Jesting bishops
Funny god these bishops believe in. Arbitrary, whimsical, cryptic, absent-minded, brutal, sloppy, and stupidly vicious. We’d better hope it doesn’t exist. Oblivion is vastly preferable to being bossed around by a petty shit like that for eternity. Funny that the bishops seem to find it attractive. (But not really funny at all of course, since it’s merely a projection of their own petty shitness.)
One diocesan bishop has even claimed that laws that have undermined marriage, including the introduction of pro-gay legislation, have provoked God to act by sending the storms that have left thousands of people homeless…[Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle] expressed his sympathy for those who have been hit by the weather, but said that the problem with “environmental judgment is that it is indiscriminate”.
Why yes, it is; clever of the bish to spot that, but therefore perhaps not all that clever to attribute it to a deity he probably wants people to love as well as fear. Typical enough, of the incoherence of church ‘teaching,’ but not all that clever all the same. Also a tad scientifically illiterate – he doesn’t mean ‘environmental judgment’ of course; the technical term is meteorological judgment.
I very seldom contact public figures who make foolish or offensive comments. However as the bish is more or less local, I found myself sending this e-mail;
Sir,
I find your recent remarks, as reported, profoundly offensive to those who have died in the recent floods, and to their families. May I assume you will be joining the Reverend Fred Phelps in his next picketing of the funerals of the victims of disasters and massacres? Other than diction I see no difference between your position and his.
I’ll let you know if he replies.
Well done.
Pretty amazing and incoherent. “The Beast” is accused of wanting to “control people and their morality” while bascially letting people be. That seems to be confusing. If the Beast is evil, how can it even be expected to “do God’s will” anyway? Why should The Bish be expecting this? Unless he just wants to get rid of secular government altogether and replace it with a lovely theocracy? Which is not even Biblical, anyway.
“Oblivion is vastly preferable to being bossed around by a petty shit like that for eternity.”
Right on the money. If biblical religion were true, its truth would not be an evangelion (good news), but rather, a kakangelion.
Wonderful blog OB. Keep up the magnificent work, it is much appreciated. One question though, how come there is no link to ‘news and notes’ from the B&W home page?
Many Thanks
I wasn’t previously familiar with Thomas Sutcliffe (main page), but now I’m almost tempted to buy the Indy.
Brendan – you mean Notes and Comment? There is a link on the front or home page – left column, under In Focus and Flashback. There isn’t one at the top of the page because space is limited there, so it’s under Dispatches. (We didn’t know N&C was going to be so busy when we first designed B&W [for that matter we didn’t know B&W was going to be so busy]; if we had we probably would have given its own link in the top row.)
Golly gee, I wonder what those mammoths and so on did back in the Pleistocene, that triggered the floods that scoured Eastern Washington? Oh, and the dinos must have really been naughty, getting wiped out like that…
To clarify–I *know* the dinos lived a lot earlier than the mammoths…
That particular bishop’s spokesman has said that of course the bish does not believe that there is a direct link between gays and the floods, it not like god decided to smite the north because of teh gays (well clearly, that would be just preposterous) but apparently our libertinism creates the general mise en scene in which these things are allowed to happen by the almighty.
Where on earth do they get this crap – do you think they are on drugs?
You’d think an omnipotent being would be capable of just flooding the houses of same sex couples and those with an overlarge carbon footprint rather than drowning schoolboys. But maybe he/she/it had a lot of other things to do and got careless.
Surely *He* had ought to be punishing the Bishops for being such lousy shepherds, and leave the rest of us alone. The guy’s an embrassment to DNA.
Ah, c’mon guys – “He” works in mysterious ways, after all. “Ineffable plans”…? there’s an easy get-out clause for everything…
and ya gotta admit, ensuring that a whole pile of high-pressure systems didn’t emerge over russia/europe, thus ensuring that the storms hit us just right to kill those particular kids as a retribution for our gay-friendly, sissy-loving social liberalism…now that’s some plan!
nice to see the spokesman trying to backpedal pretty desperately from what the guy said…oh, well, he might have used the words “it’s all the gays’ fault, let’s burn the lot of them now to please our great master in heaven!”, but what you’ll find he actually MEANT was…etc,etc
anyone out there with kids at a CoE school who still thinks it’s harmless, woolly let’s-all-hug-each-other fun, eh?
“<> Be <> wary <> of <> ‘the beast’. <> He <> is <> pointing <> his <> finger <> at<> you <> right <> this <> minute. <> He <> is <> saying; <> how <> dare <> you <> regard <> the <> life <> you <> are <> living <> as <> legitmate!!! <>“
So says the ‘fallen angel’ messenger who came down [crozier and all] with the last heavenly meteorite.
And some of these people are allowed to sit in our upper legislative chamber. If they just got on with their daft beliefs, the way flat-earthers do, fine, but that daft twat could be chosen to sit in the House of Lords and take part in the creation of legislation that is going to affect you and me. I do hope Brown’s idea of dropping the government’s right to choose bishops leads eventually to disestablishment. If anything will bring that about, this mentally ill bishop’s comments will!
And some of these people are allowed to sit in our upper legislative chamber. If they just got on with their daft beliefs, the way flat-earthers do, fine, but that daft twat could be chosen to sit in the House of Lords and take part in the creation of legislation that is going to affect you and me. I do hope Brown’s idea of dropping the government’s right to choose bishops leads eventually to disestablishment. If anything will bring that about, this mentally ill bishop’s comments will!
Aye Andy – there’s never going to be an Opus Gay is there ?
>”egitimate” < should have been ^ up above. “I do hope Brown’s idea of dropping the government’s right to choose bishops leads eventually to disestablishment”. You seem in Britain to have it coming from all directions “The world is broken; marriages fail; all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and love can abound in the most surprising of places” So sayeth Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’ Connor who tried with respect [disrespect] of GAY ADOPTIONS to blackmail the Government. An aside. He attended a Christian Brothers school in Bath, in which he said “they relied too much on the strap as a means of discipline”.
Yes, let’s hope the right of CofE bishops to sit in the House of Lords is removed soon. This idiot’s comments may help in the process.
There are 26 seats reserved for CofE bishops in the House of Lords. The Archies – Canterbury and York – get an automatic seat. The rest are chosen in order of seniority by reference to their date of appointment. The Bishop of Carlyle was appointed in 2000. Going on information at http://www.crockfords.org.uk he doesn’t curently sit in the House of Lords but he is one of the most “senior” who don’t. It seems that it will take only two of the curently sitting professional superstitionists to hang up their croziers and Graham Dow will become one of our legislators simply by right of office. Even though the legislative powers of the House of Lords are limited, they do exist. The situation is absurd. At least an elected idiot has to be voted in and, most importantly, can be voted out.
Missed out the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester, who, it seems, always sit in the House of Lords as of right along with the two Archbishops. The rest wait their turn, naturally. But not the Bishop of Sodor and Man. It’s all so logical.
Has Dow got the solution to drought in Australia? Just get everyone to do what he doesn’t like them doing (but which I thought they were doing quite a lot of anyway) and there should be a deluge there.
I honestly thought this was a spoof when I read it.
Texas has been plagued by floods this summer, despite the state passing a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in 2005. Perhaps God was aiming for Massachusetts or Quebec and just missed.
W…what if we picked the wrong religion? Every week, we’re just making God madder and madder!”
– H Simpson
January 24, 2004
Nick,
There is, undoubtedly, more wisdom in the Simpsons than in the combined works of all religions that have ever existed.
Believers sneer at atheists for having no basis for morality but give me the complete works of both Matt Groening and George Eliot over any alleged word of any alleged god.
“…[G]od is exposing us to the truth of what we have done.”
Whether desired or not.
I would entirely agree with this sentiment. “God is [willy nilly] ‘exposing’ us all to the truth of what we have done”. And has been for quite some time. ‘Suffer little children to come unto me’? For theirs has been hell on earth!
I like Nigel’s plan. Just marry a few same-sex couples in Australia and the drought will end.
Funny that the Terry Eagletons and Theo Hobsons and Chris Hedgeses worry so much about militant fundamentalist atheists when they could be worrying about fundamentalist bishops who, as youall point out, have real power.
Quite OB, – plus they feel very assured of their own complete seperatedness from loony fundies when faced with accusations of the atheists sceptics, but they are quite simply the last if ever to condemn this sort of appalling medievalist bigotry, as if there’s no need.
WB – re Bish of Sodor & Man – that’s cos we’re stuck with him in the Manx upper assembly.
Last unelected plank in the place and to double the insult, chosen from a short list given to Westminster, not our politicians, by Lambeth Palace, not our local Anglicans -who I’m reliably informed detest the man.
” . . to double the insult, chosen from a short list given to Westminster, not our politicians, by Lambeth Palace”
Stuart – that’s a double whammy for the Isle of Man. And isn’t the Tynwald one of the oldest parlaiments around?
I have only glanced at it, but the UK government’s just-published Green Paper on the Governance of Britain proposes to remove the PM’s (technically the monarch’s) power of appointment of CofE Bishops but apparently does not commit to removing any automatic seat they have in the House of Lords or come down against the idea of their sitting automatically in an unelected portion of a reformed second chamber. I guess that, if automatic seats are reserved for them, then having the Bishops appointed by the PM provides at least some kind of democratic nexus: things could be worse. But I can see the looming spectre of a worst case scenario – seats reserved for representatives of all the major religions with no wider democratic mandate or political control.