From the March 2009 debate at Samford University in Birmingham, AL.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHiGsL4bzmM]
Christopher Hitchens vs John Lennox, “Is God Great?”
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Rowan Williams, economist-manqué
One of the ironies about Rowan Williams’ recent condemnation of bankers for not repenting of their capitalist ways, is that Rowan and his church have become more interested in how people are doing in this world than they are in where they will end up in the next. And he manages to be just as muddled about this as he is about his own church.
If Rowan were really interested in reducing poverty, he would be encouraging capitalism in places where it is squashed rather than demanding repentance from western practitioners of it; as this article points out, capitalism produces wealth, Rowan and his ideas don’t:
I respectfully disagree with Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, over his views on the City and its finance industry. He regrets there has been “no repentance for the excesses which led to the economic collapse,” and describes a feeling of “diffused resentment” that bankers have failed to accept their responsibility for the crisis.
While the archbishop is entitled to express his views, I am sure he will not mind me pointing out that these are somewhat uninformed views. He admits to not being an economist, saying the crisis has taught us that “economics is too important to be left to the economists.” I am sure he will not mind me pointing out, either, that financial services are not founded on greed. For the most part they represent honest trading by well-intentioned people whose skill lies in the efficient allocation of resources. This skill, internationally, has lifted more people from the blight of poverty and hunger than any other force in history, including religion.
T-shirt theology
Now atheists do it:
The war of words between believers and non-believers is being fought in books, on television screens, and even on the front of T-shirts.
Below we have selected 20 of the coolest and funniest atheist tops on the web, for anyone wanting to make a public statement of their scepticism.
We’ve also gathered 20 humorous Christian shirts, so you can decide which side is winning the fashion war.
I must admit, the atheist T-shirts do sum up the atheist position much better than the Christian T-shirts do the Christian position. This, of course, is because the atheist argument is considerably more trite than the Christian argument and is best suited for summarising on T-shirts and bumper stickers.
Abortion harms future children
Abortion not only kills its intended victim, it harms babies yet to be conceived:
Women who have abortions could be posing a risk to future children, according to research published today.
A Canadian medical study found that those who abort a pregnancy could run the risk of giving birth to premature of low-weight children in subsequent pregnancies.
It discovered that women who had undergone more than one abortion had a 72 per cent increased risk for low birth weight and 93 per cent risk of prematurity.
It also found that women who had an abortion in the first or second trimester had a 35 per cent increased risk of giving birth to a low-weight birth baby and a 36 per cent increased risk of having a premature baby
It sounds like abortions have a more deleterious affect on subsequent babies than smoking: a mother who smokes is only 60% more likely to have a premature baby than one who doesn’t. Perhaps abortion clinics will be forced to display conspicuous warning signs to this effect, just like cigarette packaging. Perhaps not.
Jimmy Carter should go back to his peanuts
Jimmy Carter not only sees apartheid when it isn’t there, he also sees racism:
Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter said a congressman’s outburst directed at President Barack Obama during a speech to Congress last week was an act “based on racism” and rooted in fears of a black president.
“I think it’s based on racism,” Mr. Carter said Tuesday in response to an audience question at a town hall held at his presidential centre in Atlanta. “There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president.”
Carter himself does not hesitate to call George Bush a liar, something he presumably would not have done were Bush black. So who’s the racist?
Jimmy Carter, the former US president, has strongly criticized George Bush and Tony Blair for waging an unnecessary war to oust Saddam Hussein based on “lies or misinterpretations”. The 2002 Nobel peace prize winner said Mr Blair had allowed his better judgment to be swayed by Mr Bush’s desire to finish a war that his father had started.
Rowan Williams calls for repentance
But not from The Episcopal Church or the Anglican Church of Canada. He’s tackling something much easier: he wants the banks to repent:
The Archbishop of Canterbury has told the BBC he fears financiers feel no “repentance” for the excesses which led to the economic collapse.
Dr Rowan Williams said the government should have acted to cap bonuses.
He also warned that the gap between rich and poor would lead to an increasingly “dysfunctional” society.
Dr Williams told BBC Two’s Newsnight programme: “There hasn’t been a feeling of closure about what happened last year.
“There hasn’t been what I would, as a Christian, call repentance. We haven’t heard people saying ‘well actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, was empty’.”
He must be practising before he deals with his own organisation.
Christianity, the religion of exclusion
Christianity, and Judaism before it, is unique in its demand for exclusive loyalty. There is one God and he is a jealous God: he will not share allegiance with other gods. Not because he is an egoist, but because other so-called gods are not God and, if they exist at all, they are malicious not beneficent. This was something that disturbed the pagan world; as David Bentley Hart says of the early church,
And, while of course “miracles” might also be produced on behalf of gods other than the Christian, the signs and wonders wielded by the Christian evangelists were associated with a cult that was unprecedentedly exclusive of all other religious loyalties; and so, uniquely, the miracles of the Christians destroyed faith even as they created faith. In this way, from the first, Christianity was engaged in extinguishing all rival faiths.
Sadly, in contemporary Western Christianity this is no longer the case. The Anglican, Lutheran, United and most other non-Roman mainline denominations have reverted to the pagan notion that gods are interchangeable and – may the best god win. Thus, we have the god of sex – Xochipilli – the god of reproductive rights – Moloch – the god of ecology – Gaia – all cavorting unrestrained in the hallowed cathedrals of contemporary Christianity-lite.
God is not mocked, of course and, just as a dog flees its own excrement, so members of mainline denominations are bolting as fast as possible to exclusive Roman, evangelical and congregational churches.
The Diocese of BC in a death spiral
The Diocese of BC published some interesting numbers recently:
Out of a total of 55 parishes:
25 are in decline
15 are in growth
3 joined ANiC
2 are flat
9 are unknown
1 was recently closed
40 parishes ran a deficit and 6 a surplus (the rest are ANiC, closed or unknown)
In 2008, there were:
Baptisms: 123 or 2.6 per church
Marriages: 78 or 1.6 per church
Funerals: 342 or 7.2 per church
Children and Youth: 652 or 13.8 per church
Total Average Sunday Attendance in 2008 was 3,856. 82 or per church (47 parishes)
Total Average Sunday Attendance in 2007 was 4,955. 95 or per church (52 parishes)
Total Average Sunday Attendance in 2001 was 6544. 107 or per church (61 parishes)
If this were a business rather than an old-boys club, the CEO would have been fired – admittedly with an obscene bonus – his henchmen replaced and the corridors of power swept clean. As it is James Cowan is still firmly at the helm steaming full speed ahead into the waters of further inclusion and diversity. After all, if he opens the doors wide enough, people will come, surely; or escape – one of the two, anyway.
Leave my favourite authors alone
I was content in my ignorance; alas, no longer:
Somerset Maugham may be the most debauched man of the 20th century:
Somerset Maugham was well-placed to come up with his wonderful description of the French Riviera – ‘a sunny place for shady people’.
The most louche of all the expatriates who congregated on the beautiful stretch of coast between Nice and Monaco before World War II, the prolific writer held court at his fabulous mansion, the Villa Mauresque, in glamorous Cap Ferrat.
Nude bathing parties, drugs, lashings of champagne and nightly seductions of the local lads . . . Almost everyone who visited was shocked by his decadence.
Evelyn Waugh had three homosexual lovers at Oxford:
The novelist Evelyn Waugh had three gay lovers during an ‘acute homosexual phase’ while studying at Oxford, according to a biography.
Author Paula Byrne hails him as a ‘great bisexual’ writer and reveals that he cherished the ‘fully fledged’ affairs.
And William Golding was the Lord of Self Loathing:
When William Golding, the author of Lord Of The Flies, was congratulated by Lord Snowdon for having written The Lord Of The Rings, he failed to find the mistake funny, and that’s very revealing.
For here we have a man who categorically stated “of friends, I have practically none”, who lived in Cornwall “partly to avoid people”, and who, despite a CBE, a knighthood, the Nobel Prize, membership of the Athenaeum, honorary doctorates and a South Bank Show profile, still believed he was excluded from the Establishment. In other words, he was insecure.
“I suppose that basically I despise myself,” Golding confessed, “and am anxious not to be discovered, uncovered, detected, rumbled.”
Of course, it is well known that Tolstoy lived a debauched life until he was 40; then he married, fathered 13 children and subsequently refused to have sexual relations with his wife because he talked himself into believing he was called to asceticism. Perhaps inconsistency and debauchery are necessary attributes of an interesting writer – although they didn’t do much for Norman Mailer.
Please appease me
Do you have to behave like someone else in order to understand them and what they believe? If I want to understand Freemasonry, do I need to roll up one trouser leg and call someone “worshipful master” or if I am trying to decide whether to become an extreme Pentecostal, should I handle some poisonous snakes to see how it feels?
The answer is no, because I don’t have to try something to conclude that I don’t agree with it; this concept seems be beyond the grasp of liberal Christians bent on “understanding” Muslims:
Ramadan can be a time of great spiritual renewal for Muslims. Non-Muslims can also have a ‘taste’ of fasting if they follow the recommendation of London mayor Boris Johnson, as I did last Friday, for this report.
Contrary to a twisted existentialist view of belief, engaging in a Muslim ritual will not make you a Muslim nor will it help you understand Islam; it won’t even help you understand Muslims unless you take the condescending view that a hungry Muslim during Ramadan feels different from a hungry non-Muslim any other time of the year.
The intent in all this appears to be to conciliate Muslims by convincing them that, as Christians, we are sufficiently insecure in our beliefs that we are willing to set them aside for a while and try theirs – to prove we can get along.
All it really proves is that Western liberal Christianity no longer deserves the name derived from its founder.