Phill Sacre

Tag: secularism

  • 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.

  • Secularism and Humanitarian Punishment

    Recently, I came across C.S. Lewis’ essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”. If you’ve not read it, I do recommend it: I think Lewis makes some excellent points about punishment. It makes quite a neat follow-up to my previous post on Atheism Plus and ethics. What I was talking about in that post was personal morality: does atheism have the power to change anyone’s life from bad to good? Does atheism have the power to stop people doing things which are ‘unethical’?

    What I’d like to do in this post is look at the idea of punishment itself. What happens when someone DOES do something considered unethical / wrong, at the level of society? Lewis argues that the traditional idea with respect to punishment is that of retribution: someone has done something wrong, therefore they deserve some kind of punishment. There is a connection between punishment and crime.

    However, what some were arguing back in the 1940s with respect to capital punishment, was that retributive punishment is actually immoral. Lewis outlines the two reasons given for punishment: correction – i.e. to make someone change their behaviour – and deterrent, i.e. making sure that other people don’t follow the same pattern of behaviour. I think the same arguments would probably be applicable today. Where it gets interesting is how Lewis then takes it.

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  • Bigoted, Homophobic… and proud?!

    Thought that title would catch your attention! One thing which annoys me about the whole furore surrounding the government’s proposals to redefine marriage (which I’ve blogged about before) is the careless way people use words like ‘bigoted’ and ‘homophobic’. Particularly the first one: these days, if you are opposed to anything which society in general seems to be for, you are ‘bigoted’. For example, Marcus Brigstocke tweeted about a month ago, “Hey The Church – heres a thought – man up and own your bigotry.” Is that fair?

    Let me borrow the definition of ‘bigot’ from the online dictionary:

    a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion.

    Many say that because the church don’t want the government to redefine marriage, they are bigots. So they are ‘utterly intolerant of a different belief or opinion.’ The problem is… the idea that marriage should be a lifelong partnership between one man and one woman is an opinion – a belief. But the idea that marriage should be ‘egalitarian’ and allowed between any two consenting adults is also a belief or opinion. Unfortunately, the two opinions cannot co-exist legally – in a country such as the UK, it’s up to the government to pick a position and enforce it. In the past, such opinions have largely been drawn from a Christian view of the world (or at least, quasi-Christian). And many people still have that Christian moral framework in place, even if some of the distinctives have slipped out.

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  • Atheist Delusions: The Review

    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.

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  • Gay Marriage and other lighthearted topics

    Honestly. It feels like the news has gone a bit crazy recently, what with the ASA ruling that God cannot heal people, then the whole fracas about ‘militant secularism’, and now this: people going a bit crazy over whether the definition of marriage should be changed to include same-sex marriages.

    It seemed to kick off a few days ago when Keith O’Brien wrote an article entitled, “We cannot afford to defend this madness“. After that, the atheist brigade on Twitter seemed to go mad; I saw a number of comments along the lines of “he believes in <x> (e.g. sky fairies) and yet he doesn’t believe in gay marriage”, etc. Most of what I saw written went way beyond what he actually said and ended up in ad hominem attacks or more general attacks on Christianity.

    I don’t want to defend O’Brien’s piece because I don’t agree with all of it; although I do agree that redefining marriage would be a bad thing: the idea that marriage is between one man and one woman is an orthodox Christian belief.

    That said, I do want to make a couple of points about people’s responses, one of which will seem oddly familiar if you’ve been reading my blog of late.

    Firstly, the people who seem to be most vocal in their criticism of O’Brien (and the like) seem to be taking a ‘moral high ground’ position by claiming that it’s obviously right for marriage to be extended to homosexual couples. I would like to pose the challenge (similarly to my previous post on secularism): to what are you appealing when saying that one thing is more moral than another?

    Secondly, I got thinking about marriage (as one does), and why it’s defined like it is. What is the point of marriage? Is it strictly a civil thing, or is there some deeper meaning to it? Why, indeed, does the government have to get involved in pronouncing people man and wife?

    In fact, why should the government really be legislating on any kind of sexual activity (beyond, perhaps, sexual activity with minors and incest)? Come to think about it, why should polygamous marriages be disallowed?

    It seems to me that the legal definition of marriage makes a few (generally Christian) assumptions about what is right and wrong in terms of sexual behaviour. If we start changing one of those assumptions, we may as well reconsider the others. Once again, it seems that secularism may well lead us down a path here where I don’t think we want to go.

    Finally, Peter Ould has blogged some very good questions on “Gender Neutral Marriage” which I would recommend reading to get an idea of the scope of the issues.

    This whole move by the government smacks of “Yes Prime Minister” – doing something to prove that the government is trendy and not the ‘old Tories’, rather than actually doing something because they’ve thought it through and believe in the principles.

  • Post-script to Secularism

    My last post has generated a fair bit of controversy – I don’t think I’ve ever made a blog post which has attracted so many comments!

    I’d just like to write a very brief postscript to that with a link to a blog post about after-birth abortion: two doctors have written in the Journal of Medical Ethics a paper entitled: “After-Birth Abortion: Why should the baby live?” This is part of the abstract:

    the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

    In other words, once a baby has been born, it should be possible to kill it as it does not yet have any moral status as a person.

    Now, this sounds like very shaky ground to me. The blog post I linked to above makes the point that once you allow for abortion, any lines you draw in the sand are essentially arbitrary. When I was writing my blog post last week, I just suggested that a secular society might lead us in a direction we didn’t want to go. I’m wondering whether this is a concrete example of what one of those directions might be.

  • Secular Society: A Good Thing?

    I’ve been thinking a bit about the whole ‘militant secularism’ thing recently. If you’ve missed what’s happened, you must have been living under a rock. Or, paying no attention to the news. Either way, there’s been a whole lotta bloggin’ going on about it! This is the news article which kicked it off, although also see my post on healing and the ASA. Also you can read Baroness Warsi’s comments which I think really kicked off usage of the phrase ‘militant secularism’ in the past week or two.

    What I’d like to talk about today is secularism itself: it’s often portrayed as a ‘neutral ground’ where those of all faiths and none can come together and make a stable society where people’s personal beliefs can stay out of the way. Just leave your religious beliefs at home, and there’ll be no problems.

    The problem with that is that I don’t see secularism as ‘neutral ground’: secularism is a belief system too. What I mean by that is, the implicit idea behind secularism is that it’s possible to rightly govern, administer justice, and act ethically without a religious reference point. In other words, in this country at least, essentially secularism is equal to atheism.

    The problem with that – with respect to the governance of this (or any) country, is that I think theism in general and Christianity in particular provides the only sound, rational foundation for any kind of ethical system. As such, what the secularists or atheists want to claim – that the country would be better off if we dispensed with the religious element in leadership – is simply not true.

    Let me try and explain: in atheism, you don’t have many options for morality. I’ve heard a few different explanations, including reading an interview with Richard Dawkins the other day when he explains that morality comes from the cultural ‘Zeitgeist‘ (his word) – in other words, what people think is right and wrong at the time. But the general principle is that there is nothing objectively right and wrong – in other words, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ are simply labels which we have almost arbitrarily come to define in a certain way. That definition may well change in the future.

    So to take an example, in some Islamic countries I understand a woman may be stoned to death if she is caught in adultery. Is that a moral or an immoral action? It seems to be the cultural ‘Zeitgeist’; it’s the law of the land – the punishment is not hidden. In other words, I can’t see how an atheist could say, with all integrity, that that was a wrong or immoral action. Now if that’s not an immoral action… what’s to stop the same thing happening in this country (UK)?

    Similarly, in this country: for a long period of time (c. 8-900 years), kings and rulers have been under the same law as everyone else. In other words, all are treated equally according to the law (in theory, at least). Why should that be so? The original reason given was Genesis 1:27 – everyone is created in the image of God, and therefore everyone deserves to be treated equally. This isn’t an obvious idea – just look at the history books, look around at the world, to see that this is not so.

    I believe that something underpins morality, and that something is the Christian God. There are no two ways about it.

    This is what Dorothy L. Sayers saw clearly in her essay ‘Creed or Chaos?‘ (originally from 1940, the reference to Germany is to the Nazi party):

    We on our side have been trying for several centuries to uphold a particular standard of ethical values which derives from Christian dogma, while gradually dispensing with the very dogma which is the sole rational foundation for those values. The rulers of Germany have seen quite clearly that dogma and ethics are inextricably bound together. Having renounced the dogma, they have renounced the ethics as well—and from their point of view they are perfectly right. They have adopted an entirely different dogma, whose ethical scheme has no value for peace or truth, mercy or justice, faith or freedom; and they see no reason why they should practise a set of virtues incompatible with their dogma.

    If you reduce morals to things you can rationalise – well, you can rationalise just about anything. A secular society could well lead us down a direction we don’t want to go.

    This is where I want to draw back to the issue of militant secularism. Now I don’t agree with Baroness Warsi that we are facing ‘militant’ secularism (Although I do think there are a number of strident voices which want to get rid of any religious influence in the public square whatsoever, which may have muddied the waters). What is more worrying to me is ‘secularism creep’ to coin a phrase. In other words, more and more, secularism is becoming the ‘default’ position without it ever being democratically introduced.

    We’ve ended up in a situation where religion is marginalised in the public square, almost without anyone ever agreeing that’s a good thing – it’s just happened because of inertia and people believing that ‘secularism is neutral’.

    What I’m hoping is that all this will provoke some kind of debate about the role of religion, Christianity and secularism in our society. If the people want secularism that’s fine, that’s democracy for you – but I’d rather people were aware of what they were agreeing to rather than it just creeping in by stealth.