Not party political

Church is not party political, says archbishop amid Rwanda plan spat

The Archbishop of Canterbury has used his Easter sermon to say the church is not party political after facing criticism over his high-profile condemnation of the government's controversial Rwanda deportation scheme.

The word "party" is doing a great deal of work there - not with conspicuous success.

Doom Spirals

Clergy warn of ‘doom spiral’ as church attendance drops off at record rate

Sunday church attendance is just 80 per cent of what it was in 2019, Telegraph analysis has revealed, despite the Church of England claiming that it has “bounced back” after the pandemic.‌

The figures reveal that church attendance has more than halved since 1987, prompting clergy to warn: “This is a doom spiral of the church’s own choosing.”

‌In 2023, The Telegraph published an investigation which revealed that parishes are closing at a record rate, prompting fears that the Church had been “dealt a death knell”.

‌The investigation found that almost 300 parishes have disappeared in the past five years alone – the fastest rate since records began in 1960.


I know almost nothing about this issue so naturally I have an opinion - 

That Welby chap doesn't appear to be doing anything constructive about it. Whether he could do something I don't know, but clearly identifying partisan political issues and maintaining a sceptical distance from them would be a start. The fictitious climate doom spiral comes to mind.

In thrall to St Greta

Roger Watson has an interesting TCW piece on the increasingly woke nature of the Roman Catholic Church.


The Roman Catholic Church is in thrall to St Greta

IF anyone reading this can afford it, could they please pay the money to whoever it is who has captured the Roman Catholic Church and is holding it to ransom?

The past two years have seen an increasing level of politically charged nonsense from CAFOD (Catholic Fund for Overseas Development) — of which the Catholic Church increasingly seems like the religious bit that is tagged on — on climate change and families (which was also about climate change).

Leaving Mass on Sunday morning, I noticed a pile of glossy leaflets and picked one up. I wish I hadn’t. This leaflet described ‘An environmental policy for our diocese’ (Middlesbrough).

As I walked home before reading it, I made a mental note of some ‘trigger’ words and phrases that would get my goat and, sure enough, they were all there. Thus, the reader is treated to the evils of ‘capitalist economies’, ‘global warming’, ‘green energy’, ‘disinvest[ment] from fossil fuels’, ‘solar panels’, ‘consumption of meat’ and questioning ‘whether we need to fly’. And there was more.


Even for outsiders the whole piece is worth reading as a reminder of a more general issue, the issue of leaders who follow instead of leading. As if many modern leaders have been inserted into their positions because of that politically useful characteristic.


Of course, we should ‘reduce our consumption of meat’ and ‘give careful consideration to whether we really need to fly’. It seems that the Catholic Church really has been captured by left-wing environmental activists who simply want to make life more miserable for everybody. I don’t suggest for a minute that the Church should ‘stay in its lane’. But, instead of issuing advice, much it based on dodgy data, it should be providing a balanced view of social and political issues, including environmental issues, and get back to telling us how to be, rather than what to do.

Repelled by the darkness

Rev Daniel French has a most interesting TCW piece on the difficulties of being an anti-woke vicar.


Thought crimes of an anti-woke vicar

LET me begin with two stories, one of which is true and took place earlier in the summer, the second (sadly) fiction. I pen this as an ordinary English vicar of 25 years, who runs a parish in a stunning seaside town but finds himself increasingly bewildered with the direction of travel of his home denomination.

Submerging Ben, 29, fully into the seawater I sense something malignant leave him, a dark force. It’s difficult to describe, but when a person is under a spiritual oppression you know it. By the third invocation of the Trinity, his baptism complete, he emerges soaking, misty-eyed, panting like a man who’d completed a marathon. ‘It’s all gone, you are free.’ The words come to me unplanned. He nods, grinning and repeating: ‘I know!’


The second story is a fantasy about the ghastly Archbishop of Canterbury showing genuine and entirely non-ghastly leadership during the pandemic debacle. Fat chance, but the whole piece is well worth reading. Even as an atheist, this passage struck a powerful chord with me. Repelled by the darkness - indeed we are.


Young adults like Ben give me hope. He tells me he wants to work unequivocally for Christ and he doesn’t care what the pushback is. He is typical of men and women who say that they have migrated from New Atheism, psychedelics, Wicca, Marxism or whatever and awoken to a post-lockdown world which feels decidedly creepy, evil, a new Dark Age hanging over the West. They mostly come to God not through the light but repelled by the darkness.

Net Zero and Bulldozers

Julian Mann has a depressing TCW piece on the C of E’s bulldozer enthusiasm for Net Zero.


The C of E’s Net Zero mania


CONFIRMATION services in the Church of England are about to become politicised after the General Synod voted to include a liturgical response to ‘the climate emergency’.

The July sessions in York saw the bitter divisions in the C of E laid bare, particularly over sexual morality and in the row over the sacking by the Archbishops’ Council of two members of the Church’s Independent Safeguarding Board. It was on the last morning of the five-day hate-in that the Synod voted overwhelmingly for the ‘Responding to the Climate Emergency’ motion moved by the suffragan Bishop of Reading, Olivia Graham, on behalf of Oxford Diocese.

A firm believer in the bulldozer as a means of achieving Net Zero in the national Church’s property portfolio, Bishop Graham intoned in her concluding remarks in the debate last Tuesday: ‘On buildings retro-fitting is not always the answer. We need bespoke solutions for each building clearly and sometimes the bulldozer is the best one but sometimes retro-fitting is and we have just completed our first retro-fit in Oxford Diocese at the cost, I believe, of £75,000 but we now have a Net Zero vicarage. We hope that it is the first of many.’

She further proclaimed: ‘Ninety per cent of a church’s entire carbon footprint lies with the congregation . . . Let us be in no doubt, Synod, that we cannot invent or spend our way out of this crisis. It’s going to need us to change.’ In case you think I am making this up, here is a video of the debate, with Bishop Graham making her appearance about two hours in.


Quite mad, but the whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of the destructive link between bulldozers and political fads.


Thus salvation, according to the new secular eco-religion endorsed by the C of E, would appear to be by building works rather than by the grace of God, and works that millions of working people in Britain are not able to afford. A diocese such as Oxford, one of the wealthiest in the C of E, may well be able to afford to create Net Zero vicarages but for many people struggling to pay their mortgages re-fitting their homes would be an unbearable burden.

Corbyn never understood religion

An interesting post by James Kenyon on Conservatives Global.

Jeremy Corbyn may not be an overt blood libel anti-Semite as such, but he does otherize Jews. Reading between the lines in his tortured remarks on British Jews, Hamas, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it’s clear that whilst he doesn’t hold any overt hatred towards the Jewish people, he essentially sees them as foreign, not as a part of the fabric of British society. Perhaps he was not lucky enough, as many of us have been, to have lived his life with Jewish friends or relatives and can afford therefore to see them as the other with a clean conscience. This allowed him to be far too comfortable in his association and platforming-sharing with out-and-out anti-Semites.

 Not a radical angle on Mr Corbyn and his inability to shake off anti-Semite associations, but the piece does offer a useful reminder of his obvious failure to distinguish ancient and enduring religious hatreds from standard political class narratives.

He has been quoted describing Hamas as “an organisation that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about long-term peace and social and political justice in the whole region.”

Since, in his mind, nobody really believes in God or religion anymore, their extremism must really find its roots in poverty, colonialism, and class struggle, and that we only need appease, befriend, and morally support them in order to reach peace. It certainly isn’t unprecedented for leftists to defend Hamas on the grounds that they have at various points formed a democratically elected government in the Palestinian territories, as if Hamas themselves could care less about democracy or freedom.

The problem with this is that anybody who has ever lived outside of the secular elitist Guardianista bubble knows that this isn’t the case, and that believers of all faiths really do believe, some of them violently so. Hamas and similar organisations make clear in their founding documents that they do not merely seek for the liberation of Palestine (to allow their terminology), but for the destruction of the State of Israel and even of worldwide Jewry. These are the people whom Corbyn, in his utter blindness towards the power of the religious impulse, combined with his indifference towards the wellbeing of the Jewish people and state, has no qualms describing as his ‘friends’.

We may be bombarded with coronavirus propaganda for some time yet, but it is worth reminding ourselves that older and more intractable problems haven't gone away. For example, not everyone is unhappy about the current police state, rolled out in response to the coronavirus debacle. Not everyone would like to see things go back to normal. 

Does God exist?

The eternity of truth is inherent in it : all truths—not a few grand ones—are equally eternal. I am sorry that the word eternal should necessarily have an unction which prejudices dry minds against it, and leads fools to use it without understanding. This unction is not rhetorical, because the nature of truth is really sublime, and its name ought to mark its sublimity. Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)

To my mind the question does God exist is easily answered – no. To other people the answer is just as easy – yes. The arguments are so well-known that they have become uninteresting and perhaps that leads us to a much more interesting question – does it matter?

Probably not as far as many modern, right-on progressives are concerned, but who knows? Maybe it would have been socially and politically useful to keep a firmer and more widespread hold of the idea of God before leaping into the divisive and nihilistic swamp of political correctness. Would God have helped us to avoid rootless modes of unbelief which seem so remarkably good at fostering disorientation? Perhaps not but the possibility has to be worth a thought or two because socially and politically things are not going well for the secular world.

God as a transcendental standard of truth does at least remind us that there is an immutable reality reflected in immutable natural laws. A secular reality has no such transcendental reminder. It only has money, politics and rather feeble appeals to integrity.

Here in the West, freeing ourselves from the restrictive embrace of Christianity, however imperfect that embrace might have been, has not been an unalloyed success. Family breakdown, abortion on demand, attacks on men disguised as feminism, attacks on heterosexual norms disguised as sexual tolerance, attacks on indigenous Westerners disguised as anti-racism, attacks on Christianity disguised as attacks on Islamophobia, attacks on free speech disguised as attacks on hate speech, overt sexual display disguised as personal freedom.

It’s quite a list and all are secular trends we cannot easily discuss or analyse because our brave new world promises to be far more intolerant than the one it seeks to replace. With huge irony, secular repression is proving to be even more onerous, even more of a drag on human freedom than perhaps we assumed. Yet we thought we were in control. 

In control? Fat chance. Even our science has not been immune, that dispassionate pursuit of truth which played such as large part in pulling us out of a life nasty, brutish and short. After supposedly climbing from the gloomy depths of superstition to the cool uplands of objectivity we in the West have taken to pseudoscientific fraud in a big way. The scientific method hasn’t protected us from climate fraud but that was just for starters. If lying to children and wasting billions upon billions of dollars on bizarre attempts to control the climate were not enough we have lots more destructive pseudoscientific nonsense in the pipeline. The secular nihilists are just getting into their stride.

For example those who advocate the mantra of biologically identical male and female brains are already trying to suppress extremely well-established scientific work which says otherwise. Common sense also says otherwise but common sense is definitely passé - and no longer common.

In an increasingly rootless Western world, it is perhaps worthwhile to take another look at Santayana’s quote and ponder the possibility that God as transcendental truth may have been our best defence against secular madness. Maybe that was the whole point but we didn’t see it - we allowed ourselves to home in on the religious baggage because it was an easy target. Easy to criticise, sneer at or lampoon perhaps, but the spiritual core is not at all easy to replace because the spiritual core is where the nature of truth is really sublime, and its name ought to mark its sublimity.

This is not to claim that believers are more truthful or more sane than everyone else because quite a few are decidedly loopy. But the loopy aspect tends to come with the baggage rather than the core monotheism. Whether God exists or not and whether this is a valid question or not, it may well be that some kind of unadorned monotheism would have provided a spiritual defence against the crazy excesses of secular political rhetoric.

Suppose we move on and conduct a thought experiment. Suppose we imagine a UK which is as solidly religious as it was a century or more ago. In addition, suppose we tidy up our thought experiment by sidelining sects, schisms and doctrinal intransigence in favour of a simple pared down monotheism. This would be a theism which does not seek to compete with a scientific standpoint but bases itself on a much more moral outlook. Even a moral cosmology.

Completely impossible of course because human nature would not allow it. The baggage would accumulate from day one, but this is merely a thought experiment so we may set aside the baggage issue, insurmountable though it is. Given the impossible nature of the thought experiment any conclusion is mere daydreaming anyhow, but even daydreaming may be interesting.

In which case it may be suggested that a simple monotheism may well have protected us from a number of malign social and political trends. Not only that, but it seems likely enough that it would also have left Western societies and cultures with the confidence to remain as coherent societies and cultures in the first place. It would have left the roots intact.

It may be that atheism and agnosticism are aspects of collective intellectual decline, not the intellectual progress they seem to represent - and I write that as an atheist. It may be that God’s existence isn’t the point but some degree of transcendental truth, moral authority and cultural continuity was always the point. A point now all but lost.

Faintly flash

Every now and then we see Jehovah's Witnesses park their cars and gather together for one of their periodic house-to-house visiting sessions. For some reason we are always slightly surprised at the cars they drive.

As their religion is presumably be a large part of their lives, we'd expect them to drive something excessively modest. Something small and old with paintwork the colour of an old potato sack for example. I don't know why - stereotypes and prejudice I suppose. Anyhow the expectation seems to be wrong.

From our limited experience Jehovah's Witnesses tend to drive cars which are very modest but not as modest as the basic model. Their cars are tinged with the very slightest hint of cautious flamboyance. Two tone paintwork and even a hint of sporty aspirations. The Toyota Aygo pictured above is a good example. Faintly flash.

Forging Islamic Science

Historian Nir Shafir has an interesting Aeon essay on fake Islamic images and artifacts.

As I prepared to teach my class ‘Science and Islam’ last spring, I noticed something peculiar about the book I was about to assign to my students. It wasn’t the text – a wonderful translation of a medieval Arabic encyclopaedia – but the cover. Its illustration showed scholars in turbans and medieval Middle Eastern dress, examining the starry sky through telescopes. The miniature purported to be from the premodern Middle East, but something was off.

Besides the colours being a bit too vivid, and the brushstrokes a little too clean, what perturbed me were the telescopes. The telescope was known in the Middle East after Galileo developed it in the 17th century, but almost no illustrations or miniatures ever depicted such an object. When I tracked down the full image, two more figures emerged: one also looking through a telescope, while the other jotted down notes while his hand spun a globe – another instrument that was rarely drawn. The starkest contradiction, however, was the quill in the fourth figure’s hand. Middle Eastern scholars had always used reed pens to write. By now there was no denying it: the cover illustration was a modern-day forgery, masquerading as a medieval illustration.

The whole essay is worth reading as it gives an interesting and somewhat chilling insight into efforts being made to mould perceptions of Islam and its relevance to the modern world. 

It also highlights a Western tendency to prefer easy historical fictions to more problematic and incomplete realities, Hollywood being an obvious example.

No apology is required

I see Rowan Atkinson has defended the right of Boris Johnson to make jokes about the burka

Rowan Atkinson has defended Boris Johnson after his controversial comments about women wearing burkas.

The actor, known for his comedy performances in Mr Bean and Blackadder, said the remarks were funny.

Atkinson wrote in a letter to The Times: "As a lifelong beneficiary of the freedom to make jokes about religion, I do think that Boris Johnson's joke about wearers of the burka resembling letterboxes is a pretty good one."

He added: "All jokes about religion cause offence, so it's pointless apologising for them.

"You should really only apologise for a bad joke. On that basis, no apology is required."

I suspect a huge number of people would agree with Mr Atkinson - no apology is required. Away from the mainstream media there are numerous jokes and visual lampoons concerning the burka. One would have to live in a light-proof tent not to know that.

The whole fracas is yet another embarrassing example of establishment grovelling in the face of blatant special pleading by politically favoured minorities. Special pleading for what? For unequal treatment ironically enough.

A longer running and more pleasing joke is the inability of feminists to join in. 

Manchester - Obama puts it down to complexity

From the Independent we have Barack Obama's take on the Manchester bombing.

Barack Obama said he was “heartbroken” by the Manchester attack that killed 22 people and he hoped he will be able to use his influence to bring young people together in the face of terrorism.

“At a time, when the world is a very complicated place, when we can see the terrible violence that took place just recently in Manchester," the former US President told a crowd of tens of thousands at an event in the German capital Berlin about democracy and global responsibility.

No mention of Islam as far as one can tell. Obama's solution is to "push back" whatever that means. Not much if his past is any guide. We are well rid of him.

"We have to push back against those trends that would violate human rights or suppress democracy or restrict individual freedoms,” he said.

Pontius Pilate in Venezuela

Sandro Magister has some harsh words about the Pope's approach to the crisis in Venezuela.

Pontius Pilate Has Reappeared In Venezuela

The number of dead is now around forty, the wounded number a thousand. It is the price of a month of popular demonstrations, even of only women dressed in white, against the presidency of Nicolás Maduro, in a Venezuela on the brink.

A Venezuela in which a new factor has recently taken the field, and this is the growing, systematic aggression against properties and personnel of the Catholic Church...

...Nothing is off-limits. Death threats and blasphemous graffiti on the walls of churches. Masses interrupted by incursions of Chavist “colectivos.” Caracas cardinal Jorge Urosa Savino silenced during the homily and forced to leave the church. The venerated image of the Nazarene in the cathedral of Valencia smeared with human excrement. The chanceries of the dioceses of Guarenas and Maracay plundered. Thefts of consecrated hosts in Maracaibo. The headquarters of the episcopal conference devastated. One priest killed in Guayana and another abducted...

...The fact is that between Pope Francis and the Venezuelan bishops, concerning the crisis that is ravaging the country, there is an abyss. The bishops stand with the population that is protesting against the dictatorship, and are respected and listened to as authoritative guides. While Bergoglio is judged on a par with Pontius Pilate, unforgivably reckless with Maduro and Chavism, in addition to being incomprehensibly reticent on the victims of the repression and on the aggression that is striking the Church itself.

It is a fracture analogous to the one produced in Bolivia, where President Evo Morales has his biggest critics in the bishops, and instead a tireless supporter in the pope. Or that which was seen during the pope’s journey to Cuba, where Francis did not conceal his admiration for the Castro brothers, while not dignifying the dissidents with so much as a word or a glance.

As a crusty old atheist this is not my territory, yet even an atheist cannot fail to be aware that all is not well with the current papal regime. Pope Francis' support for the orthodox climate narrative must have raised quite a few eyebrows both inside and outside his church. How these things are dealt with I've no idea. Do we go back to black smoke? 

A God, unknown

A God, unknown at present, seems to be developing, growing, and revealing Himself from time to time. In the intervals, so it seems, He leaves the world to itself, like the farmer, who lets the tares and wheat grow together till the harvest. Each epoch of revelation shows Him animated with new ideas, and practically improving His methods. Thus Religion will return, but under new aspects, for a compromise with the old religions seems impossible. We do not await an epoch of reaction, nor a return to out-worn ideals, but an advance towards something new. But of what sort? Let us wait!

August Strindberg - The Inferno (1897)

The Inferno was written during a period when Strindberg appeared to suffer from depression or some other mental ailment, although he may also have exaggerated his problems for dramatic effect. He was also drinking heavily, particularly absinthe, although he may have exaggerated that too.

Did he foresee a genuine social trend though? It is difficult to say with any confidence, because if his new god was unknown in Strindberg’s day, then it also seems to be unknown today. Yet there are many clues suggesting that our usual distinction between politics and religion is misleading. In both cases people take belief beyond the evidence and into the realms of political control.

Other clues are to be found in the righteous nature of modern progressive attitudes to social norms; in attitudes to the environment, equality, economics, race, immigration, education, social uniformity and moral behaviour. Political correctness sums up much of it, but is there a god lurking in the righteous recesses of political correctness? A cult perhaps - but a god?

Suppose we go with cult for now. 

Suppose we take hold of the idea that a global cult is evolving within the shallow souls of susceptible social progressives. To begin with the cult could be called socialism even though at first sight socialism may have too much historical baggage to serve as a peg on which to hang this particular shroud.

Yet socialism has always had a strongly righteous air beyond a natural desire to correct social wrongs. These righteous overtones are significant enough to warrant treating socialism as political cult if we are to understand the modern world. We see frequent associations between socialist politics and the incremental enforcement of uniform behaviour using propaganda, harassment, ostracism and legal restrictions on free speech.

It may be going a little too far to paint socialism as a secular religion but there are interesting parallels once we focus on behavioural control and blur the distinction between politics and religion. Socialism has its priesthood, evangelists, taboos and possibly sacred texts. The Communist Manifesto for example. It may not be a church but it has a collection plate where even the unrighteous have to cough up their compulsory donations, compulsion being essential to progressive ideas.

As a somewhat entertaining example we also seem to have a home-grown socialist saint in Jeremy Corbyn. Since his elevation to the Labour leadership, the cult name ‘socialism’ is allowed to circulate again. Clearly the name is seen as important to believers, totemic even.

During the dark and unenlightened days of Tony Blair the name of socialism was suppressed in the pursuit of secular respectability. Since St Jeremy cleverly isolated the wicked majority of Labour MPs, believers are now free to use the sacred name once more.

Maybe Strindberg was right in one sense at least. We seem to have a progressive socialist cult and perhaps we have a god to go with it. If socialism is worth defining as a secular political cult then maybe its god is a cloud of somewhat nebulous ideals with Marx as an important prophet. The religious parallels are certainly there.

Religions may disappear, but religious feelings will always create new ones, even with the help of science.

Emile Zola - Rome (1896)

Early starter

This morning my wife opened the door to yet another visit from Jehovah's Witnesses, but this one was different. A young girl about eight years old attempted to deliver the usual spiel while two adult minders hovered in the background.

It was no contest of course and she was easily brushed off, but I’m not sure what I think of it. Our visit certainly brings home the determination of adults to infect their offspring with their own standpoint, however outlandish and isolating it may be. Because it must be isolating and that provokes another thought about the Named Person scheme in Scotland, the legislation for which comes into force in August 2016.

Most children and young people get all the help and support they need from their parent(s), wider family and community, but sometimes they may need a bit of extra support.

Children and young people from birth to 18, or beyond if still in school, have access to a Named Person to help support their wellbeing as part of the Getting it right for every child (GIRFEC) approach.

Total government is never far away these days. What would be the outcome if our young religious visitor happened to live in Scotland and decided to consult her Named Person about her doorstep preaching? If the legislation comes south we may well find out.

When confusion reigns

Towards the end of the nineteenth century Émile Zola wrote an interesting novel about Lourdes, the claimed miracles, the character and visions of Bernadette Soubirous and the huge pilgrimage site Lourdes became. He wrote the novel through the eyes of Pierre Froment, a priest struggling with his loss of faith.

The passage below shows how in Zola’s view confusion can be a vehicle for human hopes and passions even when faced with the stark realities of death and incurable disease. Over two centuries earlier Baruch Spinoza saw confusion as the essential element of misguided human thought. Whatever one thinks of the Lourdes phenomenon, it is very far from being the only area where confusion has bypassed painful or inconvenient realities. 

Pierre had now begun to understand what was taking place at Lourdes, the extraordinary spectacle which the world had been witnessing for years, amidst the reverent admiration of some and the insulting laughter of others. Forces as yet but imperfectly studied, of which one was even ignorant, were certainly at work — auto-suggestion, long prepared disturbance of the nerves; inspiriting influence of the journey, the prayers, and the hymns; and especially the healing breath, the unknown force which was evolved from the multitude, in the acute crisis of faith.

Thus it seemed to him anything but intelligent to believe in trickery. The facts were both of a much more lofty and much more simple nature. There was no occasion for the Fathers of the Grotto to descend to falsehood; it was sufficient that they should help in creating confusion, that they should utilise the universal ignorance. It might even be admitted that everybody acted in good faith — the doctors void of genius who delivered the certificates, the consoled patients who believed themselves cured, and the impassioned witnesses who swore that they had beheld what they described.

And from all this was evolved the obvious impossibility of proving whether there was a miracle or not. And such being the case, did not the miracle naturally become a reality for the greater number, for all those who suffered and who had need of hope?

Émile Zola – Lourdes (1894)

The Sexual Misery of the Arab World

After the appalling events in Brussels, perhaps this piece from The New York Times is worth revisiting. Guns, bombs, religion and politics hold centre stage, but in the end human drives and motives determine where we go from here.

The Sexual Misery of the Arab World
...Today sex is a great paradox in many countries of the Arab world: One acts as though it doesn’t exist, and yet it determines everything that’s unspoken. Denied, it weighs on the mind by its very concealment. Although women are veiled, they are at the center of our connections, exchanges and concerns.

Women are a recurrent theme in daily discourse, because the stakes they personify — for manliness, honor, family values — are great. In some countries, they are allowed access to the public sphere only if they renounce their bodies: To let them go uncovered would be to uncover the desire that the Islamist, the conservative and the idle youth feel and want to deny. Women are seen as a source of destabilization — short skirts trigger earthquakes, some say — and are respected only when defined by a property relationship, as the wife of X or the daughter of Y.

These contradictions create unbearable tensions. Desire has no outlet, no outcome; the couple is no longer a space of intimacy, but a concern of the whole group. The sexual misery that results can descend into absurdity and hysteria. Here, too, one hopes to experience love, but the mechanisms of love — encounters, seduction, flirting — are prevented: Women are watched, we obsess over their virginity, the morality police patrols. Some even pay surgeons to repair broken hymens...

The attractions of evil

Lindisfarne Priory

Does God exist? For an atheist the obvious answer is no while for a believer the equally obvious answer is yes. Arguments are pointless as there is no common ground on which one might be based, but an intractable problem for atheists is the transcendent nature of God.

For atheists God is an ideal they cannot borrow; a transcendent moral schema through which their secular world cannot be interpreted. Fair enough one might say. One might also say there are more gains than losses and perhaps there are but the losses are important.

The essential point seems to be the moral nature of what is lost as religious belief declines. God as an ideal is an open door to moral and social ideals. Corrupted at they are by human nature, they are nevertheless ideals which atheists are unable to replicate.

Some years ago Theodore Dalrymple had this to say in an interview.

One reason for the epidemic of self-destructiveness that has struck British, if not the whole of Western, society, is the avoidance of boredom. For people who have no transcendent purpose to their lives and cannot invent one through contributing to a cultural tradition (for example), in other words who have no religious belief and no intellectual interests to stimulate them, self-destruction and the creation of crises in their life is one way of warding off meaninglessness. I have noticed, for example, that women who frequent bad men - that is to say men who are obviously unreliable, drunken, drug-addicted, criminal, or violent, or all of them together, have often had experience of decent men who treat them well, with respect, and so forth: they are the ones with whom their relationships lasted the shortest time, because they were bored by decency. Without religion or culture (and here I mean high, or high-ish, culture) evil is very attractive. It is not boring

Atheists commonly have no transcendent purpose to their lives because there is nothing transcendent about atheism. Humanism is a pale imitation, a pallid reflection of the moral imperatives laid down by an omniscient and omnipotent creator.

Here again we can be distracted by the endless fallibility of human nature. The trouble is we atheists are still left with our lack of durable ideals, our inability to appeal to a transcendent authority vastly more permanent than ourselves. Equally important and damaging is that we have no ideals safely located beyond our reductionist methods of analysis. If it can be screwed we tend to screw it.

This has the unfortunate effect of leaving the gate open for fabricated social controls in the guise of political and ethical ideals. We don’t like uncertainty do we? We are prepared to make significant sacrifices if offered a more certain world and a more certain future. It doesn’t matter if the certainty on offer is a grossly obvious lie, it still tempts the unwary.

Neuroscientist Karl Friston thinks our brains are wired to minimise surprises. We want certainty – preferably now. This need for certainty creates a political market, a forum wherein purveyors of secular certainty tout their flaky wares to a populace hardwired to be gullible.

There seem to be two factors working together here. Firstly we have a problem in that a secular culture does not provide a transcendent moral schema, it provides laws and social prohibitions.

Secondly, a secular culture seems to offer a degree of spurious certainty. It claims to know more about the world than it actually does; claims to be more connected to the world than it actually is.

These two aspects of modern life are tending to promote a kind of rudderless moral drift which cannot be corrected and which Dalrymple so tellingly deplores. Unfortunately there seems to be no secular answer. Many atheists would argue that religious answers are no better or perhaps worse than having no transcendent answers at all and perhaps they often are. Yet a vital point is thereby missed in that secular societies seem to have only two long-term courses to steer.

Totalitarian domination of the weak by the strong.

Psychological conditioning of the weak by the strong.

Religious belief does not prevent either but neither does atheism.

Green opium

source

From the BBC:

Catholic bishops from around the world are calling for an end to fossil fuel use and increased efforts to secure a global climate treaty.

Catholics, they say, should engage with the process leading to a proposed new deal to be signed in Paris next year.

The statement is the first time that senior church figures from every continent have issued such a call.

Islam and the youth bulge

I suppose by now we’ve all read as much as we choose to read about the beheading of James Foley. Horrible of course and as far as one can tell Mr Foley accepted his appalling fate with a dignity his murderers perhaps did not perceive.

As for the wider message, I’m not sure there is one apart from a certain resigned acceptance that this is something the world has to deal with without itself falling in love with extreme violence.

There is however a strong temptation to condemn Islam as a whole and a corresponding temptation to regret that it ever took root in this country. As an atheist, these are temptations I am less and less inclined to resist.

When I see the faces of those young men sucked in by the insane rhetoric of older men, I’m reminded of the theory of the youth bulge. Certainly the pattern fits. If sound, then we may presume that Muslim violence is something which will decline due to demographic change. An excess of stupidly frustrated testosterone will have drained away. Maybe time will tell.

As for the present, I get no sense of fear in the wider population. No sense that terrorism actually manages to terrorise anyone but those in the direct firing line. Instead I get a sense that traditional Islam is failing to deal with an increasingly materialistic and secular world where women are not chattels and ancient books are merely ancient books. Failing because it has no orthodox response to these trends.

This inevitable failure plus the crazy young men and the evil-minded old men have come together in a particularly ghastly way. So it will continue, but not forever.

In which case, Mr Foley did not die in vain. His death was even heroic because it represents progress. Any failure of naked barbarism is progress. The world is changing and his death reminds us that his murderers belong to the past. A savage past but not frightening – simply because it is the past.

It may well point to a future where, within a couple of generations, the Islamic extremes we see today are gone. The old men have passed away; the crazy young men are now old - those who contrived to survive their own stupidity at least.

If so, there is not much to be gained by accommodation or appeasement. It won’t work and may even delay the slowly grinding wheels of social change.

False gods

From Wikipedia

For some of us without a belief in God, it may be disappointing that so many false gods have slipped into the godless vacuum that is modern society. At least a belief in God tended to highlight the worship of false gods, bringing out the fact that they were gods, were worshipped and were false.

Take whales as a crazy example. Study the ecstatic faces of those who observe their first whale – after all it’s something we see on TV often enough. Why ecstatic? Have whales been promoted to minor deities? Ludicrously enough, yes they obviously have – for some. The environment appears to be a zoo of minor deities apart from its human denizens. Humans seem to be the demons in this strange new Godless but god-riddled world.

The great and somewhat covert myth of western secularism was that social control would somehow turn out to be less rigid and oppressive than during our predominantly Christian social evolution.

Yet what is a person in our brave new secular world? As far as ruling technocrats and global corporations are concerned, a person seems to be no more than a pattern of behaviour. Not a mind, not an individual, not a free citizen with spiritual values, moral standards or any of those old-fashioned notions, but simply a pattern of behaviour.

So how wide is this range of person-defining behaviour? Well surely the first and most obvious question is – what range of behaviour might be acceptable to our puppet masters – given what we already know of them?

So that’s a narrow range of behaviour isn’t it?

The only important behavours are probably political and social timidity combined with naive shopping habits. That’s it – that’s probably all that is required of ordinary citizens.

Truth is one of the most obvious casualties, truth so often being inimical to manipulative narratives. So a politician’s job is not truth-driven and politicians are not truth-seekers. Why would they be in a secular society wholly based on manipulative narratives designed behind the scenes? It wouldn’t work.

A truth-seeking culture would screw up all those manipulative narratives. In a secular society, political and commercial dishonesty always have this covert yet wholly essential rationale.

So secular society has not proved to be the brave new rational world many secular folk may have dreamed of – and in many cases worked for. What was overlooked is that a secular desire to control behaviour in pursuit of political security and commercial advantage has no reason to stop at any particular juncture other than economic and technical feasibility.

So the only limits we have on attempts to control behaviour are economic and technical – not moral or spiritual. Control cannot be halted by any countervailing moral or spiritual force because to an increasingly large extent there isn’t one. We secular folk rejected it.

Christian religious traditions on the other hand, whatever faults and corruptions may have occurred over the centuries, were rational attempts to make moral and spiritual sense of the human condition. Our shift towards a more secular society leaves a moral hole inevitably filled by political correctness simply because that’s the biggest game in town. Promoted to that position by secular indifference and outright stupidity.

That is certainly not to say that one society is to be preferred over another. I don’t hanker after Victorian morality, but those of us with a secular outlook have a problem we seem reluctant to acknowledge. The defects of secular society may at the moment be tolerable to many, but much of that tolerance may be due to little more than physical comfort. Food, shelter and entertainment have subverted us – or too many of us at least.

Should our physical situation become less comfortable, then the defects of a secular society may well become startlingly apparent. Startling to those who missed what was going on any rate.