be a religious affairs correspondent,” begins Simon Stephen Bates in his essay Demob happy. Naturally we expect this to be followed by his aspirations to lumberjacking, but no. Let’s be serious for a minute. “I had always regarded it as a slippers and pipe sort of a job, to be given to ageing hacks in beige cardigans working their way towards retirement. So when the editor of the Guardian asked me to do the job in 2000, on my return from five years as the paper’s European Affairs Editor in Brussels, I thought he was trying to tell me something about the inexorable downward trajectory of a once moderate career.”
And so begins an account of his seven year gig at the Guardian. It’s pretty clear that this is an area in which familiarity breeds contempt, or at least a numbing despair. “What faith I had, I’ve lost, I am afraid – I’ve seen too much, too close.” Eventually…

Faltering in the face of so much theology, I decided to cover church issues politically. As a former lobby correspondent, I felt that the disputes were more explicable in such terms… indeed some conservative evangelicals are using tactics remarkably similar to the old Militant Tendency to infiltrate the Church of England these days.

What now? Bates is moving on to pastures new; meanwhile Paul Sims ((Editor of the New Humanist.)) reports that “his successor at the Guardian, Riazatt Butt, has become the first Muslim to be appointed as religious correspondent by a national newspaper.”
I’ll await his demob report with interest.