I love the Christian fundamentalist belief in the Rapture. The idea is that soon, very soon, the holy people will be raptured away to heaven, leaving the rest of us behind to suffer the painful, drawn-out end of the world. Armageddon, and all that. See the Book of Revelation for more details. Apparently in America some Christians have bumper stickers warning that in the event of Rapture, the car will suddenly be driverless.
Sadly the belief's not widely spread this side of the Atlantic. Sadly, because a bright atheist spark in America has shown it's a money-making opportunity. For a fee of $110 Bart Centre (that's the name of a man, not a public building) guarantees to look after the pets that are left behind. And being an atheist, he's able to guarantee that he'll still be here. He says "a handful" of people have bought the service.
More details here: and thanks to the Atheist Revolution blog for mentioning this.
Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
08 December 2009
27 November 2009
The Church in Ireland (2)
Back in May I posted an article about the Ryan report, which had uncovered a huge history of abuse in church-run children's homes and orphanages in Ireland. Now there's another report, giving details of abuse perpetrated by priests in the Archdiocese of Dublin. Here's an opinion article from the Irish Times - but be warned that it includes graphic description of an act of abuse. For those who can't take it, a named priest has admitted sexually abusing dozens of children. Some years after the first complaints, he was moved and appointed as chaplain to the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Dún Laoghaire (where children were among the patients). The hospital wasn't told of the suspicions against him.
Throughout, it's the same story of bishops and archbishops failing to investigate reports of abuse, much less take action to bring the perpetrators to justice.
The columnist, Mary Raftery, comments:
These are priests, who are supposed to have higher moral standards than the rest of us, who are supposed to tell us what's right and wrong. I don't see how the people of Ireland - or anywhere - can continue to have any kind of respect for a Church that went so far from any acceptable standard of morality.
The report also shows the Irish police taking no action - treating it as an internal Church matter. This isn't covered in Mary Raftery's comments, but there is more in this editorial. It points to "the fundamentally rotten nature of relations between the Catholic Church and the State" in which the Church was effectively outside the law.
Atheists like me aren't keen on using the word "evil" - that's something religious people do. But what else can you call the Church in Ireland in the 20th century? A significant number of its members abused children on what seems to be a massive scale. A much higher number colluded to ensure that the abuse went unpunished and so continued. In the process they corrupted the system of civil justice.
I'm a fairly gentle atheist, and I try to recognise that religions can have positive effects, can be a force for good. Harder atheists will say that it is the nature of religions to oppress, to make rules for themselves, and to provide an unquestionable authority for anything they do. Looking at what's happened in Ireland, it's hard to disagree.
Throughout, it's the same story of bishops and archbishops failing to investigate reports of abuse, much less take action to bring the perpetrators to justice.
The columnist, Mary Raftery, comments:
What emerges most clearly from the report is that priests, bishops, archbishops and cardinals had the greatest difficulty in telling right from wrong, and crucially that their determination of what constituted wrongdoing was vastly different from that of the population at large.
These are priests, who are supposed to have higher moral standards than the rest of us, who are supposed to tell us what's right and wrong. I don't see how the people of Ireland - or anywhere - can continue to have any kind of respect for a Church that went so far from any acceptable standard of morality.
The report also shows the Irish police taking no action - treating it as an internal Church matter. This isn't covered in Mary Raftery's comments, but there is more in this editorial. It points to "the fundamentally rotten nature of relations between the Catholic Church and the State" in which the Church was effectively outside the law.
Atheists like me aren't keen on using the word "evil" - that's something religious people do. But what else can you call the Church in Ireland in the 20th century? A significant number of its members abused children on what seems to be a massive scale. A much higher number colluded to ensure that the abuse went unpunished and so continued. In the process they corrupted the system of civil justice.
I'm a fairly gentle atheist, and I try to recognise that religions can have positive effects, can be a force for good. Harder atheists will say that it is the nature of religions to oppress, to make rules for themselves, and to provide an unquestionable authority for anything they do. Looking at what's happened in Ireland, it's hard to disagree.
22 May 2009
Atheism and morality
A big title for a blog post, and you could write several books on the subject. I've been functionally an atheist for all my adult life, for the reason that unless someone can prove the existence of God - or even the logical possibility that something that can be called God exists - there's no reason to believe it. I assume most of my friends are this kind of atheist, and I'm always surprised if one of them turns out to be a believer. But if they are good people and don't try to impose their views on me or other people, I won't try to change their views.
Recently I've been mixing (on the internet) with a lot of more polemical atheists. Part of their claim is that belief and religions are not only wrong but that they have bad effects on the world. I've always thought that the world would be better if we all accepted that the quality of our existence is our responsibility: no other being is going to sort it out for us. But the better believers act as if they accepted that. Instead of praying for relief of famine and the end of nuclear weapons, they organise and campaign for those things, ready to make joint cause with those of other faiths and no faith. Would they do that if they had no faith? Probably, because, I suspect, their actions are a result of their own moral and ethical beliefs, which don't have to be founded on any religion.
When I look at the moral pronouncements of religions, though, that's when I start to worry about the evil effects of religions. I don't know of any religion that doesn't impose duties and restrictions on its adherents. Sometimes these strike me as bizarre and bizarrely trivial, such as the dietary and clothing rules of the Old Testament, which have been richly ridiculed throughout history. Apparently trivial they may be but in Judaism have been the basis for a huge industry of interpretation. To me, these merely discredit the God who is supposedly so upset by these trivialities. A god who worries if you're wearing wool and cotton together isn't a god, because that gives you the power to upset god. (I'm over-simplifying, of course.)
But then there are the bigger pronouncements that significantly affect the lives of followers. It seems to be in the nature of religion to ban homosexuality. I'm sure not all do - the liberal branch of the Church of England is at least ambivalent, for example - but even the beautiful, otherwise tolerant Bahai faith outlaws gay sex.
Of course, opinions on morality can vary. I would find it hard to share any ground with someone who wanted to ban homosexuality, but I have sympathy for advocates of veganism, for example, although not agreeing. To me they are matters of opinion. To the religious they are matters of interpretation of God's will, and so the conclusion is absolute. Adherence to the rules is a sign of belief. Discussion of the rules is only possible within the terms of the debate. So a Muslim or a Christian would always have to reconcile their position with the sacred text.
Science advanced once scientists adopted an empirical method - trusting the results of research rather than established orthodoxy. The codes of morality of the major religions have generally worked well, I'll accept that, but they restrict full and open inquiry into how we should live, just as the cosmology of Catholicism restricted and resisted the understanding of the universe.
I am naive in theology, and no doubt there are holes in this argument. But I have been prompted to write it by the revelations that have just come out of Ireland, where the religious establishment has been shown to preside over an appalling, sickening regime of abuse of children, far worse than even the strongest opponents of the Church could have imagined. The scale of the abuse is shocking enough. What's worse, what must make anyone doubt whether the Church is a benign institution, is the covering-up that went on at the time, and which continues. People who had been known to have abused children were moved from one parish to another. The institutions of the Church only agreed to cooperate with the investigation on an agreement that no individual would be named or prosecuted. The Church did a deal with the Irish government limiting its liability for paying victims compensation to 127 million euros, about a tenth of the compensation that is now considered likely to be paid. The rest will be paid by the Irish government, which means of course it will be paid by the Irish people. Is the Church now rushing forward to admit that this deal is morally wrong? Of course not.
From this side of the Irish Sea, it looks like the Irish Catholic Church is a thoroughly immoral institution.
(I recommend the reporting of this scandal in the Irish Times, a fine newspaper, and this link to a summary of the report. But be warned, it's hard to read even the summary without anger and tears.)
[Hear me read this article]
Recently I've been mixing (on the internet) with a lot of more polemical atheists. Part of their claim is that belief and religions are not only wrong but that they have bad effects on the world. I've always thought that the world would be better if we all accepted that the quality of our existence is our responsibility: no other being is going to sort it out for us. But the better believers act as if they accepted that. Instead of praying for relief of famine and the end of nuclear weapons, they organise and campaign for those things, ready to make joint cause with those of other faiths and no faith. Would they do that if they had no faith? Probably, because, I suspect, their actions are a result of their own moral and ethical beliefs, which don't have to be founded on any religion.
When I look at the moral pronouncements of religions, though, that's when I start to worry about the evil effects of religions. I don't know of any religion that doesn't impose duties and restrictions on its adherents. Sometimes these strike me as bizarre and bizarrely trivial, such as the dietary and clothing rules of the Old Testament, which have been richly ridiculed throughout history. Apparently trivial they may be but in Judaism have been the basis for a huge industry of interpretation. To me, these merely discredit the God who is supposedly so upset by these trivialities. A god who worries if you're wearing wool and cotton together isn't a god, because that gives you the power to upset god. (I'm over-simplifying, of course.)
But then there are the bigger pronouncements that significantly affect the lives of followers. It seems to be in the nature of religion to ban homosexuality. I'm sure not all do - the liberal branch of the Church of England is at least ambivalent, for example - but even the beautiful, otherwise tolerant Bahai faith outlaws gay sex.
Of course, opinions on morality can vary. I would find it hard to share any ground with someone who wanted to ban homosexuality, but I have sympathy for advocates of veganism, for example, although not agreeing. To me they are matters of opinion. To the religious they are matters of interpretation of God's will, and so the conclusion is absolute. Adherence to the rules is a sign of belief. Discussion of the rules is only possible within the terms of the debate. So a Muslim or a Christian would always have to reconcile their position with the sacred text.
Science advanced once scientists adopted an empirical method - trusting the results of research rather than established orthodoxy. The codes of morality of the major religions have generally worked well, I'll accept that, but they restrict full and open inquiry into how we should live, just as the cosmology of Catholicism restricted and resisted the understanding of the universe.
I am naive in theology, and no doubt there are holes in this argument. But I have been prompted to write it by the revelations that have just come out of Ireland, where the religious establishment has been shown to preside over an appalling, sickening regime of abuse of children, far worse than even the strongest opponents of the Church could have imagined. The scale of the abuse is shocking enough. What's worse, what must make anyone doubt whether the Church is a benign institution, is the covering-up that went on at the time, and which continues. People who had been known to have abused children were moved from one parish to another. The institutions of the Church only agreed to cooperate with the investigation on an agreement that no individual would be named or prosecuted. The Church did a deal with the Irish government limiting its liability for paying victims compensation to 127 million euros, about a tenth of the compensation that is now considered likely to be paid. The rest will be paid by the Irish government, which means of course it will be paid by the Irish people. Is the Church now rushing forward to admit that this deal is morally wrong? Of course not.
From this side of the Irish Sea, it looks like the Irish Catholic Church is a thoroughly immoral institution.
(I recommend the reporting of this scandal in the Irish Times, a fine newspaper, and this link to a summary of the report. But be warned, it's hard to read even the summary without anger and tears.)
[Hear me read this article]
09 January 2009
Jewish Jesus
Article by Howard Jacobson in today's Guardian, about Christians' discomfort with Jesus's Jewish background. Speaking as a post-Christian atheist, I can't say that's ever been a problem for me, just as long as you bear in mind that although Jesus was Jewish, his father was definitely C of E.
06 January 2009
Atheist buses
Congratulations to the Atheist Bus Campaign on its launch today. I've already seen one of the buses, in Whitehall this morning. There's been a lot of talk about the phrasing ("probably") but that strikes me as a useful and appropriate contrast to the certainties of fundamentalists of all kinds.
In other Guardian news, surprise surprise, Tony Blair "is to receive the United States's highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from his friend George Bush next Tuesday, at a White House ceremony during the latter's last week in office". The Guardian goes on:
The medal is awarded "for especially meritorious contributions to security or the national interests of the United States, world peace or cultural or other significant public or private endeavours". It was not immediately clear last night under which heading the former prime minister had qualified.
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