Catholic thinking is rather different…
This is what I’m saying.
Tony Blair made much of becoming a Roman Catholic six months after he left 10 Downing Street, but senior figures in the Church appear reluctant to sign up to his fan club…Blair used an interview with Attitude, a magazine for homosexuals, to criticise the approach of the Pope towards gay rights. He argued that religious leaders must start “rethinking” the issue, but the new Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, said Catholic thinking was “rather different” from the kind promoted by Blair.
Precisely. Of course it is. So what does Madeleine Bunting mean by claiming she doesn’t understand when people point out that laws handed down by an unavailable unaccountable god are different from negotiable secular laws? Eh? Eh? What does she mean by it? If the new archbish of Westminster gets it (when defending his ‘thinking’ of course, as opposed to agreeing with secularist criticism of his ‘thinking’), why doesn’t she? Merely because it’s not convenient? Surely not…
I think Bunting’s reasoning goes something like “I’m a Catholic, and I believe x. Therefore, x is compatible with Catholicism.”
That’s why she’s so sure that other people must be wrong when they say x isn’t compatible with Catholicism. She thinks she’s the living proof.
Ha – that’s probably right.
It’s probably much the same with accommodationism, which I’ve just written a short post about. People probably think ‘well I can combine the two so it must be reasonable to combine them.’
Um, “a magazine for homosexuals”? Is this ordinary parlance for The Telegraph? It just seems so. . simultaneously prissy and lewd. I have warring images in my head of British dandies with pursed lips flipping through Godey’s Lady’s Book, and mustachioed Village People clones leering at Blue Boy.
Are they incapable of using the word “gay?”
I know, I thought that struck a bizarre note too. Not incapable though: they use the word ‘gay’ in the next sentence. Go figure.
This seems to be a mistake that Blair makes again and again. He thinks that all the bickering between religions, and between religion and secularists, is because they don’t understand each other. Of course they do, and that’s exactly the problem. Their positions are fundamentally incompatible, and people like Blair and Bunting don’t get this. It’s no accident that Islamicists went mainstream with the rise of the internet–it brought us right into their homes.
We don’t need a dialogue. We’ve had the dialogue. We need an argument; not a shouting match, or a war, but a debate resolved by valid argument and evidence. The problem is that believers can’t win under those rules, and they know it.
Theology is speculative fiction masquerading as objective truth. To level the playing field they must first undermine the very basis of truth. But without truth or a means towards it, you only have the triumph of the will–a boot stamping on a human face to force acquiescence. This is why religion–any religion–will turn vicious if given political power.
Great, Mark, I love your bon mot:
“Theology is speculative fiction masquerading as objective truth.”
This is something that religious people often do not even notice, until the doctrines of faith impinge directly on their lives. Then, of course, if they are invested too deeply, they try to cover it up with more fictions.
If Blair had read a little recent history of the Roman Catholic Church it is hard to believe that he would have followed through by joining his own fictions with theirs. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed just how ficitional the religious project really is.
The reason that people like Blair and Bunting don’t get it is that they take religion to bear all their deepest values and concerns. The new Archbishop of Westminster gets it because, in order to get that far in the church, he has already had to paper over so many cracks, by recursively fictionalising the fictions. Anyone who is not already involved in the process won’t understand why rethinking things won’t work. The truth is that, if you stop recursive functions from continuing, the whole system crashes.
The thing about Blair is that he should have noticed. He has absolutely no excuse for not noticing, and it’s criminally irresponsible of him to act as if he hadn’t noticed. It’s repulsive for a mature informed ex-prime minister to ally himself with a ruthless authoritarian harm-doing organization like the catholic church. By allying himself with it in late adulthood, he endorses it, and he should never have done that.
Mark: “Theology is speculative fiction masquerading as objective truth.”
Exactly. In fact, I’d say religion is a LARP (Live-Action Role-Playing game) that the participants have been raised to mistake for reality. It would be harmless if they recognised it was fiction and fantasy: the trouble is, they don’t.