I’m doing a course at college at the moment called ‘Public Theology’, which is basically about how theology and the public sphere (e.g. politics, society) interact. Earlier this week I did a seminar on marriage, i.e. how the church should engage society on the topic of marriage. As regular readers will know this is something I’ve written a fair bit about here, so it’s a topic I’m interested in! I focused on the topic of same-sex marriage, because we had limited time and that’s the thing which I think is most relevant.
Anyway, this course has really made me think through the whys and the hows of engaging culture, and has probably left me with more questions than answers! In particular on the topic of marriage – why is it that Christians should stand up for the ‘traditional’ / Biblical view of marriage? (more…)
In the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V), the American Psychiatric Association (APA) drew a very distinct line between pedophilia and pedophilic disorder. Pedophilia refers to a sexual orientation or profession of sexual preference devoid of consummation, whereas pedophilic disorder is defined as a compulsion and is used in reference to individuals who act on their sexuality.
I’m just not quite sure what to make of it at the moment. Here we have a particular sexual desire – an ‘orientation’ – being seen as acceptable, whereas acting on this particular orientation is not. (Edit: this article (see comments) indicates that the article is based on a misunderstanding and is not actually the case. However, given the article in the next paragraph, I think this post still applies, if only as more of a hypothetical – there are certainly those who would wish to change paedophilia to an orientation and it has been discussed in official circles.)
What’s even more interesting is another article on Paedophilia from earlier this year: it suggests that the ‘harm’ aspect of Paedophilia – which I would imagine most if not all people would see as proscribing any kind of paedophilic behaviour – is actually more gray and complex than you might think.
Given that I’m on a roll of offensiveness with my previous post on marriage, I thought I’d see if I can break a record of the number of people I can offend in one week by blogging about ethics. This term at college, we’ve started a course on ethics, and we spent the first week or two looking at how ethical systems are defined. While it’s still fresh in my memory, I’d like to think about how this might apply to ‘godless’ ethics, of which I have already touched on before.
Just to have a definition to be going on with, ethics is an answer to the question ‘how should we then live?‘
Broadly speaking there are three models of defining an ethical system that we’ve looked at: virtue, duty, and consequence. Let’s look at these in turn and see how they might work out.
Recently I mentioned that I was reading through “Atheist Delusions” by David Bentley Hart, and I said I would write up a review of it when I’d finished reading it. Well, I’ve finished reading it now, and really enjoyed it. Quite a lot of the book deals with the same kind of things I’ve been talking about with regards to atheism/secularism, although he takes it from a different angle. Essentially, Hart is going on a journey through Christian church history, and along the way correcting a lot of misperceptions about the past and how our society relates to that. From that perspective, I think he does brilliantly: he writes like he knows what he’s talking about – he’s done the reading and interacted with what we know historically (unlike a lot of the so-called ‘New Atheists’, who seem to basically ignore it). His basic contention is that the New Atheist reading of history is completely back-to-front, when Christianity arrived on the scene it changed the world in ways which are hard for us to imagine now.
Speaking of the New Atheists, it’s written in a fairly robust style in that he spares no love for the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris – although in general they (and especially Dawkins) spare no love for Christianity in their books so it’s like for like. And most of the book is spent not so much on interacting with their arguments directly but interacting with history and various views on it. My main problem with the style of the book was that it is fairly dense prose, which isn’t really good when you’re trying to read it late at night! It’s definitely a book which you really need to be fully awake for to read properly, but it’s worth it.
What I’d like to do is pull out some of his arguments about secularism, which should both tie in with what I’ve said before as well as give you a flavour of what the book is like. This all comes from the last quarter of the book, the previous three-quarters being groundwork for it. (I apologise that it’s a bit long… skip to the end for my tl;dr!) I’m going to do this in two sections – firstly about Christian morality as opposed to the pagan morality which preceded it, and then secularism.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
