No Dr Williams, we have real issues with you too.

Retiring Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has suggested that Secularists are using Christianity as a 'surrogate' for Islamic radicals when they criticise Church involvement in politics and public life. The comments were made at a service in Wallington in response to a question from Revd Cookson who asked him about the recent debate over secularism saying:

“Do you think that the real issue for them isn’t necessarily Christianity but actually radical Islam, that it is more of a reaction to radical Islam and we are the surrogate for that.”

To which Dr Williams said:

“I think there is a lot of truth in that. It is the last decade that has seen the great rise in anxious secularism, a real suspicion of religion in public.”

I have some sympathy with this in that I think it is true that the events of 9/11 and the London tube bombings have made people aware that religion is a dangerous force in fanatical hands and reminded the English in particular that the cosy Vicar of Dibley world of Anglicanism is not the only manifestation of religion in this country. But the fact that Rowan’s C of E posse are unlikely to be seen throwing bombs around is not the reason secularists, at least in this country, concentrate on Christianity. It is because Christianity, and Anglicanism in particular, has a political influence disproportionate to the constituency it purports to represent. Al-Quaeda does not have its leaders in the house of lords, but there are twenty-six bishops who comprise the Lords Spiritual as part of the established church in England. They get a big say in the way legislation is framed and moderated purely by reason of having climbed the ranks of this particular religious institution.
I do, as a matter of fact, think the secular elements in Britain ignore Islam more than they should. This is in part because the danger of violent reprisal is not trivial, but it also has a cultural dimension that can leave us open to accusations of racism if not approached properly. That said, Christianity is not just an easy target and a surrogate for disquiet about Islam, it would be the prime focus in any event where issues of legislation clashed with religious thinking. Neither are we, as the Archbishop believes being naïve about religion:

"We are also in a culture where a lot of people simply don’t know how religions work. I sometimes think the problem with a lot of government initiatives is that they assume either that vicars are imams in dog collars or imams are vicars in turbans. [They assume] that there is one way of being religious – either you are a sort of committed fanatic who wants to subvert the whole to your agenda or you are a sort of woolly liberal who can be persuaded who can be persuaded to go along with whatever is happening in society. The Church isn’t either of those things, it is the assembly of Christ’s friends with good news to share.”

Which is just silly: we know that religion is a diverse phenomenon, but all faiths share one thing in common. None of them are true. It doesn’t matter how benign and ecumenical the Anglican Church wants to be, the root rational for their opposition to some types of social reform comes from the same mythos as radical Islam’s and given its privaliged position is a clear and present obstacle. That is why, in the face of pending equality legislation and the Church's vocal opposition, secularists in Britain are concentrating on Christianity.

What "Big 'Pharma" learnt from Christianity.

One of the criticisms often laid at the door of “big ‘pharma” is that it attempts to medicalise perfectly natural and benign variations in people’s health and sometimes invent new diseases and conditions in order to expand the market for new drugs, Particularly in the affluent west where we have come to expect optimal health at all times as a virtual human right, it would almost be surprising if the pharmaceutical industry didn’t try to exploit our hypochondria to sell us yet more products we don’t really need. It is after all only a variation on what all producers try to do, which is expand the “universe” of potential customers to market their products to.

Depending on your opinion of the pharmaceutical industry and capitalism in general you may have a view on the extent to which corporations really do indulge in such manipulation of our collective psyche to maximise their potential sales, however there is one industry that has been doing exactly the same thing for two millennia; Christianity. And I say Christianity specifically as opposed to religion in general because it is Christianity that first sells us the disease, which is original sin and then offers the cure, which is Jesus Christ.

Even the other Abrahamic traditions, Judaism and Islam do not market themselves in quite this way with the emphasis on salvation via one individual product as the panacea for the sins it has itself saddled us with. In fact Christianity’s USP is precisely that God comes to you, via Christ to cure you permanently from your moral afflictions, never mind that you were probably unaware that you were so afflicted in the first place, or would have been if the bible hadn’t told you that you were. It’s marketing genius really when you think about it.

And, just in case you might be tempted to point out that, if you really are so “fallen” and morally sick, why do you not have any symptoms? Well, what about those lustful thoughts, the sex before marriage, the envy of your more successful peers and all of those other (perfectly natural) immoral behaviours you may indulge In ? Of course you need a shot of Jesus, at least once a week to be taken with wine and a cracker.

At least with big ‘pharma, if they invent a condition they are obliged to sell you a product which is proven to alleviate it (if they are going to call a bad mood “depression” the pill has to work in some way). Christianity however offers spiritual homeopathy, not only is the disease bogus, but the “cure” is devoid of substance.

A Muslim speaks out

It appears there is at least one Muslim prepared to speak out against the violence over the Qur'an burnings. read this by Abdullah Antepli

These violent reactions of yours really do not make sense on many different fronts. For any Muslim who believes the sacredness of the Quran as God’s final revelation to humanity, that very same Quran condemns and rejects such anarchy in many of her verses and teachings. First of all, the Quran invites us to respect and engage with her divine message more so than the actual physical form of the book that is found between two covers. Respecting a physical copy of Quran could be understandable, but violating its central teachings and principles—for example by killing innocent people—just because someone disrespected or insulted a copy of the Quran is unacceptable, barbaric and reprehensible. No physical copy of a holy scripture, including the Quran, is more sacred than the life of a human being. This is what the Quran and our beloved prophet, whom the Quran came through, teaches us over and over.

We need much more of this...

Ratzi denies infertile Catholics IVF

When is this celibate, misogynistic child abusing old man going to stop telling the rest of us what to do with our bodies? Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger using his religious mafia alias of Pope Benedict XVI, not content with insisting that every sperm is sacred, now says it isn’t sacred enough. At least not when it’s in a petri dish fertilising an ovum in vitro it isn’t.

"The human and Christian dignity of procreation, in fact, doesn't consist in a 'product,' but in its link to the conjugal act, an expression of the love of the spouses of their union, not only biological but also spiritual,"

Oh please! If a couple are committed enough to go through several, frequently expensive rounds of IVF in order to start a family of their own isn’t that an “expression of love” just as meaningful as a few minutes of copulatory gymnastics? So when infertile Catholics ignore him (which many will) and successfully raise a child are we to assume he will refuse the children baptism into his church? No, of course he won’t as that would mean being logically and morally consistent, something which the Vatican is totally incapable of.

Muslims fail to condemn the violence

Violence continues in Afghanistan in the wake of the accidental burning by US troops of copies of the Qu’ran confiscated from detainees at Bagram Air Base. In all to date some Forty Afghans and Four US soldiers have died for this putative insult to Islam, despite apologies for the mistake from the US president Barak Obama.

It is easy to claim, as many do that the actions of the Taliban over this incident is opportunist politicising and that this blatant and immoral over reaction to the destruction of some printed matter is not representative of Islam as a religion. But, the silence from the Muslim community is deafening. Unless I’ve missed it, and I’ve been looking, there has been nothing but rhetoric against the American “insensitivity” and insults to Islam, but no outright condemnation of the violent and murderous response.

So here is a challenge to all of you moderate and influential Muslims and while I’m at it to the Christians too, who also seem less than eager to point out the obvious fact that paper and ink is not equivalent to a human life: Prove that religion has morals, prove that reason can prevail over dogma and prove that if anything is sacred to you it is sentient life above symbols and artefacts.

This failure to unequivocally condemn violence in the face of such a trivial and unintentional "insult" exposes the bankruptcy of the arguments of Baroness Warsi that religion is a force for moral stability. The Baroness, herself a Muslim is in an ideal position to speak out against the injustice of the Taliban's response and vindicate her faith and religion in general against the charges of intolerance levelled against it. But I’m not holding my breath. While she is happy to rail against “militant” secularists who speak in the name of true tolerance and freedom of expression, I doubt she will have the courage to speak against her religion, even when it behaves so abominably.

Slurs on Dawkins prove the battle is won

You know you’ve won the argument when all the opposition can do is attack you personally. Or even better when all they can do is attack one of your remote slave owning ancestors and then imply you are guilty by association. Or better yet, when they make a scene over falling for a “gotcha” question on a live radio interview. Yes, I think we can safely say that Richard Dawkins’ excellent piece of research, commissioned from Ipsos Mori on the real extent of Christian belief in this country has got a few people rattled. The results available in the link above are devastating to those who would argue that Britain is to any meaningful extent a “Christian nation”. For one thing a preliminary conclusion is that only 54% of census forms were returned with Christian as a religious affiliation, down from 72% last time. We await the full census results to verify that figure but if true it is a significant decline.
But of those self-selected, self-describing Christians polled by Ipsos-Mori on behalf of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science a significant number do not know or believe in the central tenets of the faith, do not pray, and do not go to church. The question that led to Richard Dawkins’ faux pas on the today program was this one from the poll

Q23. What is the first book of the NEW Testament?

•  Matthew 35 %
• Genesis 19 %
• Acts of the Apostles 3 %
• Psalms 3 %
• Don’t know 39 %
• Prefer not to say 1%

 So 39% of these self selected Christians honestly knew they didn’t know and 19% can’t tell the OT from the NT.
I’m actually very surprised by this result as I would expect most people, religious or not, educated in our school system to know this, especially as it is presented as a multiple-choice question. It was therefore a pertinent point for Dawkins to make when interviewed on Radio 4’s today program.
In response co-interviewee Reverend Giles Fraser asked Dawkins to name the full title of Darwin’s Origin of Species (On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in The Struggle for Life), which apart from or perhaps because of its irrelevence caught him off guard.
The point is, that all weekend Dawkins has been the subject of attack and attempted ridicule on totally spurious grounds because an independently commissioned scientific poll has proved something we all knew, but has been denied by interested parties; that the relevence of the Church to public life is minimal and that our constitutional religion is a sham making the case for secularism even more sound and negating the assertions of Baroness Warsi that faith and God should be central to our way of life. More interestingly the reactions from the press and the attempt to use Dawkins’ ancestral family and personal foibles to detract from the unassailable conclusions of this research prove that the intellectual battle is won. Let the culture war begin…

This time the EHRC get it right

Trevor Phillips of the the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has been speaking at a debate in London on diverse societies and has weighed in on the right side of the argument against allowing religious privilage in respect of the equality laws in this country. This is ecouraging because as I pointed out back in July 2011 the EHRC is also capable of some very muddy and confused thinking about this issue. However I won’t rehearse these arguments again as I’ve posted a lot on this subject recently but Phillips’ main point is this:

“You can’t say because we decide we’re different then we need a different set of laws […] To me there’s nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn’t apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn’t work.”

Which seems fair enough to me. The reference to sharia has resulted in a number of puerile (and one or two racist) comments in the Telegraph about how we are a “Christian nation” so Christians can get a free shout but Muslims shouldn’t; but the fact is that no religion should. Even if it were true that people in this country generally accepted that modern society is built on Christian principles that is not a case for religious majoritarianism. We also have well established democratic systems in place which gives elected governments the mandate to enact laws on our behalf. If there really is a religious majority in this country who want our equality laws to be less equal, they must field candidates on that manifesto and vote for them at the ballot box. In the meantime, and until such time as they have convinced enough people to vote the same way they are as obliged as the rest of us to respect the laws as they stand.