In Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett writes
“Juliet’s version of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say it was erratic, past all understanding and was seldom seen.”
It’s difficult to describe how funny I think this quote is. It’s even more difficult to describe how funny I think it is that believers can laugh along with me.
Chutzpah, I guess.
He frowns slightly at my comment, then laughs.
‘Oh, we no longer believe in the bearded man in the sky,’ he says, and goes on to tell me about continuous revelation and having a personal relationship with Jesus.
‘You see’, he adds, ‘Modern Christianity has come a long way.’
No it hasn’t.
100’000 years ago, mankind explained what they couldn’t understand with ghosts, gods, demons and spirits. And for good reason: they assumed super-natural causes for super-human events like lightning, volcanos or earthquakes. Today, that belief hasn’t changed. It’s our understanding of nature that has.
Continuous revelations and ‘personal relationships’ with gods are nothing more than new struts on the same old pillar of belief. A fresh coat of paint does not make a new house. Astrology done on a computer is still astrology. Nothing has changed. This belief is still bronze-age morality founded on stone-age knowledge.
All Christians are doing is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Even if you are not superstitious, you avoid giving names that portend calamity. You won’t, for example, call your cat Road Kill, nor would many people think it wise to name a jet Crater.
Although named after a native tribe of the Wichita people, one can’t help but wonder if ‘nomen est omen’ adheres to the town of Waco, Texas. In 1993 it was home to a group of world-class religious wackos who called themselves Branch Davidians and managed to not only get themselves killed, but also took a number of innocent law officers with them.
Recently, “The Science Guy” Bill Nye got a taste of some more Waco wackiness: as one of the speakers in McLennan Community College’s Distinguished Lecture Series, he incurred the wrath of religious nut-cases who took offense at him pointing out that the moon does not glow by itself, but merely reflect sunlight. The problem? In Genesis 1:16 it’s written that God put up a Light to rule over the night, not a mirror. And everyone knows that the Bible is always right. The nuts left the lecture in protest over Nye’s irreverence.
Luckily this kind of crazy does not extend to nearby Huston – else we’d really have had to fake that landing.
Ah, bishops. The unending wellspring of good examples. Good examples of what not to do. Today’s exhibit comes from the Twin Cities, where Catholic Archbishop John Nienstedt makes an archass out of himself.
During a meeting with Catholic leaders last August, the perhaps most revered, but definitely not very bright Archbishop thundered righteously:
“Sodomy, abortion, contraception, pornography, the redefinition of marriage and the denial of objective truth are just some of the forces threatening the stability of our civilization. The source of these machinations is none other than the Father of Lies.”
Wow. Sodomy, abortion, contraception, pornography, and homosexuality all in one sentence!
We better take this apart because it seems impossible to pack more misses into a single line:
Yet, his ‘denial of objective truth’ takes the cake. Objectively, gods don’t exist – they only do in this priest’s subjective imagination. More to the point, it’s his priestly job to deny objective truth. Taken in the context of his own speech, that means he’s either denouncing himself, or admitting that he’s working for his ‘Prince of Lies’.
Sometimes I feel there’s an unofficial contest between men of the cloth to find out who can pack the greatest amount of stupid into a single sentence.
A discussion about religious morals made me look at the actions of priests who recently exhibited somewhat questionable behavior: fire someone for converting to a different belief, lie to their flock, preach hate, or discriminate against women and homosexuals.
In all these cases we can objectively say that their behavior was ethically wrong. So why did they do it? Are they bad people? Their actions certainly indicate so.
Well, not always. When you look more closely, a pattern emerges: In general, priests try to avoid unethical behavior. They usually know when they are doing something unethical – and don’t like it very much. Sometimes they just have to do it – it’s expected of them.
Similar to firemen rushing into a burning building, priests sometimes have to do dangerous things. Like bodily harm to a fireman, a priest has to shoulder the risk of destroying his integrity.
For a priest, lying, hate-mongering and spreading homophobia are occupational hazards.
It’s part of their job.
In the tranquil valley of Erschmatt in Switzerland, a storm is brewing. The predominantly christian community has to deal with a shocking development that threatens the very fabric of their existence.
What has happened? In Switzerland religion is a subject that is taught in all schools. Presumably, the curriculum contains information about the world’s major religions. Edith Inderkummen, a catholic, has a degree in religious pedagogy from the University of Lucern, and was teaching religion and ethics at a local state school. Then she decided to convert to judaism. She was fired for this (warning: article in german).
The Bishop of Sitten revoked her license. He seems to believe that someone who has a degree in ethics and religion is unfit for teaching after committing the vile act of converting to a different religion.
This opens a couple of questions:
A lot went wrong here. But what went wrong most of all:
How the hell can a Bishop fire a teacher employed by a secular school?