Apathy Sketchpad

Apparently, the ‘relics’ (or ‘bits’) of St Thérèse de Lisieux are coming to town, which should at least prove marginally more lively and relevant than anything the Pope has to say on his forthcoming tour. Thérèse is a relatively modern saint, canonised apparently after someone reckoned a visit to her grave restored their sight, so I would hope these are genuine remains from that grave rather than just some joke shop bit of bone approved by the Grand High Catholic Board Of Reality who have so far authenticated three of John the Baptist’s heads.

My question is this: is the following quote from St Thérèse the sort of thing you would want to publicise if it was your religion?

Be not afraid to tell Jesus that you love Him; even though it be without feeling, this is the way to oblige Him to help you, and carry you like a little child too feeble to walk.

Read it again, this time mentally substituting ‘your boyfriend’ for ‘Jesus’. I think that’s a little bit like something Jo Brand might say.

Because, you know, the Pope never makes me cross.

First of all was the story of Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the Archbishop of Recife’s decision to excommunicate a woman who helped her daughter get an abortion. The daughter was nine. She needed an abortion because her Catholic stepfather raped her. The rapist was not excommunicated. The Vatican supported all of this, so the only way these actions make any sense is if the Vatican considers abortion worse than raping a nine-year-old girl. And that nearly makes sense, except that the girl would probably have died in childbirth, so even if you consider her twin fÅ“tuses ‘people’ you still have to be pretty warped to expect her to die for the crime of being raped. (Warped, or Muslim.)

After that, the Vatican calmed down a little and celebrated International Women’s Day, by — I know, this has to be gold, doesn’t it? — by publishing an article asking the question “What in the 20th century did most to liberate Western women?” and reaching the rather brilliant conclusion that it was probably the invention of the washing machine. Not the right to work. Not women’s suffrage. Definitely a machine that makes cleaning clothes (which clearly is Women’s Work) easier. I mean, even if that’s pragmatically true (which it isn’t) don’t say so right after you’ve okayed raping small girls.

It’s lucky the Pope isn’t at all utterly terrifying.
photo credit: openDemocracy

After that piece of light-hearted batshit whimsy, the Pope decided to refocus his efforts on Catholicism’s core competency: ruining innocent people’s lives with arbitrary and idiotic dogma. This time, it’s Africa’s turn. Speaking about the AIDS epidemic there, the Pope himself, not a lackey this time, said “the distribution of condoms… aggravates the problems”. The Telegraph have found themselves a priest to defend him — and let’s mention now that I’m only inferring he’s a priest from his photo. Nowhere do they bother to actually mention that he works for the Pope, because that might be a bit too much like declaring one’s interests for the mainstream media. Their priest, George Pitcher, rehashes the same old argument I’ve heard over and over again: “that the Church’s historic teaching that chastity outside marriage and fidelity within it would prevent the spread of killer diseases such as Aids”. And this is true, but alas irrelevant, because nobody is criticising that teaching. (At least, I’m not. At the moment.) What we are criticising is the Pope’s claim that distributing condoms will make the AIDS epidemic worse. This claim is demonstrably false. It turns out that if you grow up and go with the facts instead of just making shit up, you can actually make a difference and save some lives.

The problem I have with the Pope’s speech is not that he advocated abstinence: it is that he specifically lied about something that we know works. Even if nobody acts on his advice, if they believe the epidemiological claims that he makes then they will make bad decisions and people will die.

Here are my NewsBiscuit submissions for the last month. First, one that made the front page:

• Government Agrees Rescue Package For Snowmen (original submission)

Now the others. Tip of the hat to anhodika for inspiring the first one and to Smudge for the headline on the second one. (Community site, see?)

Straw refuses to publish details of amendments to Freedom of Information Act

Following backlash against the scrapped publication of Parliamentary minutes from the run-up to the Iraq war, Jack Straw has announced that there will be a series of reforms to the current Freedom of Information Act. He promised reporters that the new Act would be more efficient and less easily circumvented, but he refused to divulge how this would be achieved or exactly what the proposals were.

Speaking on BBC Radio 7, he said that the new rules would stop politicians ‘publishing embarassing information in obscure places where it would be unlikely to be widely seen, such as Hansard or this show’. When asked where the information would instead be published, Straw looked puzzled, and after a pause said that the new proposals favoured openness but that the specifics of the proposals were not intended for public dissemination.

Straw went on to explain that while it is important that the public has a right to access information about government, that must be balanced with other concerns, such as security. ‘Of the nation?’ prompted the presenter, to which Straw replied, ‘well yes, obviously, but also of my job.’ When pressed for more information, he explained that ‘if the public know how to get information, then so do al-Qaeda, and that could pose serious threats.’ Instead, the government is set to bring in a replacement Act, whereby the public has a right to access large amounts of government information, including Parliamentary minutes and MPs’ expenses, but will not be told how to do so. He promised, however, that details of the process would be made freely available to anyone who asked to see them, as long as they submit their request in a correctly formatted letter to the new Information Commissioner’s office, whose address was also available on properly presented request.

The new Act is expected to come into force at the start of April, however Straw promised that information important to the public, such as war minutes and MPs’ expenses, would be covered by the new rules immediately ‘to aid transparency in government’.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been a bit behind in my ‘Popewatch’ documentation of his every move. He recently offended a number of people when he appointed an ‘ultra-conservative’ bishop (as if there were some other kind). Apparently, this guy ‘wrote in a parish newsletter that Hurricane Katrina was an act of “divine retribution” for the sins of a sexually permissive society’, ‘warned children against reading JK Rowling’s novels about the boy wizard Harry Potter, describing them as spreading satanism’ and ’said it was no coincidence that the Tsunami disaster had occurred at Christmas, inferring that it was punishment for “rich western tourists” who had “fled to poor Thailand”‘. All of the above is pretty shitty, but probably for the most part fairly harmless and to be expected of some part of any large religious group. What is despicable in this story is that the Pope made the man a bishop. The Pope has the power to make Catholicism a respectable, progressive religion or to make it an dangerous and oppressive cult, and he appears to have picked ‘cult’.

Before that, he… er…

Okay, I don’t know what the word for the opposite of ‘excommunication’ is. I shall use ‘incommunication’.

Anyway, Pope Ratzinger has incommunicated a former cleric thrown out of the church for being a Holocaust denier. He can’t be a priest again unless he changes his mind, apparently, but he’s still back in the church. The Pope’s explanation is that he didn’t know about his views on the Holocaust when he lifted the excommunication. Smart readers will have spotted that that story makes no sense, and the reason it makes no sense is that I made a mistake. Here, I blithely assumed that a Holocaust denier thrown out of a religious order with a professed moral authority might have been thrown out because he was a Holocaust denier, but it turns out that he was thrown out on a technicality. More bizarrely still, he has in the last hour built a bizarre simulacrum of utter reasonableness and issued this statement:

Since I see that there are many honest and intelligent people who think differently, I must look again at the historical evidence. It is about historical evidence, not about emotions, and if I find this evidence, I will correct myself. But that will take time.

For a Holocaust denier to say something like that is simultaneously massively encouraging and terrifying, but given that his job is to promote belief in Jesus, a man whose historical existence is predicate on a handful of accounts of his life written decades after the event and who claims to be the son of a virgin and an invisible wizard who lives in the sky, it’s just too surreal to try to analyse further.

I had no idea this quote existed when I started this post. Every time you look into the inner machinations of any church nonsense like this appears. The whole system is so entirely unhinged that any place you choose to dig will lead to something like that pretty soon.

I mention it principally because I was surprised to read in the news that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, a cleric I despise more than most, not least because he is complicit in the sexual abuse of children, had done something good for a change by publicly criticising the Pope for this, in a letter to the Chief Rabbi…

Dear Chief Rabbi,

I am writing to express my dismay at the effect of the Vatican decree releasing from excommunication bishops consecrated illicitly. Specifically I naturally deplore the comments made by the Englishman, Rev Williamson, in his denial of the full horror of the Holocaust.

His statement and views have absolutely no place in the Catholic Church and its teaching. Pope Benedict’s reaffirmation of this on 28 January 2009 was made very clear when he expressed “full and unquestionable solidarity with our brother and sister recipients of the First Covenant … May the Shoah be for all a warning against forgetfulness, against denial or reductionism, because violence against a single human being is violence against all”.

Perhaps I should add that the lifting of excommunication is only a first step towards reconciliation of the bishops concerned. None of them is yet able to exercise any office either as priest or bishop in communion with the Catholic Church.

I put this in writing to assure you of our continued understanding and friendship. In these difficult times we are called to bear witness to peace and goodwill. I like to think this is especially true of relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish Community here in Britain.

With kindest wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Cormac Card. Murphy-O’Connor
Archbishop of Westminster

…but then I read the letter and it turns out he didn’t actually say anything at all.

I can’t work out why that’s considered news. He doesn’t criticise the Pope at all (which is fair enough as he didn’t do anything wrong in this case), despite what the Telegraph may think. He basically says “I think it’s a shame that undoing a piece of beaurcracy happened to increase the number of Holocaust deniers in the church, but it’s not that big a deal. We’re still cool, right?”. Which is fair enough, but why report it?

Look who it is! Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor is back, with another little rant. This time, the Independent has inexplicably given him a column to explain his opinions of the invented problems facing the strange and alien version of Britain that exists inside his imagination:

The progressive secularisation of the cultural environment and the accompanying decline in religious practice means that religious belief of any kind tends now to be treated more as a private eccentricity than as the central and formative element in British society that it is.

No, it isn’t. It’s Winter Solstice season, when almost every religion ever invented has a major festival, and still almost nobody I know cares at all about religion (except for those who are against it). That would probably be because it’s a kind of private eccentricity. On account of the progressive secularisation of the cultural environment and the accompanying decline in religious practice. Religion is so important in public life that more people will shop online than attend church on Christmas Day and the Bible Society reckon that one generation from now there will be less than 90,000 people in church on Christmas. That’s less people than consult life coaches (it says here). You can’t simultaneously claim that people have stopped practicing religion and that religion is a “central element” in society.

‘Private eccentricity’ is a phrase I’ve never heard anyone use about religion until I read this, but I like it and might have to start.

Over the past 40 years, social prejudice against Catholics has largely disappeared, and Catholics have been fully assimilated into the mainstream of British life.

Good for them. Well done. But don’t worry, keep ranting and you can still be a social pariah if you like. And you can live in a make-believe world where God loves you and religion is a central and formative element in British society, and where phrases like ‘central and formative element in British society’ mean something. Won’t that be nice?

Intellectual and cultural acceptance is another matter; and there is a widely perceived conflict between religious belief (and the Catholic Church in particular) on the one hand and the prevailing notion of what it means to be a “liberal” and tolerant society on the other.

Hang on there, Cardinal Fear-Quotes. You’re saying that people saying “infidels will burn in hell” is at odds with liberalism and tolerance? Of course it is. You don’t promote tolerance by dividing people into arbitrary groups, giving them all different rules about how to live, and telling all of them that the only way to save everyone else from eternal torture is to make them follow your rules. That’s how you start a war. Having lots of people with deeply-held convictions all at odds with each other is probably not a good way to make peace, is it?

Leaving aside the polemical views of Professor Richard Dawkins and his fellow atheists on the essential irrationality of all religious belief, …

That’s a bit like saying ‘leaving aside the crazy rantings of Harold Shipman on the idea that two fours are eight’. You can’t just pick the most controversial person you can think of who holds an opinion and pretend that the opinion is as controversial as him. Religious belief is irrational. (I realise my word isn’t helping here as I’d probably be as controversial as Dawkins if I had his publicity.) You believe in an invisible magic man who made the universe, handed out a bunch of cryptic rules, and now spends his time appearing to uneducated people in shrines and not saying anything. You want to tell me that’s rational?

…there is a current dislike of absolutes in any area of human activity, including morality (though this does not apparently preclude an absolute ban on anything that can be interpreted as racial, sexual or gender discrimination).

So, there’s only a dislike of absolutes that you made up or read into a laughably out-of-date book, then. As long as we’re clear. I shall steer clear of stoning people to death for opening their eggs at the wrong end, then.

In part, this dislike stems from an entirely understandable revulsion for totalitarianism; and there is no denying that too absolutist an approach to ethical problems leads to intolerance. But as the ongoing debate about faith schools has demonstrated, the intolerance of liberal sceptics can be as repressive as the intolerance of religious believers.

Yeah, we’re so intolerant of ignorant people forcing unsupported ideas and dangerous ideology on vulnerable children (and you can read the bottom of this post to see what Murphy-O’Connor thinks we should do with vulnerable children) and calling it ‘educating’ them. We’re also intolerant of someone killing their daughter for her choice of boyfriend. Where do you want to draw the line? Let’s hear it: at what point do you think an injustice becomes great enough that we shouldn’t ignore it as ‘their culture’? Is there a line in your head?

Partly I’m just baffled that someone can type “the intolerance of liberal sceptics” without straining their irony glands and having to have a little lie down.

What should be the limits of tolerance in a liberal society is a key question in the wider debate about “multiculturalism”. Because of the Catholic experience of what it means to be a credal minority, British Catholics are likely to sympathise with those ethnic and religious groups who want to retain their cultural and religious distinctiveness in a British environment.

The issue of integration is made more pressing as a result of the migrations from eastern Europe, Africa and South America over the past few years. This has been most vividly demonstrated by the arrival in Britain of more that 500,000 Catholics from Poland, and they alone will change the face of British Catholicism.

Well, there’s them, and the millions of Muslims who’ve turned up and dressed differently than most British people and built mosques everywhere. Although yes, certainly most of the public debate has centred around Polish Catholics. Apparently they’re taking our plumbing jobs.

The growth of ethnic chaplaincies, especially in London, offers a support that is familiar, but, as with previous migrations, integration into existing communities is already taking place through school and work.

…and must be stopped at once! How can you say that and still support faith schools? It’s totally self-cont– oh, forget it, it’s like trying to teach a Lotto machine to count.

For Catholics, the conflict with liberal opinion focuses at the present time on two issues on which the Catholic position is characterised as intolerant and (even worse) “reactionary”: the absolute value of every human life; and the central importance of the family and the institution of marriage as fundamental pillars of a rightly ordered society.

You mean, your arbitrary and unscientific assertion that a cluster of cells none of which are brain counts as a ‘person’, and your even more baseless and frankly rather offensive claims that homosexual sex is wrong? Yeah, those are sticking points.

Many other Christians, as well as Jews and Muslims, broadly share the Catholic Church’s position on these issues, but I think it is fair to say that the Catholic Church bears the brunt of “liberal” hostility on both fronts.

Maybe that’s because you write about it in the Independent. Also, you have a Pope. If Pope Ratzinger (I’ll call him Pope Benedict XVI if he’ll call me Captain Marvellous) just once acted Infallible and said being gay and having abortions were basically okay then the problem would halve overnight. Can’t really do that for Islam. Islam’s an idea with a life of its own and that can’t be reasoned with. Catholicism has a leader and a structure full of people we can pester about it. Just a shame they’re all stubborn, bigoted fools.

One area of specific concern for the Catholic Church is marriage and family life.

You mean, hating the gays. Come on: it’s a spade, say the word ’spade’.

The British enthusiasm for debate and tolerance of alternative views has led to an acceptance of diversity and pluralism. This is welcome, but if an acceptance of diversity and pluralism becomes an end in itself there is a grave risk that long-accepted cultural norms, such as marriage and family, are undermined to the detriment of society as a whole.

“People like to be accepting, and that’s good, as long as they’re not accepting of any of the things on my List Of People I Hate For No Reason.”

The vocal minority who argue that religion has no role in modern British society portray Catholic teaching on the family as prejudiced and intolerant to those pursuing alternatives.

Because you hate the gays?

Catholic teaching is clear that all unjust discrimination is wrong, but this teaching cannot accept the relativistic acceptance that all approaches are equivalent.

So presumably you’ll be immediately stopping believing a load of made up rubbish and from now on waiting for evidence, yes?

British society champions tolerance and freedom, but that freedom is dependent on responsibility.

You have freedom to do whatever you want, on the condition that you don’t use it to have homosexual sex? I wonder if Murphy-O’Connor has read Catch-22.

With the exception of the US Evangelical movement, I can’t think of even one mainstream religious leader who I have a lower opinion of than Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. He shouldn’t be given a platform to air his views; he should be sidelined for them. In fact, no, he should be in prison for being complicit in the sexual abuse of children. That this man has the nerve to criticise consensual sex between adults of the same gender as ‘immoral’ suggests to me that he is dangerously insane.

Remember, Catholics: the only difference between you and orthodox or Reformist Christians is that you endorse these lunatics. I know Christianity is important to many of you, but it doesn’t have to come packaged with bigotry or child abuse or banning condoms in places with AIDS epidemics or a boycott on Amnesty International. You can be a nice Christian instead.

I guess in some ways you have to feel sorry for the Pope. He’s committed his whole life to Catholicism, and he’s managed to rise to the highest possible job in the church, and now he’s discovering that he doesn’t actually do anything much but sit there and occasionally address a crowd of people who mostly won’t understand a word of it. He’s a figurehead, and (as he amply demonstrates) imaginary dead people can do that job. He’s head of an organisation that hasn’t materially changed since its inception, and probably by now everything interesting and relevant on the subject has been said by a previous Pope, so now he’s reduced to chatting nonsense. This is his spokesperson (or ‘Metatron’) talking:

In the age of the cell phone and the internet it is probably more difficult than before to protect silence and to nourish the interior dimension of life. It is difficult but necessary. There is an interior and spiritual dimension of life that must be guarded and nourished. If it is not, it can become barren to the point of drying up and, indeed, dying. Today, this is a very grave threat, and it is the most irreparable misfortune. Nations once rich in faith and vocations are losing their own identity under the harmful and destructive influence of a certain modern culture.

It’s just nonsense. It sounds like something Sarah Palin might say. It seems to mean (if anything) that having the opportunity to communicate efficiently is a bad thing because it means you spend less time sitting about on your own coming up with bullshit ideas about how you’d like the universe to work. But mostly it looks like vague twaddle designed to sound impressive without saying anything, with a couple of modern references thrown in at the start to make it seem relevant and new, even though you could replace ‘the cell phone and the internet’ with ‘quill and parchment’ or even ‘the wheel and fire’ and it wouldn’t make any less sense.

But tragically, this really is the most useful thing he has to do with his life. There are a lot of problems with the Catholic Church that by rights the Pope should be fixing, obviously, but you can’t expect him to actually do it because the entire system is designed so that nobody who will spot them would ever want or be allowed to become Pope.

I wonder if he realises how utterly pointless he is. Probably not. I expect he’d do something useful if he did.

This month, I am awarding Crackpot to the Italian government prosecutors, who have really managed to pull it out of the bag by simultaneously being wrong and stupid. Not a good combination when you’re in a position of any kind of power.

Apparently, they have decided to prosecute a comedian called Sabrina Guzzanti. Her crime, such as they think it is, was this: she said in her act that within twenty years Italian schoolteachers would be vetted by the Vatican,

But then, within 20 years the Pope will be where he ought to be — in Hell, tormented by great big poofter devils, and very active ones, not passive ones.

The wording seems to vary between reports. I assume they are different translations. This one is from the Times. Other reports are in the Guardian (and their opinion), Chortle (where I first found the story), and loads of others, including Zimbio, whose article has this to say:

Ratzinger does a lot of pontificating…

That’s true. I also hear he’s Catholic.

They think it’s okay to punish people for mocking a bigot in a frock. Perhaps more worryingly, they also think it’s okay to punish people for mocking their President — that must make politics a risky game. It is no surprise that this law was signed by His Excellency Benito Mussolini, Head of Government, Duce of Fascism, and Founder of the Empire (really, that’s what he called himself).

So that’s why they’re wrong. You just wait until you hear why they’re stupid…

The July rally [at which Guzzanti made the offending joke] was called to protest against alleged interference by the Vatican and the Catholic Church in Italian affairs, from abortion to gay rights, but also to attack the Prime Minister for passing “ad personam” laws to protect his own interests and avoid prosecution on corruption allegations.

So your plan is to arrest anyone who points it out under “ad hominem” laws? That will work.

Three years ago Ms Guzzanti released a widely praised film, Viva Zapatero!, about the suppression in 2003 of her late night show RAIot in which she had satirised the Italian Prime Minister. At the 2005 Venice International Film Festival Viva Zapatero! was given an ovation.

Just you watch how well that works.

This month, I’m awarding the title of Crackpot to Father Sean McDonagh, and to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, whoever they might be. He has decided, based on scripture, that you can’t use GM wheat for the Eucharist. Which is fair enough, you might think, but… well, there’s really very little non-GM wheat available. It’s about the most artificial plant there is. Even if God created man, man created things like poodles and bread-wheat.

But even so, all this was done before Jesus supposedly lived, so let’s grant him that God picked a man-made crop, and let’s even grant him literal trans-substantiation (albeit because it’s irrelevant rather than because it’s even remotely reasonable). The mental acrobatics he must have done before this made sense are enough to win him the award:

Fr McDonagh quotes from Canon Law 924, section two, which stipulates: “the bread must be wheaten only, and recently made, so that there is no danger of corruption.”

But he says that genetically-engineered wheat is not “made solely from wheat” because of protein added to make it resistant to a weed killer. “For example, people who suffer coeliac disease are unable to absorb gluten, a protein found in wheat. Eating even small amounts of wheat can make them ill.

“In recent decades, it has been possible to extract the gluten from wheaten bread so that people can eat bread without endangering their health. Despite the fact that gluten-wheat poses a health threat, which can often be serious, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith stated in a reply in 1982 that, ‘the local Ordinary could not permit a priest to consecrate special gluten-free hosts for the communion of coeliacs’,” writes Fr McDonagh.

So your theory is that God, in his infinite wisdom and compassion, gave loads of people a medical condition that means they can’t eat wheat, and then required them to eat wheat every Sunday? That regular wheat can literally become the body of Jesus but GM and gluten-free wheat can’t? What part of that is supposed to make sense?

And even ignoring all of the above, basically allow him to invent his own reality, he’s still wrong — because gluten-free wheat is “made solely from wheat”, just with a bit taken out, and the whole analogy is nonsense in any case.

How shitty a person do you have to be to expect people to eat poison for God?

I feel now like I may have been a bit harsh on the Church of England. Obviously I don’t think it should remain Established a moment longer, and naturally my ideal world wouldn’t include it, but…

Well, first of all, it’s at least trying to be progressive. They ordain women, much to the chagrin of Anne Widdecombe, a woman so conservative she even objects to equal rights for women, and gay people (although they do ask them not to actually have sex, although in fairness that’s as much the government’s fault for failing to legalise gay marriage as such). If there really has to be an Established church (which there clearly doesn’t) then I’d rather it be them than most of the others.

And what happens?

A breakaway sect of Anglicanism (a phrase I never imagined I’d have to type — cake or death, anyone?) forms, designed to keep those dirty gays out. And people (like the aforementioned Tory notjob) desert the Church for the safety of Catholicism, where of course there is no danger at all of anything remotely resembling liberalism, progressivism, or any form of acknowledgement that it’s not the middle ages or that making stuff up is different from research. These people usually justify their actions by saying things like “you can’t just ignore the parts of the bible you don’t like”, while wearing cotton-polyester blend. So either you’re being selective, and therefore will need to either stop being a sexist homophobic bigot or find a better reason, or else you’ve got to accept the whole bible, including all the really fucked-up stuff with rape and murder and slavery and so on and so forth. Honestly I’d be happier if they just came right out and said “I think homosexuality is wrong and I won’t be a member of any church that supports it”. They’d be flat out wrong, but at least they’d be honest. When did palatable become better than honest?

If all this is right, then to say the C of E is doomed because it’s losing people is like saying that a cancer surgery patient is doomed because they’re losing cells. If enough of the fools abandon the ship then the Church may even end up being a force for good.

Of course, I’ll still want it disestablished.

(There are some really fucking weird versions of Cake Or Death on Youtube…)

This hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for Christianity in Britain. We learned that the Church of England is suffering because young people aren’t interested and the people who are are dying of old age, and we learned that Cliff Richard has decided to pitch in to help, presumably because he is almost uniquely placed to sympathise with that plight. His contribution is to publish a book of his favourite Bible stories, including the story of how God killed everyone in the world except for one family and then regretted it, the story of how God murdered all the innocent first-born sons in Egypt despite having “hardened the Pharaoh’s heart” to ensure he wouldn’t release the slaves, the story of how God masterminds and helps with the genocide in Jericho, the story of Solomon, who was granted wisdom and then went off to worship someone else, and the story of how God had his own son tortured to death to “pay for” sins committed by other people according to rules God devised in the first place. I can see how that will help.

Also trying to help is the Church Army, who want to hook youngsters into the faith by analogising it to Doctor Who. They point out the many similarities between the Doctor and Jesus, and the storylines in the show and in the Bible. And there are many similarities, although frankly almost every single one of them is pathetic. They say

The Tardis was considered to represent a Church by being an ordinary object that points to something higher while the Doctor was likened to Christ in his willingness to sacrifice himself for others.

What? You could liken The Brittas Empire to the Bible if you’re willing to go that far.

My favourite Christian reference is the kenotic storyline in the episode called “The Chameleon Arch”, which is a machine that takes away all the Doctor’s powers and renders him human. It is a clear nod towards Philippians 2.6-11, where the incarnation is described as God “emptying himself”.

Not all that clear, I’m afraid. I thought that was a sub-par and rather silly bit of technobabble which had to be tolerated to tell what was, in the event, a damn good story. A story which, incidentally, really didn’t bear more than a passing resemblance to Jesus’.

We saw the Doctor persuaded to save a family of Pompeians in one of the most recent episodes, surely a reference to Genesis and Abraham’s bargaining with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I’m not at all sure it is a reference to that. It’s just a good dramatic theme. Nobody should read anything into the fact that it’s come up more than once. You might equally well argue that the fact that Biblical themes can be independently rewritten by a gay atheist suggests that they’re made up. Besides which, there’s shitloads of Bible and rather a lot of Doctor Who. Certainly there are parallels — but that just makes it more pathetic that these people are using such crap examples.

I don’t really know if Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor (as if that’s a real name) was tryong to help when he made a terribly dull speech entitled “Faith In Britain: A Personal Perspective”, which is buried somewhere on this webpage that’s sufficiently poorly designed that I can’t link directly to it. This is from the same lecture series as the previous winner’s speech. He says, for example, in this speech that

Only a modern person would think that religion is a private matter, something the individual does in his or her solitude

which presumably makes Jesus a “modern person”, since Matthew 6:6 says

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

I don’t mind that, of course. Ignorance of what the Bible says is what keeps Christianity going. What annoyed me was this bit:

I would want to encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem because the hidden God is active in their lives as well as in the lives of those who believe.

He must be very well hidden.

Why can’t he “encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem” because we’re smart enough to reject nonsense even when it surrounds us? Because we’ve managed to develop morality without been spoon-fed it by a book of made up rules? Because we’ve got enough confidence in our convictions to go against the flow and stand up for what we don’t believe in? If a Christian were to tell me that they regard me with deep esteem because of something God did, I would find that patronising and offensive, and I’d say so.

He also says this:

What did we do to generate unbelief? We spoke too easily about God, we spoke perhaps in the wrong way and we treated God as an idea rather than a living mystery to be approached in silence and prayer rather than in the arguments of the mind. If Christianity gave European thought the impression that God can be conceptually determined and pinned down and proved as a hypothesis, then it is hardly surprising that there has been resistance, as science and culture have developed, to worshipping this idea of God. We as Christians need to examine what we might have done to give people a misleading view of God. Faith in Britain might be improved by a deeper grasp of the mystery of God on the part of believers.

Now, I may have got the wrong end of the stick here, but to me that reads “whatever you think God is like, you’re wrong. He’s not like that, nor is he like anything else in particular, because he’s fundamentally mysterious and can’t be pinned down or rigorously defined. Of course, that doesn’t stop him existing and it doesn’t stop us knowing how he feels about gay people and stem cells.” If that is what he means, then he’s a moron.

It’s for largely this reason that I’m not sure Religious Crackpot of the Month is really viable any more. I think clearly all these people require recognition, but they can’t have it because it was this month that I read

The primary cause of unhappiness in Britain is not lack of material wealth but a loss of faith in God and religion, a group of MPs says today.

Apparently, there’s a report out by a group of all of five MPs who

argue that if values related to relationships, responsibility, trust, self-esteem and potential – all with their roots in the Judeo-Christian beliefs that once underpinned Western legislative philosophy – were to have greater emphasis in society, everyone’s wellbeing would improve.

So I did what I always do: I found the report. It turns out that the document, called “Faith In The Future” (the same pun, you’ll note, as the government used for their document), is available from a group called Theos, and it is to Theos that I award this month’s Religious Crackpot trophy.

Theos seem to be quite large and well established. They have a website that looks very professional (although it is in fact crap — it doesn’t even have an RSS feed), and describe themselves as

a public theology think tank which exists to undertake research and provide commentary on social and political arrangements. It aims to impact public opinion about the role of Christianity in society.

They go on to say

It was launched in November 2006 with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.

You probably know what I think of those endorsements.

Its first report “Doing God”: A Future for Faith in the Public Square examined the reasons why faith will play an increasingly significant role in public life.

They call themselves a “think tank”, although that’s a bit rich unless you count quoting the Bible as ‘thinking’. Really, they’re just a load of antidisestablishmentarianists hell-bent on reversing the work done since the Enlightenment in secularising society:

what Theos stands for

Society is embarking on a process of de-secularisation. Interest in spirituality is increasing across Western culture. Faith is on the agenda of both government and the media. In the arts, humanities and social sciences there are important intellectual developments currently taking place around questions of values and identity. Theos speaks into this new context. Our perspective is that faith is not just important for human flourishing and the renewal of society, but that society can only truly flourish if faith is given the space to do so. We reject notions of a sacred-secular divide.

And they’ve released quite a lot of frankly rather impenetrable literature about how secularism is bad, but they don’t really understand what it is. They can’t really tell it from atheism:

We can, though, at least make some assumptions. In a seriously secular country, the vast majority of people wouldn’t believe in God, however vaguely. Few would claim to belong to a religious group. And nobody would pray. What would be the point?

No. It’s entirely possible to be religious and secularist at the same time. Take this speech by Barack Obama (which I’ve copied from Dwindling in Unbelief):

We all know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son, and without argument, he takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded.

Of course, in the end God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute, and Abraham passes God’s test of devotion.

But it’s fair to say that if any of us leaving this church saw Abraham on a roof of a building raising his knife, we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham. We would do so because we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason.

Theos can publish all the inane sophistry they like, but the bottom line is that God doesn’t exist and even people who think he does can’t agree (in the case of Murphy-O’Connor, even with themselves) what he’s like or what he wants, and even those who feel they have a clear idea of both of these things can’t offer even the slightest shred of evidence or indeed any good reason to listen to them. So until Theos can prove that God exists, they will remain a sectarian group of crackpots trying to further Christianity’s already excessive influence on British politics.

And that’s just not on.