The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is stoking up indefensible views

Traditionally Easter used to be the time when hellfire and stoppage was preached from the platforms of competing teachers' conferences. These days, regrettably, the Churches are getting in on the act. Over the weekend the fabulous Norman pile at Durham surrendered its calm to the far-from-pacific message delivered by its bishop, Tom Wright. Sermonising about the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, currently before Parliament, the bishop criticised the Government for “pushing through, hard and fast, legislation that comes from a militantly atheist and secularist lobby”.

Stop the sermon right there. My NUT/religion comparison is an even better fit than I realised. The legislation emanates from a “militantly atheist and secularist lobby”? Oh yes, that would be it. Haven't you seen them on the streets and on your screens, all got up in their God Is Dead, Christians Should be Deader atheist headbands and red robes, burning Bibles, insisting on the teaching of Dawkins and Hitchens in school RS lessons, smashing icons and creeping up behind bishops and lifting their cassocks?

Sermon continues: “This secular utopianism is based on a belief in an unstoppable human ability to make a better world, while at the same time it believes that we have the right to kill unborn children and surplus old people...” Now, this is as close to a lie as makes no difference. Dr Wright may reply directly to the Times letters page, which, even in this fallen age, generally prints the words of high clergymen, to tell me which significant secularist body, or scientific group, or gaggle of atheists is it that believes “we” have the right “to kill surplus old people”? Or is he referring here to voluntary euthanasia, the idea that people may have a right to end their own lives? I challenge him.

This almost wanton disregard of fairness was being deployed for the specific purpose of attacking the proposals to allow the creation and use of hybrid embryo tissue in scientific and medical research. Or, as the Bishop put it, with what was intended to be withering irony: “Gender-bending was so last century; we now do species-bending.” Now, the eminent theologian has confused Boy George with sex-change operations (a big mistake, one gathers from the singer's memoirs), so let me note instead that it was this kind of verbal looseness that so upset Lord Winston, when he heard about the Easter sermon delivered by the leader of a rival Church union, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh.

Divisions over Sharia law and Catholic schools could be avoided, argues SAM GHIBALDAN, if Britain decided to go secular
AS A reality TV show it might be hard to beat. Take some members of every religion, mix in atheists and agnostics and send them all to live on a desert island for a couple of years. Sink or swim; they'd have to decide how to live and work together. The more extreme would try to assert themselves; the more reasonable would look on aghast. Heated discussion, arguments and possibly violence would follow. It could go either way; they'd find a way of living together or chaos would result.

How to govern a society and the role religion should have within it is a vexed question. Recently two significant figures have entered the debate: Alex Salmond declared that we should celebrate state-funded Catholic schools and the Archbishop of Canterbury argued that aspects of Sharia law should be adopted in the UK. Both intended to promote diversity; but by drawing inspiration from the historical practice of linking religion and the state they risk undermining it.

British history is littered with the consequences of religiously inspired government. Seeking to root out heretics, Protestants and Catholics spent a few hundred years inflicting nasty judicially sanctioned murders on each other. The combination of power and religion in Northern Ireland proved a lethal cocktail. Look further afield and similar patterns can be seen around the world.

I’ve noticed that this year in the mainstream press there are far more articles than ever before about the lack of religious diversity among the candidates for U.S. President.

It’s certainly not news that those who seek our country’s highest office are always professed Christians of one brand or another, usually standard issue Protestant. Republican Mitt Romney’s Mormonism caused a stir for a brief moment in time, precisely because it’s not the kind of Christianity that Americans are accustomed to hearing about. Defending his beliefs against the fundamentalist Christians who are extremely vocal and influential in his conservative party, Romney used the opportunity to bash those of us who are atheists or agnostics.

In one of the more nonsensical statements of his presidential bid, Romney said that “freedom requires religion.” Nothing could be further from the truth: Freedom demands freedom from religion and from the influence of religion in the political arena.

While sitting in an airport, I had an interesting experience listening to a group of pastors returning from a retreat and discussing who is and who isn’t a Christian. They were quite open and vocal in their exchange, with little concern for who was listening. The typical suspects were dragged up in the conversation with the usual disapproval and even disgust, “How can a Catholic or a Mormon be saved? And, what about those churches who ordain women and gays, what is the faith coming to? What can be done?” As the pastors entered the plane the conversation continued along those lines and I found myself slinking further and further behind the group of pastors trying to distance myself from the conversation because of the sadness coming up in me about my own faith. I thought I had finally succeeded in avoiding my pain, until I sat down and discovered that the three pastors were on both sides of me in the same isle, still talking. While I listened to the conversation gain momentum I began to wonder:

What is really being said here? It seems that Instead of trusting the process Jesus has people in and allowing for that process to transform individuals into a new spiritual identity organically emerging from community, the organized Church requires identification with a historical and theological Jesus, relating a Cartesian perspective of Christ as “The Faith.” As one of the pastors talked of Orthodox Christianity and its requirements, I was taken by his tone; I wondered, is Christianity an ideology for scaling Christ into form to be marketed?

The irony of this situation struck me because I had brought a book entitled Infidel I was intending to finish on the flight. Infidel is the life memoir of a Muslim woman by the name of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and it chronicles her life journey of coming out of the oppressive radical Islamic community and becoming a champion of free speech and her mission to fight injustice done in the name of religion.

RICHMOND
As the apocryphal old Irishman woefully confessed, "I'm an atheist, God forgive me."
Atheism has been in the national news the past few years, propagated by the publication in 2004 of Sam Harris's "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason," followed in 2006 by "The God Delusion" by scientist Richard Dawkins and followed last year by trouble-maker Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." Atheism is nothing new on our planet. Its roots go back about 2,500 years and there have been as many variations on the theme as there have been religions to foster them.

I have told the story before about the Holy Cross College freshman I met at a party about a half century ago who was so enthusiastic about a course he had taken with a Catholic priest on comparative religion.

"And we proved," he stated proudly, "we proved that Roman Catholicism is the only true religion."

"Good for you," I told him.

When I read recently that Pope Benedict XVI had confirmed this, I nodded and said out loud, "Good for you, too."
The national debate has finally trickled down to the pages of this newspaper in a flush of letters intermingled with an op-ed piece by Dan Valenti. After I read Valenti's embarrassingly condescending attack on atheism, I nodded again and said, "Good for you, Dan."

...My favorite line in all literature is in the book "Finnegan's Wake" by James Joyce. In one of the chapters, Joyce recreates "The Last Supper" and in the middle of the Passover meal someone at table says thusly: "Pass the fish for Christ's sake."

You can take that anyway you want but all in all it encapsulates life as we know it.

A common criticism of the so-called “new atheists” (who I prefer to call the "new anti-dogmatists") is the "problem of morality": how, many religious critics ask, can we be good without God? Isn’t the fact that people are good, that people can tell good from evil, evidence for the existence of God? Even if God is a myth, isn’t He necessary to inspire people to acts of goodness and to keep them from falling into immorality? And in any case, don’t we get our morals from our religious traditions?

A key problem here is that this “good without God” criticism is really at least five different arguments jumbled together.

The argument from scripture

First comes the argument from scripture: “how can we know what's good without a book of rules, like the Bible?” This is the one that Richard Dawkins so ably rebuts with his "cherry picking" point in his recent best-seller, The God Delusion. The Bible is full of horrible acts and recommendations. It also contains some very kind and good acts and rules. Most Christians don't follow the former any more, but continue to follow the latter. How do they chose? What do they use to “cherry pick” the Bible in this way? It's not something in the Bible, it's something in the reader. If this moral sense exists in us and allows us to pick the good bits of the Bible from the bad, what do we need the Bible for, except as one among many anthologies of moral propositions on which to practice our moral sense?

The platonic argument

Second, there's the Platonic “by what standard” argument: “granted we have an innate moral sense, but how can we know what's right and wrong if there is no absolute standard of right in the universe?”, says the theist. “Doesn't our ability to recognise that some acts are good and others evil imply that there must somewhere exist a perfect thing of goodness to be the standard? Doesn't our moral sense itself act as evidence of the existence of God?”

Here the error is epistemological: of course we can judge degrees of something even though a perfect sample of that something does not really exist. Nowhere in reality is there such a thing as a perfectly straight line. Yet we are easily able to judge and even rank the straightness of connections between two points in the real world with relative ease - this hand-drawn line on this piece of paper is straighter than that one; this rooftop is straighter than that one; the path of this meteor is straighter than that one, and so on.

The argument from the mysterious origin of morality

Letter writer Philip Rowe's main point seemed to be that if atheists debate religious issues with believers, then the motivation is hatred. The writer seemed especially fond of the word "pushy." Does that make pushy Christian proselytizers hateful? Would he apply the same standard to his own faith?

I am an atheist and I do not hate the writer or other Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, etc. I love all human beings equally, even if I disagree with their theology.

My car has been bashed in with baseball bats. Bibles left on my front porch. A cross planted in my yard. Death threats received via e-mail. Nasty notes left under my windshield wipers. My children harassed and picked on at school, and much more.

I loved "The Golden Compass." What a wonderful film. Not since I was a child had fantasy worlds like this one so effortlessly absorbed me. I was afraid my adult imagination could no longer afford such luxuries at the cost of my maturity and cynicism. But, thankfully, "Pan's Labyrinth" and now "The Golden Compass" have both proven me wrong within the last year. I can't remember the last time I was so happy to be proven wrong. "Pan's Labyrinth" is, of course, a superior film, but "The Golden Compass" is without a doubt in the same league.

Today came the news of the films disappointing performance in the box-office and usually a film's success or failure does not bother me. This had, though. After seeing it Friday, I walked out of the theater thoroughly satisfied and convinced it would be a classic for all children. It wasn't until I had told others about the film that I heard various second-hand accounts of parents refusing to bring their children to see it. I was inspired to surf the net and see how far, and deep, this epidemic had spread. I found countless posts from parents and Catholics warning others how dangerous the impact of this film's popularity would be. Some students from various schools posted letters from their principals and deans sharing the same fear. Many of the letters claimed, in different words but with the same sentiment, that "The Philip Pullman film, the first of a trilogy called His Dark Materials, has been compared to 'Lord of the Rings' and C.S. Lewis' 'Chronicles of Narnia' series. Well, it's not. 'The Golden Compass' is the exact opposite of the Christian-based classics. The film is viciously anti-God while weaving messages of atheism, witchcraft, evolution, divination, homosexuality, and immorality. The author himself boasts that, 'I am of the Devil's party and know it!'"

Now, I must not have seen the Director's Cut of the film. Where is it playing?
I am a Catholic. I have read the bible from cover to cover. But I found nothing wrong with the film. And trust me, I looked hard. Maybe my bible is missing as many passages as the version of "The Golden Compass" is missing the scenes that bare the messages described above. But I am positive that Atheism is the belief that God does not exist, nor the Devil—so if they have quoted Pullman accurately then they have disproved the validity of their every accusation.

I was disappointed to find that not one Atheist or any advocates of atheism were so offended by the attack on their beliefs that they felt the need to rebut. Maybe they are too busy prepping the attack on the next film that supports Christianity.