Remember, the Pope is a Catholic
Julian has a good thing in the Guardian. Makes a change from Andrew Brown.
In order to be a distinct belief system, a religion has to have specific doctrines. That automatically creates two types of dissenters. Heretics are those who claim to be of the same conviction, but who disagree on some fundamentals…Apostates reject the religion altogether…In public life, we allow heretics and apostates their sinful ways. But within religious institutions, to grant the same liberty would be absurd. For example, you can’t have a Pope who thinks the Bible is a good book, but is no more the product of divine authorship than The Da Vinci Code.
Just so. That’s similar to the point Edmund Standing makes in ‘Misdirected Outrage’: that if a religion teaches something, then that is what the religion teaches, and it’s no good pretending it doesn’t.
Either choose the human rights culture born of the rejection of the old discriminatory approaches of religion, or choose the moral order of Allah, the divine dictator. Allah is not a proponent of human rights. Allah does not believe in the right of the individual to choose how to live. Anyone who thinks that Islam and homosexuality can be reconciled is living in a fantasy world. Take a look at what the Qur’an has to say about homosexuality. This is what Islam teaches. Don’t like it? Then get out.
This confusion is behind (or at least enables) a lot of the soft squashy but relentless pressure to ‘respect’ religion at the moment: the mistaken idea that religion is compatible with human rights. But it isn’t. That’s why we hate it, that’s why it’s coercive, that’s why it can’t be argued with or reasoned with, that’s why it has to be kept out of public policy: because it rests on divine dictatorship. It’s really really important to keep that in mind, especially when the ‘let’s be nice to religion because that’s where the votes are’ crowd is writing its wrong-headed polemics.
Back to Julian’s piece:
This matters to more than just believers. The idea of a secular state is currently under fire as people call to bring religion into more areas of public life, such as education. But if more institutions become the domain of religion, questions of heresy and apostasy will become relevant to all who use those institutions, and work for or with them.
And what a nightmare world that would be. Wouldn’t you say? Questions of heresy and apostasy muddying things up in what should be secular institutions? Let’s not go that way.
As an atheist, I usually I find myself in full agreement with your own and Julian’s views on religion, but I don’t accept a key premise of JB’s argument here. My problem is that I think there are two distinct concepts of what constitutes a religion. One concept – call it the Doctrinal Concept – sees a religion as a set of specific doctrines, perhaps laid down in a canonical form. The other concept – the Realist Concept – sees a given religion as the sum of the beliefs and practices of its self-declared adherents.
What difference does this make? Well, the Realist view is essentially anthropological, treating a religion as a sociocultural phenomenon, and allowing an external analysis of its significance and value to a culture. For example, it can make sense of temporal shifts in the understanding of core religious concepts by adherents, as a result of pressures brought about by other, non-religious social or political changes. The Doctrinal view can’t do this; it’s an essentially internal perspective.
To give a concrete example, taking a Realist approach, I have no problem seeing, and condemning the Inquisition as a Christian phenomenon; that is, a Christian activity carried out by some adherents to Christianity, sincerely motivated by their faith. If I took a Doctrinal view, I would have to engage in some sort of hermeneutic exercise with the core texts of Christianity in order to decide whether the Inquisitors were manifesting genuinely Christian behaviour, or if they were just sadly mistaken about the tenets of their own faith.
So unlike Julian, I see no reason why you couldn’t “have a Pope who thinks the Bible is a good book, but is no more the product of divine authorship than The Da Vinci Code” – try polling C of E theologians on that issue and see what they think. How did the C of E get that way? Are they not “really” Christians any more? There’s surely no a priori reason why Catholicism shouldn’t move in the same direction; one could only think so by adopting a rigid Doctrinal understanding of Catholic Christian precepts. Even adherents don’t do that, so why should an atheist? History shows it’s just a mistake to assume that believers act as if a religion’s “specific doctrines” have an atemporal truth value. Since we atheists think the whole thing is nonsense anyway, why should we expect coherence and consistency from believers?
The same argument applies to gay Muslims: if they regard themselves as Muslims – as does Irshad Manji – and they become accepted as such by a large number of self-identified Muslims, then as far as I’m concerned, they *are* Muslims. It’s a strange concept of religion that can make an atheist more of a Fundamentalist than a believer.
Yeah. I know what you mean. I argued with Edmund a little bit over that article (he won’t mind my saying that – he told me to put a disclaimer on it if I wanted to). I don’t really know what I think – I’m torn. Ideally, I suppose, I’d like people to admit the Doctrinal Concept, as you nicely put it, and just decide that their religion isn’t compatible with their rational ideas, and get out. But, as a matter of reality, I’m enormously glad that Manji exists and wrote her book and is doing what she’s doing, and I hope she has a lot of influence. I’d much much rather that she stayed and influenced a lot of other Muslims, and Islam as a whole, than that she left.
And yet – I get irritated when feminists complain that the pope doesn’t favour women priests. Well of course he doesn’t, he’s the pope!
Um – I’ll have the vegetarian steak, please.
Well, scads and scads of Christians have become quite tolerant of gays and lesbians (at least in certain countries), even though their official Bible still contains the well-known condemnations by Paul et al. But it’s true that atheists like to insist that religionists stick with the most absurd of their sacred texts — it makes them a much easier target!
the funny thing about homosexuality and islam is that in the real world, love & sex between men was not persecuted. you had these religious laws, but they were almost never put into action (by requiring 6 eyewitnesses of the actual penetration that would have been… difficult to say at least). a lot of classic arabic poems were directed at young men; you’ve got paintings of embracing men etc. so the social practice differed very much from the religious text. so I believe that Edmund Standing’s text about the topic is not too much on target
“For example, you can’t have a Pope who thinks the Bible is a good book, but is no more the product of divine authorship than The Da Vinci Code.”
At least one Roman Catholic apologist has suggested that the bible is the record of the RC faith, and not its source. The traditions of the church are as important as the scripture. Divine authorship is a distinctly Islamic conceit. Julian may be overstating the importance of the Bible to RCs.
Well, Elliott, I can’t speak for the Roman Catholics, but I can note that down in the trenches (or in the pulpits) of Fundie America, Divine Authorship of the Bible is certainly their concept of the Bible. Although they can never explain, except for the old “God works in mysterious way,” how God worked in such a confusing and contradictory way. (i.e., why does the Eastern Orthadox Bible NOT include the Fundies’ favorite book, Revelations?)
Yes, but Divine Authorship of the Bible is a Protestant thing, not a Catholic thing. That was one of the most basic splits between them. I would amend Elliott’s point to ‘Divine authorship is a distinctly Islamic and Protestant Xian conceit.’ Notice that neither has a pope.
That’s interesting, OB I always assumed Catholics had a similar view regarding Divine Authoriship. Of course, given that Catholic politicans and eclesiastical officials were involved directly in the debate over exactly which books and texts are Biblical, maybe they have a more realistic appraisal of the “inerrant Word of God” (as the old fire-breathing pastor at Bible Baptist Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana used to thunder :))
I suppose I should admit that one of my less amiable traits is to twit extreme Protestants over what I describe as their Islamic adherence to scriptural inerrancy.
Brian, nah. Weird, isn’t it – but the Bible was taboo before the Reformation. People were not encouraged to read and study it, they were forbidden to. No Bible study groups for them! Translating it into the vernacular could get you killed – cf. Jan Hus.
Is that a less amiable trait, Elliott? Sounds quite sweet to me.
Well, reading about all the fun and happy things our favorite Thunder God did during his wild oats days, I can see why Catholic prelates distrusted the idea of the “uneducated masses” reading the “Good” Book. Might give them…strange ideas. Heck, the same kind of strange ideas exhibited by some of our current Generals and Corporate Profiteers over in Iraq right now (i.e., slay the infidels, old Jehovah certainly did.)