You may think our rules are crap, but that’s tough
How obliging of Simon Sarmiento, right on the heels of Bunting’s incomprehension at my claim that laws handed down by an unaccountable god can be oppressive and difficult to change.
Anglican and RC church representatives, giving evidence to a parliamentary committee on Tuesday, were very concerned that a new definition of “the purposes of an organised religion” would curtail their own existing right to discriminate against lay people for reasons other than religious belief.
Oh were they. And yet I thought ‘that in any religious tradition there is interpretation’ and ‘the way Christian teaching has changed over two thousand years is enormous and it continues to change’ so surely there can’t be a problem with Christian teaching not having changed enough, because if there were such a problem then Bunting would have understood what I was talking about, and she said she didn’t, so there must not be a problem. Right? Or perhaps not.
Fittall said: “You might believe that some of our rules and disciplines are wrong, but our view is that that is a matter of religious liberty – a matter for the Church of England, Roman Catholics, the Jews or whoever.”
Right, and that’s how you get away with it – you talk pious boilerplate about ‘religious liberty’ so that you can go on treating people unequally. Well – this is what I was saying. Religious laws are very hard to change because religions get this kind of special dispensation called ‘religious liberty’ and because the rule-giver does not answer requests for judicial review. That’s not an unmixed blessing.
And whaddya know – a colleague of Humera Khan’s has a lot more sense than Humera Khan seems to have –
There also seemed to be little support for the churches from their religious colleagues on the witness panel. Indeed Maleiha Malik, speaking for the Muslim Women’s Network said:
“I do not think that there is any evidence that there is a narrowing, but, like the British Humanist Association, we would very much welcome and strongly support any narrowing of the exemptions, for the following reason. The way the exemptions strike the balance between the rights of organised religion to discriminate and the rights of individuals to be free from discrimination is deeply unfair. It gives too much power to organised religions to police their internal members.”
Well said Maleiha Malik.
I make periodic forays into Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and Sources of the Self. (The methane from the bog becomes chokingly impenetrable after awhile, so the forays have to be short.) It’s a form of penance for being Canadian. The really remarkable thing about these books, and about Taylor’s style of argumentation, is the degree to which religious assumptions are buried under tons of modernist and post-modernist debris, always compared unfavourably with all the religious nonsense that came before. (There is, after all, a reason why he won the Templeton Prize.)
He speaks, for instance, (in Sources) of the modern sensitivity to suffering, and comments about earlier forms of punishment, and how we are more sensitive on this score than our predecessors, “only a few centuries ago – as we can readily see if we consider the (to us) barbarous punishments they inflicted.”
(Notice the relativising ‘to us’.) Now this is a curious way to characterise pre-modern types of punishment and death by torture for those of the lower classes. He thinks that previous ages had the conception of cosmic order which was undone by terrible crime, and could only be re-established by horrific punishment. But punishment tended, in those wonderful days of yore when we could rely on a sense of cosmic orderliness, to be graded by caste or class – the rich died quickly and with least pain, the poor as cruelly as the imagination could devise, and not by the intrinsic character of the crime at all. The cosmos was more upset by the lower orders acting ‘criminally’, than by the aristocrats misbehaving themselves.
The point of this parallel? Well, in an earlier post I characterised the Bunting’s maunderings as ‘religious bluster,’ something so clearly in evidence when religious institutions seek exemptions from rules which seek to protect individuals from discrimination and opprobrium based on nothing more than long-term religious prejudice. My remark then was that religions really only have bluster, since their moral condemnations (or approvals) rest on little or nothing more substantial than unsupported negations (or affirmations).
What can there be except callous frivolity, once you have reduced moral argumentation to sheer assertion? You may have to play by the rules, and produce positive examples (like women priests in the Anglican Church, or a tribal matriarchy in Indonesia which happens, with some strain, to have accommodated some form of Islam), but in the end they know that their only refuge is blind submission to authority, a bit like Paul VI deciding, on the basis of a minority report, and flying in the face of the evidence, that contraception is a horrible crime. Pius XI called it an ‘intrinsically vicious’ deed.
This is the kind of frivolous nonsense that the religious must always resort to in the end. And why should powerful organisations be permitted to continue to treat people as non-persons simply on the basis of unargued opinion? Simply because, at the basis of it all, is the suggestion that there may lurk a god which somehow, though we know not how, supports the callously trivial claims of its minions! Bizarre! And people still make claims that this sort of moral blindness should win our respect!?
“And why should powerful organisations be permitted to continue to treat people as non-persons simply on the basis of unargued opinion?”
That is indeed the question. It is in a sense well known, yet also carefully or carelessly ignored, that religions alone are exempt from laws that mandate equality in hiring. Nearly everybody just takes that for granted, with the result that all-male clergies get to go on excluding women and making laws that subordinate women, forever and ever. And the Buntings and Khans cheer them on. Pathetic.