I’m terribly excited as the pilot episode of my new podcast has just gone live. The Pod Delusion is a bit like From Our Own Correspondent, but with a sceptical/liberal/lefty/Guardianista slant. Have a listen:
It’s Saturday night, I’m watching TV and on screen I can see a singing and dancing extravaganza that it making me feel a little bit sick. No, I’m not watching the X-Factor, as I’m far too elitist for it. And besides, I’m annoyed as it’s not fair that when I suggest they parade the mentally ill on TV to be laughed at I’m labelled a monster, yet when Simon Cowell does the same thing, it is apparently labelled a ratings smash.
No, I was watching one of the obscure religious channels on Sky, Inspiration TV. I know I shouldn’t be surprised at the transparent money-grabbing and the open contempt they show towards their viewers – after all, I compiled a video of much the same thing a couple of years ago – but it really reminded me just how sickening the whole thing is.
I tuned in to see a large man of about 60 wearing an expensive looking suit, hosting something akin to a church service on what looked like the set of Blind Date. At the bottom of the screen was prominently displayed phone number and a message soliciting for donations – or for viewers to “sow their seed” in religious channel parlance. Apparently a £120 donation will get you a free “Prophecy Bible”, because obviously the eternal love of God isn’t a big enough draw on its own.
What’s interesting about the language of “sowing seeds” to describe donations is that I’ve heard it before on other religious channels, where the on-screen charlatan will promise miracles in return for donations. Presumably there must be a loophole in the Ofcom broadcasting code that makes it acceptable to promise undeliverable rewards in exchange for money, as long as you express it as an agricultural metaphor.
What made this even more remarkable though was that the text occasionally changed to say that if the caller makes a donation of £1195 ($2400), then they are guaranteed to get a miracle that is ten times larger. That’s right: £1195.
So somewhat bemused by the precision at which indulgences were valued I sat and watched a large man, who must have been somewhere between 60 and 70 years old tell a long, rambling story about a trip he made, interrupting himself every few sentences to ask a man off-camera how many people had called in so far – as they were trying to find 12 people to make the big $2400 donation. What he lacked in charm and charisma he made up for in shouting.
To cut a long, rambling story short, the gist of it seemed to be that he got back something he gave away one time – the moral being that donating can only be a good thing. He said at one point: “Call in now and sow your seed of $2400! I’ll give it back…” which sounds surprisingly generous, but he then added “…but it’ll be by miracle”.
He kept referring to how he himself was a prophet, but I’m still sceptical that of all the people in the world that God would choose him, and even if he did, whether God would let this man write black miracle cheques as he seems to be doing.
The most enjoyable part though was as the end of the programme neared, he became more visibly anxious about not getting enough callers – the checks with the man off stage became more frequent and the presenter/reverend/pastor character became more visibly ratty. “You gotta act tonight” he said, slightly exasperated, “NOW!”.
He sounded pretty angry that people seemingly weren’t willing to send him over £1000 at the drop of a hat.
As the programme began wrapping up, the huge choir behind him started to sing “Yes Lord, Yes Lord” over and over whilst the man shouted “Pick up that phone! In Jesus’ name, pick up that phone!” repeatedly, whilst the cameras cut to the people taking the calls.
Having not hit the targets they were aiming for, right at the end another man appeared and informed us viewers (I’m assuming it wasn’t just me watching) that lines were going to remain open after the programme, and that we should “obey the voice of the holy spirit, obey the spirit of obedience”.
And at this point I got a little bit depressed thinking about the naked profiteering that these charlatans manage to get away with, and the poor, credulous people who buy into this shit and throw away their money.
It was still better than Children in Need, though.
A few hours ago now Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail poured a Molotov Cocktail and sat back, ready to watch the PC brigade scream. Today (Monday)’s Daily Mail frontpage has one of those frontpage stories that’ll make you tut and say “typical Mail“. But it’s so typical in fact, that I think it’s worth digging a little deeper into it.
It screams “ANOTHER BLOW TO FATHERHOOD” in that way only the Mail can do. No – it’s not a sympathetic piece supporting say, Fathers 4 Justice and their campaign for father’s rights – the Mail branded those “morons” long ago. It’s in fact some thinly-veiled homophobia, of course. “Now IVF mothers can name ANYONE as ‘father’ on birth certificate – and it doesn’t even have to be a man”, the paper tells us.
Now obviously the Mail can’t just outright attack homosexuals – even it knows these days that it isn’t really on – and besides, the Mail is the voice of silent majority – shouting would be to surrender to the politically correct Brussels bureaucrats that really run this country. So it has had to opt for some euphemistic language instead.
Critics said a woman could list her best friend on the birth certificate. The word ‘father’ may even be replaced with the phrase ’second parent’.
Don’t worry they’re not lezzers, they’re just good friends.
The second parent, who will have to consent to being named, will take on the legal and moral responsibilities of parenthood.
This raises the spectre of a legal minefield in which female ‘fathers’ will fight for visitation rights and be chased for child support payments if their fragile relationship with the mother breaks down.
Obviously any relationship between women is going to be fragile because who’s going to beat them into behaving?
Making its agenda slightly more obvious, the paper tells us:
The regulations are part of the controversial Embryology Bill passed by Parliament last year. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority said they will give lesbian couples in civil partnerships who undergo IVF the same rights as married heterosexual couples.
So we get it, this is a Bad Thing, right? But how can we know for sure – what we need is an expert opinion. Maybe a Doctor could give us some insight:
Dr Trevor Stammers, a GP and lecturer in healthcare ethics, questioned the strength of the relationships or friendships between the mother and ‘father’.
He said: ‘There is no doubt from sociological evidence accumulated over the past few years that children do best in a two-parent married family with heterosexual couples being the married parents.
‘It probably will be the child that is the loser but by the time we find that out, in 15 or 16 years, a huge amount of damage will have been done.’
Dr Stammers, has been described as a GP and lecturer in healthcare ethics. He makes quite a damning judgement of the moves here – I wonder what informs his ethics? Oh, he wouldn’t happen to be the same Dr Trevor Stammers who is head of the Christian Medical Fellowship, would he? Oh, he is. I wonder how much of his “sociological evidence” was found in his Bible?
The Mail also cite another professor:
David Jones, a professor of bioethics, likened the role of second parent to that of godparent. He added: ‘This sounds like social engineering on the hoof.’
David Jones is a professor of bioethics – that’s an important sounding role. He must definitely be an expert. Oh wait, here he is – it looks like he isn’t a scientist, or a professor of say, sociology, both which would make his contributions relevant – he’s a Professor of Theology. He’s a Professor at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham – which when you look at its mission statement, reveals in it’s first line to be aiming “To advance education, in such manner as befits a Catholic foundation” and that “The mission of St Mary’s is to provide high-quality academic and professional higher education within a collegial ethos inspired and sustained by Christian values”. The website also reveals that Jones doesn’t have anything even resembling a science qualification, having stuck with theology. No wonder the anti-abortion Society for the Protection of Unborn Children are such big fans of Prof Jones’ bioethics course.
There’s a name on the St Mary’s website that sounds familiar too. Dr Trevor Stammers? Why do I recognise that name from somewhere? It makes me wonder how much of this story is verbatim from a press release.
Still, maybe the Mail’s other sources of commentary are more objective?
Philippa Taylor, of Christian charity CARE, said: ‘We are going to get to the point where a birth certificate is not going to be a true statement of anyone’s biological heritage.’
Oh. At least they’ve admitted that this lady is head of a Christian charity. Though what a quick Google reveals is interesting: the evangelical organisation started life as the Nationwide Festival of Light – which Mary Whitehouse had a prominent role in. No surprises there then.
So what about our elected representatives – what do they have to say? I hear that there’s some cross-party concern about this change for birth certificates.
Geraldine Smith, Labour MP for Morecambe, said a birth certificate should be a true record of a child’s genetic heritage. She added: ‘I don’t think the state should collude with parents to conceal the true genetic identity.’
Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said a father played an essential role in the development of a child. He added: ‘The present Government seems not to care a damn about families.
At least Ann Widdecombe, a woman who quit the Church of England and joined the Catholics because it was too liberal for her, is fairly honest about her intentions:
Tory MP Ann Widdecombe said the change would destroy the ‘basic nature’ of a man and a woman bringing up a child together as parents.
These are MPs in the Commons though. What about the other Chamber, the Lords? That’s where respectable peers, who are able to take time and deliberate in a calmer, less confrontational manner are able to go over bills with a fine tooth-comb to make sure all of the technical details are sound.
Baroness Deech, a former chairman of the HFEA, said the practice would lead to the ‘ falsification of the birth certificate’.
A bureaucratic concern – falsifying birth certificates could create some problems. On a completely unrelated note, Baroness Deech has happened to be absent on every vote on equal gay rights.
So I’m not saying that the Daily Mail is homophobic or anything – well actually I am. It’ss just funny how every source of comment in a story happens to come from either an anti-gay (not to mention anti-abortion, etc) member of the legislature, or a couple of Christian sources (a religion that doesn’t exactly have a tradition of tolerance). What makes this even worse is that Mail have deliberately hidden the affiliation of these people to various religious organisations and the like, which makes the whole thing fundamentally dishonest.
Sigh. Sometimes I wish I was religious. Life would be so much easier if I didn’t have to worry about justifying the things that I say with “evidence” or “reason”. It’d be brilliant to be able to shout my mouth of about anything and then just say “This is true because I believe it is true” and then raise my eyebrows, sort of raise my palms and pull a wry grin as if it were self-evident. Because I don’t do that already.
I mention this because of the recent news of the Catholic church re-admitting (recommunicated?) a bishop who is a holocaust denier. Whilst probably not the worst thing a Catholic bishop could do, it doesn’t exactly help brush away the… y’know… well known association between the Nazis and the Catholic church.
What’s most stunning is that the holocaust denier who the Pope has let back in isn’t even an ex-holocaust denier – they haven’t made him hold a press conference and say “What I ACTUALLY meant to say was…” – they’ve just let him back in.
I know that Catholic church is supposed to be pretty big on “forgiveness”, but this just makes them look really inconsistent. That’s right – a religion is being inconsistent! It took them hundreds of years to forgive Galileo for proving them wrong, and the best part of two millennia for them to forgive the entire Jewish population of the world for killing Jesus, and John Lennon was forgiven for claiming the Beatles were bigger than Jesus in four decades. By comparison. the lesser sin of denying the holocaust gets only a twenty year penalty.
There’s a staggering video on the BBC News website (seriously, give it a watch) of him denying the Holocaust in November 2008. He really doesn’t help himself by using the phrase “quote unquote ‘The Holocaust’”.
I like though how he’s clearly trying to position it as some sort intellectual disagreement. Betraying the rich history of his church, rather than saying something anti-semitic he tries to cite the evidence. “As far as I’ve understood the evidence…”. Obviously this strikes me as quite an odd thing to say, as it clearly implies that he’s somehow managed to miss all of the actual evidence, like… I don’t know… the gas chambers for a start?
Then again, I guess this is also a man who having presumably considered the “evidence” believes there is a magic psychic man in the sky who hear his thoughts and will grant wishes. And he probably wears a skirt too.
The upshot of this is that we have the following confirmed: You’ve more chance of becoming a Catholic bishop if you’re a holocaust denier than if you are a woman.
The battle raging in my mind contemplating the conflict in the Middle East is almost as intractable as the real thing. And unfortunately, just like the real thing, I’m horrendously stubborn so the chances of the components of my brain coming to a negotiated settlement are pretty much zero.
My opinions on the conflict don’t really go much further than “please stop killing each other” and “hey, lets help poor people”. Because if they didn’t go that far, then I wouldn’t really qualify as a member of humanity.
The other day, I wrote about Gaza conflict from an international relations perspective, much to the chagrin of some of my friends. For the sake of a surprising amount of editorial integrity on my part, it turns out I was slightly wrong on some of the specifics about the sit-in protest at my university: it’s not the SWP organising it, it’s some other leftist group, and they’re pushing for the marginally more realistic goal of getting the college to revoke Shimon Peres’s honorary doctorate and to send some supplies to the bombed Gaza University. For a group of people who have been no-doubt using the word “proportionality” a lot lately, I’m still not sure what the scale-of-action to probability-of-success ratio is.
What got me to thinking about this again was seeing the Gaza protests in Trafalgar Square yesterday- when I walked through the middle of them, the speaker was saying something about burning the license fee (because of this faff)- perhaps the first time the hard/far left have ever had cause to agree with the Daily Mail about something.
So maybe peace in the Middle East can be achieved after all if such disparate dogmatists can be shown to find common cause?
But anyway, I’ve been thinking further about the role of international law in the context of the Gaza war. Despite largely writing off ethics in international law in my previous blog entry, I don’t think this is entirely true (and I wouldn’t describe myself as some sort of of Morgenthau-esque classical realist, despite how I may have come across).
Ethics have been a part of international law for a while now – the most obvious example of this would be the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and questions of validity aside (at the time in 1947, the USSR, most – if not all – Muslim countries and the obviously nasty ones like apartheid South Africa didn’t sign up to it) – and the declaration has been used as a yardstick since by which to judge countries and by which to justify actions towards them and so on. You could also point to the UN convention on genocide (that I accused the Atheist Bus Campaign of breaking) for adding a similar ethical dimension to international law – in fact, it goes a step further and commits UN members to intervention in cases of genocide, breaking the previous international convention of non-intervention.
The human rights and international law arguments are the best ones I’ve heard so far as to why Israel are cunts, and I quite agree – Israel are being a bunch of cunts. They’ve bombed schools, universities, even the UN – and it’s surprising that they don’t seem to have bombed any hospitals yet considering the big red cross marking the target on them.
What I’m struggling to understand – and would love to hear a well argued response to this question – is why the plight of the Palestinians and to a lesser extent, the Israelis has become such a hot-button issue that provokes so much spitting of venom on both sides. Sure, I appreciate that it has been going on for ages, and has a depressingly intractable theistic side to the conflict, but I’m not sure why the conflict carries a seemingly disproportionate weight amongst the general public’s more secular collective conscience.
The whole point of a law is that it is a standard that is applied consistently. The laws of physics and human laws are essentially the same – whilst only one can be broken, it is the consistency that makes a “law” what it is.
If you don’t accept this axiom, then you’re implicitly accepting the point I made in the previous blog entry that international law is irrelevant, the international system has no rules governing it (it is in a state on anarchy, as so to speak), and that states are only constrained in their actions by the limits of their power and the actions of other states.
If you do accept what I am saying about consistency being the key tenet of international law, then I would re-iterate my question: Why Israel-Palestine?
Why are Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza the issue that people seem motivated to get behind? Why don’t other cases of human rights abuses get quite such a reaction? What about Hamas’ human rights record? What about Saudi Arabia’s? What about America’s? What about Britain’s?
Similarly, if we accept the Palestinians right to self-determination and back their cause, why don’t the Kurds see rallies worldwide for their cause? They’ve spent the last 80 years being persecuted and fenced in by arbitrary borders imposed by the British too. What about all of the other nationalist conflicts? Why don’t we see protests supporting Northern Cyprus, Somaliland and Scotland? Hell, what about the Tamils? After years of armed struggle and 70,000 deaths the Sri Lankan government has recently nearly totally smashed them to bits. Why the double standards?
(I’ve actually written about these double standards before, incidentally, in another polemic contextualised by the far less emotionally charged issue of Georgia. Why does no one care about South Ossetians? I’ve no idea.)
What I think is most interesting is the implications of this ethical dimension for the international system. As I’ve described above ethics, at least in terms of the rights of the individual (some may consider the violation of another state’s sovereignty unethical) are a relatively modern concern as far as international law goes, and it’s only really since the end of the Cold War that there has been any traction behind the idea of states acting for ethical – “humanitarian” – reasons.
It is similarly interesting that prior to the UN Human Rights declaration (and I’m prepared to be proven wrong on this if anyone can provide an appropriate link) international law, and international behaviour was all about maintaining order and stability in the international system.
This isn’t surprising considering that individual states want to maintain their place in the international system and not have others meddle, and I guess because the level of slaughter that the Nazis managed wasn’t even conceivable until we had the technology of the 20th century. This preference of “order” over “justice” has long been evident even in this “ethical era”, if you can call it that. The American administrations have had no qualms backing the Saudi royal family for decades, and the Obama administration will inevitably do exactly the same (sorry, utopians, I’d dearly love to say they won’t but I’ll eat my figurative hat if this isn’t true). Even on the level of the state – which has things the international system doesn’t have like a monopoly on the use of force and the ability to enforce laws – order has often been chosen over justice in order to maintain stability. For example, when apartheid ended in South Africa, they set up a ‘Truth and Reconcilliation Commission’ to essentially let off the various bastards from the apartheid government in order to maintain precious stability.
What I’m trying to get is that challenging this notion of order being the goal of international law is fraught with danger, as it opens a massive can of worms. Take, for another example, the doctrine of pre-emptive strike. Though massively discredited now, I won’t be surprised if we hear another major power (eg: Russia) “pre-emptively” disarm a perceived threat (eg: any country from it’s sphere that dare look to the west). Or an even better example that’s relevant to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict would be that of Kosovo. The west recognising Kosovo’s independence set a dangerous precedent that will act as justification for nationalist group after nationalist group for years to come. In fact, it already has been – regardless of whether it holds holds water or not, the Kosovo precedent was used to justify the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia.
To attempt to apply ethics consistently to the international system is merely going to fog things up further. State sovereignty is, unfortunately, the powerful concept that has maintained order in the international system and undermining it is opening up the international system to almost limitless ethical dilemmas. Should we (the “international community”) be invading Israel to prevent it from killing Palestinians? Should we be going into Zimbabwe to remove Mugabe? And so on – a completely unmanageable and unenforceable scenario that would cause the international system to break down entirely.
This is what makes international relations so depressing. Any attempt to apply any level of consistency to the ethical ideas that we can use to hold international actors, be they Israeli, Palestinian or otherwise, to account, is basically going to cause the entire body of international law to unravel and reveal that the international system is in a state of amoral anarchy.
And of course, though it feels ridiculous to point out, that I don’t care about the plight of individuals caught in this international relations crossfire – I have a great deal of sympathy for people in Gaza, much like I do for the people who were being waterboarded at Guantanamo Bay or the homosexuals being hanged by cranes in Iran. And yes, I’ve donated to the DEC to actually help the people affected, just as I would if it was Israel have the crap bombed out of it by the Palestinians. And at risk of sounding even more mawkish than I already do, I think that the ethics of helping people should transcend the political conflicts, and if we’re going to campaign against human rights abuses, we should recognise all of them – not just the ones that suit the political argument that we’re trying to make. I wouldn’t march under the Israeli flag, or the Palestinian flag, just as I wouldn’t march under the British flag. I think it’d make for a much more powerful statement than the wingnuts and moonbats ever could manage alone, if people, regardless of political opinions and affiliations would protest together for respect for human rights on both sides. Not that there is a chance in hell of this actually happening.
In my most utopian of dreams, I’d prefer to see a single world state with full accountability, rule of law and a monopoly on the use of force through which to enforce international law – it’s really only under these circumstances that ethics can really count. But of course, until that happens, if you’ve managed to make it through what I’ve written above, I’d hope you’d agree that the role of ethics in international politics is much more complex.
And that’s why I can’t get my head around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
So lately I’ve waded in on some serious politics. It’s a bit of a gamble, really – there’s some actual risk involved in writing about things sincerely, rather than just a load of silly bollocks like I usually do. Unlike writing drivel, there’s a tangible risk that I could be held to account or that I could be proven wrong – something which, as every pundit knows, is a fate worse than death.
However, I have got some self confidence in what I’m saying. International Relations is What I Do. It is My Thing. I’ve got a degree that proves it, so I like to think that I know what I’m talking about. So I’m going to take a bit of a gamble – after receving some encouragement from Duncan, who has done the same, I’m going to put my head above the parapet and put my undergraduate dissertation online for all to see.
My dissertation was on the role of religion in international relations – which as far as I’m aware is a surprisingly unexplored topic. It explores the philosophical and historical roles of religion and then looks at some modern examples. And then I conclude that religion is a crock of shit.
Your mileage may vary. I got a 2:1 for it if that counts for anything. It’s basically me trying to be like a less educated Richard Dawkins.
You’ve probably seen in the news recently about the Atheist Bus Campaign, a group led by Ariane Sherine and Richard Dawkins who are putting advertisements on the sides of buses and on the tube saying “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”. But what no one seems to have noticed yet is that the apparently well-meaning group are attempting to commit a crime against humanity and break international law.
For you see, the Atheist Bus Campaign is attempting to advocate a non-theistic worldview, and by extension, are hoping to erradicate religious belief. You might think this is a noble goal, but the United Nations don’t think so.
In 1951 the UN Convention on Genocide became legally binding and it has remained so ever since. The document outlines the definition of genocide like this:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
The Atheist Bus Campaign, by buying advertising space on public transport, is committing acts intended to destroy in whole or in part a religious group: specifically, all religious people. And though Richard Dawkins hasn’t yet taken to roaming the streets of London yet shanking anyone who looks even vaguely pious, these adverts, like all adverts, are an attempt at controlling people’s behaviour – they’re deliberately inflicting on believers conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of religious beliefs.
And this isn’t even considering point (e) – surely by forcing kids to take science lessons and teaching them about reason, logic and evidence basedempiricism kids are being systematically taught not to be theists. Therefore, keeping creationism out of the classroom is essentially a crime against humanity.
Interestingly too, this entanglement with the UN convention on genocide does seem to debunk one of Richard Dawkins’ major arguments that no atrocities have ever been committed in the name of atheism. Unfortunately for Dawkins, it turns out that it is he himself who is committing a crime against humanity in the name of atheism.
Sure, the UN convention on genocide has been criticised by legal scholars and philosophers for concentrating on the outcome rather than the means in defining genocide, but this is an irrelevant point – the law is the law after all.
Thankfully, he’s not entirely crackers – in the linked article is he agrees that creationism is a unscientific nonsense, or a “crock of shit” to use the scientific jargon, but he does still display the sort of spectacular cognitive dissonance required to be a moderate theist – say what you will about fundamentalists, but at least they’re relatively consistent.
He said of creationism that it “is the fruit of a fundamentalist approach to scripture, ignoring scholarship and critical learning, and confusing different understandings of truth” and that “The argument for intelligent design may have some appeal for many Christians but is ultimately a negation of what science is about, which is to make a hypotheses from what is observable and then conduct experiments in a constant process of testing.”
What I always find to be remarkable about these moderates is the pick and choose nature of this – Carey rejects Genesis, but presumably (and you’d imagine so considering that he’s a former Archbishop) believes in Jesus and all of the miracles and all that. Why can’t he apply that same level of scholarship and critical learning to a man who can allegedly defy the laws of physics and perform some impressive party tricks? Even if the “But Jesus is New Testament! The old testament is all rubbish now” defence or even the “The Bible is full of allegory” line, it doesn’t really explain why Carey really doesn’t like the gays, which as I understand it are only mentioned in the old testament, in fairly ambiguous terms.
Of course, he also stuck it to Dawkins and Hitchens and the like, slagging them by saying that “The attacks on the World Trade Centre, Pentagon and the White House woke us all up to a resurgent and militant Islam which remains an active presence seven years on. For some writers, such events are illustrations of the evils of religion – all religions.”
9/11 was a damn good example of religious lunacy – he’s got that right, and also rightly implies that 9/11 woke up a lot of people to what religion can do – but is displaying that amazing cognitive dissonance yet again if he’s implying that it was a freak occurrence. I’m tempted to upload my dissertation on the role of religion in shaping the international system to offer a drop from the ocean of counter-examples. But lets face it, we already know most of them.
Apparently this is taken from a lecture to the University of Gloucester, where Carey remarked that 9/11 is the “date that symbolises a growing split between faith and reason”. I didn’t realise that faith and reason were ever close friends.
If Rage Against the Machine have taught me anything, it is that it’s moderately important to “know your enemy”, in order for you to know who you’re raging against. Which is why last week I went to the chapel, which was basically a mini-church in my uni. Stained-glass windows, candles, the works. I wasn’t there for a church service or to actively rage against it, but for a lecture on ‘natural theology’, by Alister McGrath, the former Oxford professor who wrote ‘The Dawkins Delusion‘, who now, inexplicably, is a respected professor at my university.
Now, I got used to my friends making fun of my old undergraduate university, and claiming that it’s a Mickey Mouse university, because it’s a former-polytechnic, but I’m starting to wonder if in fact the university I’m at now is more like Acme Looneyversity. Not only does it have a Chapel as one of it’s central features, but it has an entire theology department – which is at least a magnitude less-valid a subject than, say, fashion design, which my old uni was one of the leading places for.
So I decided to go along to this public lecture Alister McGrath was hosting in the Chapel, in order to challenge my opinions. I’d only be a good disciple of Dawkins, and advocate of reason and evidence, if my scientific worldview could stand up to the challenge.
As luck would have it, rather than have an epiphany and have to repent on slagging off religion a lot, it turns out that my opinions are still correct and accurate. It turns out ‘natural theology’ is bollocks. And I don’t mean that in an anti-intellectual way, and I really don’t intend to write-off an entire branch of academia, but assuming that the lecture I saw was representative of the subject at large, it really doesn’t seem like it should be allowed to be something a serious place of learning should allow to go on.
Natural theology is presented as pretty much an alternative to the scientific method. The idea is that rather than us drawing conclusions about the nature of existence based on the shared experience of verifiable, observable evidence, is that you fill in the blanks yourself (usually with “God did it”) then look for something to support it. In other words, basically doing exactly what the creationists do. McGrath said that he tried to present in as theologically-neutral terms as possible, but this was undermined slightly that the lecture was being held in a fucking chapel.
Apparently taking the “Christian perspective” can help “understand” things. A couple of direct quotes from the slides were: “Capacity of nature to point to the kingdom [of God] when it is rightly interpreted” (my emphasis) and “nature has to be seen in a certain way if it is to be properly understood”… is pretty much the antithesis of what academia is all about. You’re supposed to study things first, then use what you’ve learnt to figure out what’s going on – not the other way around. I admit, things being the other way around would be useful for me though – I wouldn’t have to read some books before writing the 15,000 word dissertation I’ve got to do this year.
To give an example of the “natural theology” approach, it was presented as the bastard-child of the arts and the sciences (a bit like geography if geographers drew maps before checking them against the shape of the land). One peace of “evidence” was talking about the nature of beauty, and an excerpt from a poem about how nice some hills looked or something was shown as if to say “pretty nice hills… you’d need God or you can’t appreciate them”. No time was given to any alternative explanations for the nature of beauty, of course, such as how a human perception of beauty correlates with what someone who is healthy looks like, and that can be explained in terms of natural selection.
What was truly startling though was that once you strip away the already slim on the ground substance, you’re left with literally nothing – I honestly came away from the 90 minute lecture having felt that I learned nothing. It was all very poetic and wordy, and so on, but it was more akin to listening to some nerds who like Lord of the Rings discuss their own fan-fiction continuity ideas rather than anything more academic.
I bet it’s quite easy to do for a job though as there’s no real studying involved.
The Anglican Church has finally joined the 20th century this week, and has allowed the ordination of female Bishops – this was one of many brave moves passed at the recent meeting in York of the General Synod – along with declaring that moving pictures on a screen are not actual caused by witchcraft, and that the “popular music” that “young people” listen to isn’t going to cause the very fabric of reality to fall apart.
That last part is a lie of course, though I do think its pretty remarkable that it’s taken this long for the church to decide that women are all right – especially as so many male church officials seem pretty keen on wearing dresses, so you’d think they’d be all for gender equality.
Depressingly though, there’s a large number of church leaders – about a third of them – who are opposed to this and have gone as far as forming a “no girls” club of likeminded churches – throughout my research into this, I’ve been unable to determine whether these churches are all led by eight year old boys.
The reason they’re so opposed to the idea of women bishops is apparently that because (and lets assume the Bible is 100% true, for the sake of argument) Jesus’s disciples were all men… so no girls are allowed. Which is a pretty rubbish criterion to hire people on – maybe Jesus’s all male crew was a coincidence, and they were all hired on merit? The job criteria may have been: must think Jesus is ace; be willing to commute to Nazareth; be a team player – and the most suitable happened to be men? Or maybe Jesus wanted a football team? (His team wouldn’t even have to walk alone on water.) Or maybe they were all men as a consequence of world history basically being one long patriarchy?
The trouble for the church is even though it appears to have finally reached adolescence; it still faces a number of battles with the relentless onslaught of modernity and the passage of time. It can’t be long until perhaps the biggest taboo has to be tackled: the ordination of bishops who have other faiths.
Though I’m not a woman, I still feel as though the church is discriminating against me – I bet if I sent them my CV, they wouldn’t let me achieve my dream of being Archbishop of Canterbury – just because I’m not religious. Just because I don’t believe the same stories as Anglicans, I’ll never get a free palace just across the river from Parliament or the right to a seat in the House of Lords.
It’s madness really – there are probably thousands of women who would be great at doing… whatever it is that Bishops do. Barring people of other religions is just cutting of potential talent. Look at the Pope, for instance – he probably knows his Bible better than anyone, and if anything is probably over-qualified for the job of Anglican bishop, yet he won’t get the job just because he’s Catholic.
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