Sorry, these topics are not linked, but are two topics I am thinking about separately partly because of two items on the radio today.
I was brought up as a Catholic - became an agnostic - married the first time in a Catholic church, and have always felt "culturally" Catholic. In the last 15 years or so, when all the scandals about the Church have come to light, I have often found myself defending the Church against the somewhat simplistic criticisms of all the people who have piled in to denounce the Church (and why am I writing Church, not church?)
I have no theological loyalty to the church - but when I go to RC church services I often find myself wishing I was still a member. I think there are many very good things about the church - its world wide reach, its social/economic teaching - its compassion and work for the poor. So what's not to like? I guess for me, the reason I wanted to leave was the authoritarian nature of the church - it's not immediately apparent when you are surrounded by smiling, guitar strumming nuns, and dignified, thoughtful clergy with liberal ideas (a vignette of my childhood experience), but when you grow up and discover that you are expected to believe certain things because the church tells you to, and are not allowed to defer to your own conscience, well, of course, you leave. Broadly that is my objection to the church.
Today I was listening to a piece about Irish soldiers who fought in WW2 for the British - if they died their children were "taken into care" i.e. put into really cruel factory schools and given especially bad treatment because their fathers had "deserted" the Irish army. This was a particularly Fianna Fail policy - opposed by Labour and Fine Gael - all part of DeValera's sneaking wish for the Germans to win the war, such was the hatred of the English. As I listened (again) to the horrors inflicted on children in these places I was again wondering how nuns and "brothers" could do this to children, how nothing they might have read in the Gospels had come to mind and stopped them doing this. But it must be the case that authoritarians hang together - the Church's innate authoritarianism meeting the punitive desires of the Irish state and being happy to administer punishment. "We are right" must be the unofficial motto of the Church - but we all believe "we are right" yet most of us don't have the chance to administer our views of what is right to our fellow citizens. How can an organisation that is meant to be driven by the Gospel be so utterly wrong? The answer of course is that the RC Church is not driven by the Gospels, it is driven by its own structure of ethics, which have "surpassed" the Gospels long ago, probably since the time they became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and suppressed anything pluralistic and found that siding with temporal power was the way forward. So chumming up to injustice has gone on ever since, side by side with all the good, kind, saintly people within the church.
Stephen Hawking was another topic today. It was the kind of things people said about him that were interesting.... he is clearly the equivalent of the Dalai Lama to some of his admirers. It is connnected with the strange way cosmology is becoming an alternative religion: there is no God but Cosmology, and SH is its prophet. One woman said "it is extraordinary to meet this man and to be in the presence of someone you know that people will still be talking about in 1,000 years."
I wonder if people felt like that about Charlemagne or Thomas Aquinas? I suspect that 21st century cosmology will have been so wildly surpassed by other ideas that in 1,000 years time, if any human civilisation survives, SH will turn out to have been a by-way. Mind that is because apart from the famous book, I am not clear what he is famous for - is it black holes? I mean, what has his unique contribution to the mystic science been exactly? Black holes are all very well, but they have led on to all the other stuff, like Dark Matter and Dark Energy... and the theory of multiverses (which sounds perfectly reasonable in its way - originally predicted by CS Lewis in The Magician's Nephew of course!)
Perhaps I should have another crack at A Brief History of Time but at the moment I have so much else to read. Anyway, I think there is just as much that is unbelievable in cosmology as there is in Christianity. The other day Brian Cox was advertising one of his programmes on TV - saying how was it possible to believe that a particle could be in different places at the same time? I felt, smugly, that this was not an intellectual problem for those of us who believed in God - since we had committed ourselves to believe in that long ago, and to believe in paradoxes such as the existence of a being, Jesus, who was simultaneously fully human and fully divine. I am not sure that most people will understand the science behind this particle behaviour (if they have worked it out yet) and will take it on trust, as a matter of faith, just as religious believers do.
OK - that's enough religion.
I was brought up as a Catholic - became an agnostic - married the first time in a Catholic church, and have always felt "culturally" Catholic. In the last 15 years or so, when all the scandals about the Church have come to light, I have often found myself defending the Church against the somewhat simplistic criticisms of all the people who have piled in to denounce the Church (and why am I writing Church, not church?)
I have no theological loyalty to the church - but when I go to RC church services I often find myself wishing I was still a member. I think there are many very good things about the church - its world wide reach, its social/economic teaching - its compassion and work for the poor. So what's not to like? I guess for me, the reason I wanted to leave was the authoritarian nature of the church - it's not immediately apparent when you are surrounded by smiling, guitar strumming nuns, and dignified, thoughtful clergy with liberal ideas (a vignette of my childhood experience), but when you grow up and discover that you are expected to believe certain things because the church tells you to, and are not allowed to defer to your own conscience, well, of course, you leave. Broadly that is my objection to the church.
Today I was listening to a piece about Irish soldiers who fought in WW2 for the British - if they died their children were "taken into care" i.e. put into really cruel factory schools and given especially bad treatment because their fathers had "deserted" the Irish army. This was a particularly Fianna Fail policy - opposed by Labour and Fine Gael - all part of DeValera's sneaking wish for the Germans to win the war, such was the hatred of the English. As I listened (again) to the horrors inflicted on children in these places I was again wondering how nuns and "brothers" could do this to children, how nothing they might have read in the Gospels had come to mind and stopped them doing this. But it must be the case that authoritarians hang together - the Church's innate authoritarianism meeting the punitive desires of the Irish state and being happy to administer punishment. "We are right" must be the unofficial motto of the Church - but we all believe "we are right" yet most of us don't have the chance to administer our views of what is right to our fellow citizens. How can an organisation that is meant to be driven by the Gospel be so utterly wrong? The answer of course is that the RC Church is not driven by the Gospels, it is driven by its own structure of ethics, which have "surpassed" the Gospels long ago, probably since the time they became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and suppressed anything pluralistic and found that siding with temporal power was the way forward. So chumming up to injustice has gone on ever since, side by side with all the good, kind, saintly people within the church.
Stephen Hawking was another topic today. It was the kind of things people said about him that were interesting.... he is clearly the equivalent of the Dalai Lama to some of his admirers. It is connnected with the strange way cosmology is becoming an alternative religion: there is no God but Cosmology, and SH is its prophet. One woman said "it is extraordinary to meet this man and to be in the presence of someone you know that people will still be talking about in 1,000 years."
I wonder if people felt like that about Charlemagne or Thomas Aquinas? I suspect that 21st century cosmology will have been so wildly surpassed by other ideas that in 1,000 years time, if any human civilisation survives, SH will turn out to have been a by-way. Mind that is because apart from the famous book, I am not clear what he is famous for - is it black holes? I mean, what has his unique contribution to the mystic science been exactly? Black holes are all very well, but they have led on to all the other stuff, like Dark Matter and Dark Energy... and the theory of multiverses (which sounds perfectly reasonable in its way - originally predicted by CS Lewis in The Magician's Nephew of course!)
Perhaps I should have another crack at A Brief History of Time but at the moment I have so much else to read. Anyway, I think there is just as much that is unbelievable in cosmology as there is in Christianity. The other day Brian Cox was advertising one of his programmes on TV - saying how was it possible to believe that a particle could be in different places at the same time? I felt, smugly, that this was not an intellectual problem for those of us who believed in God - since we had committed ourselves to believe in that long ago, and to believe in paradoxes such as the existence of a being, Jesus, who was simultaneously fully human and fully divine. I am not sure that most people will understand the science behind this particle behaviour (if they have worked it out yet) and will take it on trust, as a matter of faith, just as religious believers do.
OK - that's enough religion.
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