Phill Sacre

Tag: christianity

  • The Story of the Jews

    One of the things which interests me about modern-day Judaism is how different it is from my understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures (i.e. the Jewish Bible or the Christian Old Testament). Given that Christians and Jews have so much shared Scripture (most of the Bible – 75% or thereabouts – is the Hebrew Scriptures) – how have they ended up in such different places? In particular, modern-day Jews do not offer sacrifices and there seems to be no atonement for sin – the focus seems to be rather on the observance of the law. So I was interested to see that Simon Schama has created a new documentary called “The Story of the Jews” recently (Sunday evenings on BBC2 – at the time of writing there are another couple of episodes remaining in the series). Mrs Phil and I have been watching it, and it’s fascinating. What’s particularly interesting to me is how Judaism has changed and adapted over the years.

    It’s fascinating to see how Simon Schama – and others – interpret the parts of the Scriptures which I am familiar with, and yet put a slant on them which I would be quite unfamiliar with. Present-day Jews have much more history to look back on, and have much more to explain. In a particularly poignant moment at the end of the last programme, for example, Simon Schama talked about the building anti-Semitism in Europe at the end of the 19th century before finishing up at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. (more…)

  • Welcome to the New Orthodoxy…

    Christian Martyrs being burned at the stake… but, to borrow from The Who, it’s not the same as the old orthodoxy. I’ve just read a very interesting article called “The Unhappy Fate of Optional Orthodoxy” (only the top half of the page is the article in question; the rest is a collation of shorter pieces. H/T John Richardson via Facebook for the link).

    I think it sheds some light on the comments I’ve received here recently about my posts on sexuality and marriage. It seems that anything about sexuality from a traditional Christian perspective has the ability to get people’s backs up like nothing else at the moment (with the exception of women bishops, perhaps – although I haven’t blogged about that much so I haven’t experienced commenter wrath on that one…)

    Anyway, I’d like to quote from the article because I think it hits the nail on the head. This is a fairly lengthy quote but I think it’s worth it. I’ve highlighted in bold the quotes I think are particularly insightful. (more…)

  • Does God LOL?

    Source: Flickr (martinsphotoart)

    For my birthday, I was given a copy of “Does God LOL” – a collection of brief thoughts by various people working in the field of comedy about the subject of God and humour. I actually found it a fascinating read!

    The book is, as you would expect from a compendium of different people’s thoughts, a mixed bag. But the sheer breadth and number of the people involved is – to my mind – pretty staggering: comedy is perceived as being a very ‘godless’ kind of place, and often Christianity is mocked (see my previous post on Comedy and Christianity, for example). But as I turned the pages, I kept seeing names I recognised – or at least, people involved with things I recognised. Tim Vine and Milton Jones have contributed, of course – both are well known Christian comedians. But there are also chapters by other familiar names who aren’t often associated with religious things – Jo Brand, for example. There were also people who were associated with (i.e. writers for or actors in) shows which you probably do know, such as Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow or Miranda. In general, I was pleasantly surprised by how many I recognised and how faith seems to be a really deep-seated thing and real for many of the writers.

    Is comedy godless? Well, on the basis of this book – definitely not!

    Some of the pieces were very thought provoking, though. (It got me thinking about whether it would be possible to do a Biblical Theology of laughter, although I suspect that any attempt might be a bit forced). One chapter got me thinking about Psalm 2, one of the times in the Bible where God is said to ‘laugh’. (more…)

  • Is Atheism a replacement for Religion?

    I don’t know if you’ve seen the latest “storm in a Twitter-cup”, but Richard Dawkins has hit the news once again. You can read more about it here and here. Suffice it to say, he’s not made himself a popular man!

    Earlier today, I tweeted this:

    https://twitter.com/phillsacre/status/365807088443736064

    This started a Twitter conversation with few people, and I just wanted to clarify what I meant. Part of the problem is how you define ‘atheism’: many people were quick to point out (both to me personally and in general) that atheism is simply a lack of belief in god or gods: it’s not a system of values. It doesn’t help you to live your life, per se. Its remit is very narrow. (Thus, Richard Dawkins does not speak for atheists, he is not the atheist leader, etc).

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  • Is Secularism ‘neutral’, ‘godless’ – or even possible?

    Image source: Flickr
    Image source: Flickr

    After writing my previous post, I read Gillan’s excellent post over at the God and Politics blog, which I do commend to you. At the bottom of the article, he linked through to an article on the Theos Think Tank website, written by a Christian barrister, entitled “Is Secular Law possible?” I would encourage anyone who has an interest (either positive or negative) in religion in the public sphere to read it. It’s not a short article but it will be well worth your time.

    It basically argues: (1) secularist law – i.e. law which excludes any religious influence – is impossible, but ‘secular’ law (understood correctly) is possible; (2)  secular law is only possible because of Christian foundations in distinguishing between law and morality; (3) secular law is imperative, the idea of limited government logically comes from Christian foundations.

    In these days of alleged ‘militant secularism’, I think it’s high time that these kind of issues got out into the open and were actually discussed rather than simply being assumed. What kind of secular society do we want? I don’t think we want a secular society which can be used as a weapon against religion. To whet your appetite for the article, I’d like to quote from the first section on morality, which puts rather more eloquently what I have said here before:

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  • The Church is wiser than our secular society

    A BibleOne of the articles that seems to have been doing the rounds on Twitter lately is “Our secular society is wiser than the Church” by Oliver Kamm (most recently I saw it tweeted by my friend @pandammonium). I often read articles online without responding to them, but sometimes one annoys me sufficiently that I feel the need to write something about it here.

    The article itself is pretty short, it won’t take a minute of your time to read, but the argument is basically that the church always lags behind societal attitudes. Frankly I find the thinking in the article so muddled I don’t quite know where to begin, but I’ll quote a few sentences and try to explain:

    Gay marriage will become established and there will come a time when few of its current opponents (including Archbishop Welby) will be exercised by the issue.

    This is unbelievably patronising. Kamm is basically saying, “There, there, dear – your petty and ridiculous objections to same-sex marriage will be forgotten in a few years when you’ve finally caught up with society – and you will.” In other words, “you’ll come round, just give it time”. It doesn’t deal with any of the objections to same-sex marriage (hereafter known as SSM); it just assumes that SSM is correct and that any objectors are purely irrational hatemongers who will come round.

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  • Comedy and Christianity

    I watched an interesting programme on TV last night called “Are you having a laugh? Comedy and Christianity” (still available to watch on the BBC iPlayer at the time of writing). I didn’t agree with everything in the programme but I think it raised some interesting points: things do seem to have changed in the past 50 years – Christianity in general seems to be an acceptable target to attack in general now.

    One thing which I found particularly interesting was how a lot of comedians assume that it’s just OK to ridicule Christianity in a comedy show because (according to one comedian), Christians don’t enjoy comedy and don’t go to comedy shows. Now clearly that is stunningly narrow-minded, but at the same time it’s just reflective of the way Christianity seems to have been sidelined in society: it’s perfectly OK to be a Christian, as long as you don’t actually let it influence you in public life (see some of the tolerance stuff I was talking about).

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  • Toynbee Strikes Again

    I don’t usually write about such things on this blog, but this article by Polly Toynbee has got me quite annoyed. Her article is full of misinformation and slightly odd logic (something she’s been guilty of before, but we’ll leave that for the time being). It baffles me how someone who is so vitriolic can get a regular hearing in a national newspaper – but then, I guess Richard Dawkins has written articles before, so…

    Seeing as I don’t have much to do this afternoon, let’s take a quick look at some of the claims and arguments she makes:

    Rows over gay marriage and women bishops bewilder most people. With overwhelming popular support for both, how can abstruse theology and unpleasant prejudice cause such agitation at Westminster and in the rightwing press? Politics looks even more out of touch when obscure doctrine holds a disproportionate place in national life.

    It’s true that most people are probably in favour of women bishops – although that was more of an internal Church of England thing. Parliament haven’t really had to get involved in that; it wasn’t a political issue in the governmental sense. As for gay marriage, I’d hardly say there was “overwhelming public support” for it: according to the statistics from this article, just over 50% of the responses to the government’s proposals were in favour. This is ignoring the number of responses on both the “Coalition for Marriage” and “Coalition for Equal Marriage” petitions (c. 500,000 vs c. 60,000). Clearly, the world which Polly Toynbee lives in is one where even the government’s own official statistics are only just barely in favour of gay marriage is equal to ‘overwhelming public support’.

    With a third of state schools religious in this most secular country, Michael Gove not only swells their number but lets them discriminate as they please in admissions. As he is sending a bible to every English school, the BHA is fundraising to send out its own Young Atheist’s Handbook to school libraries. Government departments are outsourcing more services to faith groups in health, hospice, community and social care.

    Not entirely sure what the point of this paragraph is. So… religious schools are increasing in number. They do a good job; they’re usually popular. And each school has to be somewhat discriminatory in its admissions policy. What’s the problem? [See also this on the Church Mouse blog] And the government are ‘outsourcing’ services to faith groups. Because Christian faith groups tend to have a good track record in health, hospice, community and social care work. What’s the atheist record like in those areas? Oh.

    But of all the battles Jim Al-Khalili confronts, the most urgent is the right to die. Powerful religious forces block attempts to let the dying end their lives when they choose … The public supports the right to die, but many more will drag themselves off to a bleak Swiss clinic before the religions let us die in peace.

    Oh dear oh dear. So the only reason anyone would ever oppose euthanasia is because of religious ideas? Once again, I don’t think this is supported by the evidence. It’s not just the religious who have issues with assisted dying: see, for example, this piece (and, related, this one about the Lords which Toynbee mentioned in the article) – particularly the link through to the Scope website in the quote at the end. It seems that what Toynbee says is just propaganda; the BHA have set out their stall here and I don’t think they’ve considered all the implications.

    Sensing the ebbing tide of faith since the last census, the blowback against unbelievers has been remarkably violently expressed. Puzzlingly, we are routinely referred to as “aggressive atheists” as if non-belief itself were an affront. But we are with Voltaire, defending to the death people’s right to believe whatever they choose, but fighting to prevent them imposing their creeds on others.

    What Toynbee doesn’t seem to get is that governments, pretty much by definition, have to impose a view or creed on others. The government has to take a position on assisted dying. The government has to take a position on gay marriage. Her beef seems to be that the government don’t take her particular view, or that of the BHA. As I said before, atheistic secularism is NOT neutral ground.

    For instance, he might take offence at the charge that without God, unbelievers have no moral compass. Hitler and Stalin were atheists, that’s where it leads. We can ripost with religious atrocities, Godly genocides or the Inquisition, but that’s futile. Wise atheists make no moral claims, seeing good and bad randomly spread among humanity regardless of faith. Humans do have a hardwired moral sense, every child born with an instinct for justice that makes us by nature social animals, not needing revelations from ancient texts. The idea that morality can only be frightened into us artificially, by divine edict, is degrading.

    ‘Seeing good and bad randomly spread among humanity’ – that’s interesting. Why is ‘good and bad’ randomly spread among humanity? What’s the ‘bad’ doing there? If everyone truly has a hardwired instinct for justice, why is there bad? And what can the BHA do about it? I’m asking a genuine question here. If humans are so brilliant, why is the world in such a mess – especially when much of the world’s current mess is caused by the least-religious West? (i.e., it wasn’t ‘religion’ that caused the problems.)

    And the statement about morality being ‘frightened into us artificially, by divine edict’, is ignorant if nothing else.

    The new president will confront another common insult: atheists are desiccated rationalists with nothing spiritual in their lives, poor shrivelled souls lacking transcendental joy and wonder. But in awe of the natural world of physics, he’ll have no trouble with that. Earthbound, there is enough wonder in the magical realms of human imagination, thought, dream, memory and fantasy where most people reside for much of their waking lives. There is no emotional or spiritual deficiency in rejecting creeds that stunt and infantalise the imagination.

    ‘Creeds that stunt and infantalise the imagination’ – all I will say is, [citation needed]. I mean, seriously? Given how much incredible art, music, architecture etc. that religion has inspired? Sounds like the words of someone with a massive chip on their shoulder.

    Still, if all members of the BHA are as bitter as Polly Toynbee, with such a massive chip on their shoulders, I can’t see them ever being that popular. Self-worship is never particularly inspiring; and I think essentially that’s what is happening with humanism: we have a ‘can-do’ attitude, we can solve all our own problems. “Hey, look at us! We’re brilliant!” This ties in with something else I’ve been thinking about recently, about atheism being the ultimate form of idolatry, but we’ll leave that particular theological discussion to another day…

  • Merlin vs God

    Have you been watching the BBC Series ‘Merlin’? Mrs Phil and I have been watching it virtually since the beginning, and very much enjoy it. It’s silly, it’s a bit of fun, but it has some great moments in it.

    Obviously the programme has its flaws… as someone pointed out the other day, for a show which is supposed to be about Merlin – at the end of five series he’s still in the same position, whereas all the other characters have grown and developed. It’s also frustratingly contradictory at times, and this is something I want to pick up on today: what does Merlin (the show, not the character) say about God?

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  • No More Page 3 and ‘Rape Culture’

    I haven’t blogged about this before now, so firstly: if you haven’t seen the No More Page 3 campaign, I do encourage you to have a look and sign the petition if you agree. Frankly I think Page 3 is a dinosaur – a relic of a bygone age which should have been gone long ago. (Well, should never have been allowed to start, but let’s not go there.)

    I signed the petition a while back, but what prompted me to blog today was this article about ‘rape culture’. I find it seriously disturbing to know the kind of things which are going on around Universities these days (although, to be fair, it was probably going on when I was at uni almost ten years ago too – but the rise of Facebook and social media seem to have made it more prominent).

    I’m not sure how we got to this point in our society: clearly there are many factors at play, and I’m not clever or well-versed in history enough to understand them. But I do wonder whether this is partly down to our understanding of what it means to be human: if people coming through school are constantly being told “we’re basically fancy bald monkeys” – i.e. we are animals, nothing more and nothing less – then can people really be blamed for indulging in ‘animal instincts’ a bit? If men are designed by evolution to spread their genes as widely as possible – can they really be blamed for trying to indulge that?

    Obviously that is far from the whole picture, but it seems that once a society abandons the idea of a good Creator who values each of his creations equally, this kind of thing is almost to be expected. (Similarly with my previous thoughts on secularism and infanticide). It will be interesting to see what, if anything, can be done about this in our society: I struggle to believe that more ethical education is what is needed for lads who are being educated at university.

    A societal change is needed, and indeed I believe abolishing page 3 is a step in the right direction. The question is, whether it’s enough to stem the tide in a sex-saturated culture, or whether a more deep-rooted and fundamental change needs to happen in the life of society.