Year: 2010

I have nothing to add.

A 16-year-old girl who was raped in Bangladesh has been given 101 lashes for conceiving during the assault. The girl’s father was also fined and warned the family would be branded outcasts from their village if he did not pay. According to human rights activists, the girl, who was quickly married after the attack, was divorced weeks later after medical tests revealed she was pregnant. The girl was raped by a 20-year-old villager in Brahmanbaria district in April last year…Muslim elders in the village issued a fatwa insisting that the girl be kept in isolation until her family agreed to corporal punishment.

Her rapist was pardoned by the elders.

No, I have nothing to add.

The horrible slush keeps pouring out as if from a broken sewer pipe.

Instead of admitting that we do not know how to reconcile a loving God with terrible disasters like Haiti and Indonesia, some theologians come up with cruel solutions…We do not know the answer to this conundrum except to say that is the nature of freedom in an imperfect world and that is the mystery of the providence of God. God will work all things for our good even if we don’t understand. That is what faith is: the moment we say we understand, there is no longer any faith.

We do not know except to say – it’s always ‘except to say,’ isn’t it – it’s never just we do not know. What’s really meant is They don’t know but I do. We do not know except to say ‘that is the mystery of the providence of God.’ That’s knowing a hell of a lot! And it is of course knowing way more than we do in fact know. We don’t know if there is anything that matches the name ‘God’ and we certainly don’t know anything about what such a god’s ‘providence’ might be, or that what happened in Haiti is some of it. We don’t know jack shit, and saying ‘all we know is that that is the mystery of the providence of God’ is the very opposite of saying we do not know. It’s just part of the endlessly tiresome conceit of religious people to think they can get away with saying ‘we don’t know except for just this one big thing’ – to think they can get away with eating their cake and having it in that brazen way. I’m so humble, I know we don’t know, and also, I have the knowledge of ‘faith,’ so I do know, so I get the credit for both – humbleness and faithy knowledge.

And the upshot of this contemptible enterprise is still to end up in the same place – God will work all things for our good even if we don’t understand – so it’s okay that God crushed a lot of people to death at once and let a lot of others die very slowly in pain and thirst and fear. Well fuck that. It’s not okay. If God exists and did that, God is a monster. Don’t explain away horrors.

James Wood, in his alternately insightful and contemptuous Op-Ed article, concludes by dismissing the views of a Haitian bishop — who affirms that “what happened is the will of God” and “we are in the hands of God now” — as “little more than a piece of helpless mystification, a contradictory cry of optimistic despair.”…The bishop’s theology is neither mystifying nor contradictory, and in fact represents one version of a view held by many Christians and other religious people: namely, that God is deeply present in and through the events of the world — often inscrutably, but always powerfully and lovingly — and though we cannot for the life of us see how, even catastrophes include divine presence and power.

Yes, of course that’s a view held by many Christians and other religious people; it’s still both wrong and cruel. Dressing it up in unctuous churchy language doesn’t make it any less of either. Telling people that smashing tens of thousands of people to death is something to do with a God who is loving is just to sanctify a nightmare.

The perpetrator of that second one is an associate professor of ministry studies at Harvard Divinity School.

The Church of England comes right out and admits it – it is opposed to equality. It’s politely regretful – or to put it another way, it politely pretends to be regretful. But when a choice has to be made, it chooses the principle of male authority, and that’s that. It would like to be all liberal and modern and right-on and all, but when the stakes are this high, it just can’t do it. So sorry.

The Christian Churches, alongside many other faiths, support the Equality Bill’s wider aims in promoting fairness in society and improving redress for those who have suffered unjust treatment.

Except for we don’t. We say we do – but then when we’re actually expected to act on it – we don’t. We wish we could – we would so love to – we wish you all the very best – but we don’t. So, so sorry.