The Cardinal loses the thread
[I]n Britain today there is considerable spiritual homelessness…Many people have a sense of being in a sort of exile from faith-guided experience…To some extent this is the effect of the privatisation of religion today: religion comes to be treated as a matter of personal need rather than as a truth that makes an unavoidable claim on us.
Yes. That’s because it’s not a truth that makes an unavoidable claim on us. It sounds pretty to say that, but it isn’t true. (The ‘unavoidable claim’ is largely a matter of childhood imprinting. People who aren’t imprinted don’t experience the claim as unavoidable.)
The Cardinal loses the thread quite easily, and quickly.
‘Pope Benedict knows,’ he said, ‘that religion is about truth and not social cohesion.’ A very accurate remark I think. TS Eliot once observed that it was a dangerous inversion to advocate Christianity not because of its truth, but because of its benefit.
Then in the next paragraph –
One of the aims of the Christian religion is to create and foster a culture and society in which human beings flourish and God is glorified by his presence in a holy people.
So, it’s a dangerous inversion to advocate Christianity because of its benefit, but one of the aims of the Christian religion is to create and foster a culture and society in which human beings flourish. Ooooookay. Just throw everything and hope that something sticks, eh.
I wanted religion to be seen to be open to the questions of those who do not believe; those who call themselves agnostic or atheistic. As always, the interesting question about atheism is ‘what is the theism that is being denied?’ Have you ever met anyone who believes what Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in? I usually find that the God that is being rejected by such people is a God I don’t believe in either. I simply don’t recognise my faith in what is presented by these critics as Christian faith.
Which bits? The Resurrection? The Trinity? God as all-powerful and perfectly benevolent? Which bits don’t you recognize? But there’s no point in my asking because (of course) he doesn’t say. He’s like Chris Hedges that way – atheists do this that and the other, with never a shred of documentation offered.
God is not a fact in the world, as though God could be treated as one thing among other things to be empirically investigated, affirmed or denied on the basis of observation. Many who deny God’s existence treat God in this way, and they simply don’t know how to ask the proper question about God. God is why the world is at all, the goodness, truth and love that flows into an astonishingly complex and beautiful cosmos…
What, exactly, does that mean? Is it anything other than pretty but empty talk? What does he mean? Does he mean just that God is the fact that the world is at all? If so then I believe in God. If he really means ‘God is why the world is at all’ then what does that mean? Why would it not be just a nice phrase that’s easy and pleasant to say but doesn’t actually mean anything?
I know it seems tediously village-atheist to say things like that, but what can we do? People – priests and theologians – will say things like that, and get respectfully reported by the BBC for doing so, so what can we do other than try to figure out what is meant, and if we can’t figure it out, ask why people say things that don’t seem to mean anything? If you say ‘God is why the world is at all,’ then what is ‘God’? If I said ‘Ranesh Pronunu is why the world is at all,’ you’d wonder what Ranesh Pronunu was, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t think that sentence explained what Ranesh Pronunu is – you would think it created a new mystery rather than solving an old one. So why is that supposed to tell us what God is? You tell me.
Is human identity and purpose a clue to God’s reality? Yes, because in our response to truth and love we are what God brings about as the expression of his overflowing goodness…
Oh, crap. Tell that to the people in Burma, tell it to the people in Zimbabwe and DR Congo and Darfur and Somalia and Bangladesh and Gaza. Tell it to the women of Saudi Arabia and Iran and Afghanistan. Tell it to sick people, people in pain, bereaved people, frightened people. Tell it to animals being torn apart by leopards or foxes or rats. Overflowing goodness nothing.
If Christians really believed in the mystery of God, we would realise that proper talk about God is always difficult, always tentative. Why are atheists so clear about the God who is rejected? A God who can be spoken of comfortably and clearly by human beings cannot be the true God.
Why? No, really, why? If this God is overflowing with goodness, why does it want to make a mystery and a secret of itself? If it’s such a good thing, why does it hide? I’m dead serious about that. (I’m dead serious about all of it.) If it’s such a good thing, why does it hide? There’s no reason for it. The only reason, of course, is because it’s not there, so the priests have to say it’s hiding. That’s a rather cruel hoax, I think.
By the talk about “mystery” I took him to be saying something like “be vague and obscure when you talk about God so those nasty atheists won’t have such an easy target.”
As a sort of counterblast, let me commend to your attention the following:
http://thepaincomics.com/weekly071205a.htm
Pay particular attention to the second paragraph of the Artist’s Statement.
Anyone else notice that the Cardinal is borrowing a bit transparently from the whole “killing the Buddha” theme? Problem is, in Buddhism they mostly stick with the whole “You can’t talk about what you can’t possibly understand” idea on a consistent basis. They’re muddleheaded mystics (in my never-humble opinion), but at least they’re reasonably honest and (generally) consistent muddleheaded mystics.
Mystical poseurs like the Cardinal spew pretty poetry and empty metaphors out of the mysticism sides of their mouths while telling us in no uncertain terms what God Himself Personally wants us all to do out of the other side of their mouths. If they stuck to the mysticism they’d be relatively harmless. But the problem is that they so swiftly and willfully switch back and forth from “ineffable” this and “transcendent” that to “God doesn’t like gay marriage/experimenting on cells that happen to have human DNA/not letting us tell children exactly what God thinks and says in school/et cetera, et cetera.”
It isn’t just a defense against the criticism of atheists, it’s a defense against any rational critical thought at all. If the preacher types didn’t claim all sorts of mystery and transcendence – mysteries which they, as God’s anointed, have a special decoder ring for translating into some awfully specific recommendations for the arrangement of our personal and social lives – then people might start thinking for themselves and stop listening to them.
As R.A. Heinlein wrote:
The profession of shaman has many advantages. It offers high status with a safe livelihood free of work in the dreary, sweaty sense. In most societies it offers legal privileges and immunities not granted to other men. But it is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that the shaman is on the moral level of any other con man.
But it is a lovely work if you can stomach it.
He also wrote a more succinct version: Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent.
Ramen!
Hey! I take it all back! This is really the reductio ad absurdum of everything that I was trying to say (lamely, I know, but you have to start somewhere) about the role of religious consciousness in human life.
Obviously, you eventually come back, again and again, not to some kind of new religious consciousness that contributes of human flourishing, but to the old old story of Jesus and his love (to quote an old old hymn).
What I cannot understand is how people like Murphy-O’Connor can say, on the one hand, that God can only be talked about in highly tentative ways, and then, having said that, go on to talk, without qualification of God’s overflowing goodness, in spite of the evidence! It’s a fair cop. I’ll come quietly.
It really is a children’s game. All you have to do is say “NOT IT!” and no one can touch you.
dzd –
only if you’re in the “den”, mind, otherwise it’s false & blasphemous heresy…
The awed crowd calls out: Thanks, superhero!
“But the problem is that they so swiftly and willfully switch back and forth”
Exactly. I mean to say – the Catholic church? Like they don’t have any rules and stuff? Pu-leeze.
I’ll have to look up the Catechism. I have a notion that there are some things in it that match that God that Dawkins doesn’t believe in pretty well.
Excellent piece, OB.
God of the apologists or god of the punters? The trick is in perfecting the smooth switcheroo.
‘Have you ever met anyone who believes what Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in? ‘
Every day, and I don’t live in a faith-blighted part of the world. Perhaps His Whateverness should get out more.
Thanks for the Westminister Cathedral lecture links. Am presently listening to same.
Oops, should have read “Westminster”.
Due to a recent change of Irish Taoiseach – there has automatically been a reshuffle of Government Cabinet ministers. Hence my preoccupation with the latter.
BTW, Brian Cowen replaces Bertie Ahern as new Taoiseach.
‘If Christians really believed in the mystery of God, we would realise that proper talk about God is always difficult, always tentative. Why are atheists so clear about the God who is rejected?’
Hard to believe that 21st-century priests and theologians are still using what is essentially the ‘God moves in mysterious ways – we’re not meant to know’ argument, the default cut-you-off-and-shut-you-up argument beloved of the religious since time immemorial. And they talk about modern theology as though it’s sophisticated…
Also atheists don’t exist in a vacuum; most of their arguments and issues with religion stem from the beliefs and attitudes of the religious themselves – if we’re ‘so clear’ about the God being rejected it’s because theists, for all their talk of nebulous concepts and ‘goodness’, actually have some pretty detail-specific ideas of what (who in fact, tellingly) God is.
This bit is particularly irritating:
‘A baby is called to self-consciousness by the love and smile of his mother…. It reveals four things to him: 1) that he is one in love with his mother, and yet he is not his mother, and so Being is one; 2) this love is good, and so the whole of being is good; 3) that this love is true, and so being is true, 4) this love is a cause of joy, and so Being is beautiful.’
All this from a baby? Really?! It just typifies the emptiness of the speech as a whole. What does ‘…and so Being is one…’ mean? Why is phrased as though it’s the inevitable conclusion of an argument, when it actually doesn’t really make sense? Or are we supposed to gloss over that fact and bask in the Cardinal’s wisdom?
One more thing; so much of the speech returns to that trendy idea in Christian thinking these days, that in actually thinking critically about God’s existence atheists miss the point and it’s Jesus’s actions and the behaviour of people in response to thenm that is the key thing. There may be something to be said about the behaviour of the religious being the important thing in the immediate practical sense, but religionists can’t constantly duck the supernatural questions -it’s because of the absolute supernatural God-elements that they claim to be absolutely universally eternally right about the nature of existence. It’s hardly something that can be swept under the carpet when it’s tricky or embarrassing to defend.
Dave JL,
I get the point of your last paragraph. But in fact, I do think there are a lot of traits to admire in the depictions of Jesus. Mercy, Kicking against the shit, concepts of social justice, etc.
Then again, I also like some of what Judge Holden says in Blood Meridian.
I guess that shows that fiction can be powerful…