Author: Ophelia Benson

Why do I frown on Blair’s adult-onset Catholicism? Why do I think it’s reprehensible for informed adults to join the Catholic church? Because the Catholic church is a reactionary cruel woman-hating bullying organization run by men and based on mythology, that’s why. If you join the Catholic church as a reasoning adult, then you are signing up to and endorsing that organization, just as if you joined a neo-Nazi party or the Taliban or any other organization. It makes no sense to disagree with many of its most vehement and public positions and yet join it anyway. Jimmy Carter, to his credit, left The Southern Baptist Convention when it announced a new woman-subordinating stance; if he gets credit for that then Blair gets uncredit for joining the unregenerate Church of Peter.

A Brazilian archbishop says all those who helped a child rape victim secure an abortion are to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church. The girl, aged nine, who lives in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, became pregnant with twins. It is alleged that she had been sexually assaulted over a number of years by her stepfather.

And in any case she was sexually assaulted by someone, because she’s pregnant, and nine-year-olds can’t give meaningful consent to sex, much less to pregnancy and motherhood.

The Catholic Church tried to intervene to prevent the abortion going ahead but the procedure was carried out on Wednesday…The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, told Brazil’s TV Globo that the law of God was above any human law…However, doctors at the hospital said they had to take account of the welfare of the girl, and that she was so small that her uterus did not have the ability to contain one child let alone two.

So the archbishop thinks that ‘God’ wants a young girl who was used as a sex toy to bear twins despite the fact that her body is too small to make the attempt safely – so the archbishop thinks ‘God’ is a moral monster. Well I tend to agree with him, but that’s why I think human law is not ‘above’ but better and also a great deal safer than the putative law of God. The archbishop of course does not know what ‘the law of God’ is or might be if there is such a thing; he merely pretends to, and then pretends that his own pretence is ‘above’ human realism and reflection.

Grown-up reasonable people have no business joining such an outfit. In fact they ought to be leaving it in disgust, not stumbling along to join it.

The BHA is critical of a survey by Theos because the wording of the questions is a tad peculiar.

The survey first asked whether respondents believed in “theistic evolution”. This was confusingly defined as “the idea that evolution is the means that God used for the creation of all living things on earth.” The survey then asked whether respondents believed in “atheistic evolution”, again reflexively defined as “the idea that evolution makes belief in God unnecessary and absurd.”

Yes, that’s pretty obviously tendentious. It’s amusing to remember, though, that some observers have thought the BHA’s own polling wasn’t entirely up to the best standards.

(Last link fixed!)

Tony Blair seems very confused.

In an interview published in the Church of England Newspaper , Mr Blair said: “Sometimes I think we as Christians are more sensitive than we should be although I say that as someone who when I was in office, although I was perfectly open about my Christianity, nonetheless kept it within certain boundaries that were restricted in terms of what I said publicly. The position of prime minister puts you in a unique category. But in general terms in British society there is a risk that people see faith as a personal eccentricity.”

But if faith is not in some sense ‘a personal eccentricity’ then why did Blair keep his Christianity ‘within certain boundaries’? If Christianity is a perfectly ordinary set of beliefs, with no hint of the irrational or the illusory or the wishful about them, then why is there any need for boundaries that are restricted in terms of what a PM says publicly? In other words, is not the perceived need for boundaries there because ‘faith’ is what it is – is belief in the absence of or in defiance of evidence? Yet Blair dances around that rather obvious fact.

“I hope and believe that stories of people not being allowed to express their Christianity are exceptional or the result of individual ludicrous decisions. My view is that people should be proud of their Christianity and able to express it as they wish.” He admitted that conflict is “inevitable” between traditional religions and the new liberal doctrine of human rights. But he went on: “The real test of a religion is whether in an age of aggressive secularism it has the confidence to go out and make its case by persuasion.” Mr Blair disclosed, however, that while prime minister he believed equality and diversity were more important than religion in the case of the Catholic adoption agencies, who failed in their bid to be exempted from laws requiring them to consider homosexual couples as potential parents. “I happen to take the gay rights position,” he said.

Does he really mean he simply ‘happens’ to take the gay rights position? Is he saying he doesn’t take it for reasons? Is he saying it’s not a principled view but just a quirk or a matter of taste, as if gay rights were butterscotch or plaid or Mozart? He is saying that, whether he would stand by it or not – that is, he put it that way in order to skirt the obvious problem that his position is the opposite of the Catholic church’s position and yet he is now a Catholic. He attempted to duck the issue by using a weasel word. He did that presumably because he doesn’t want to address the fact that the Church he just joined has bad nasty retrograde views on various human rights. This is not impressive. It’s also decidedly distasteful in the context of a snide remark about ‘aggressive secularism.’ If it weren’t for ‘aggressive secularism’ we wouldn’t have gay rights, and if it weren’t for aggressive theocracy we wouldn’t keep having to fight rearguard actions against the enemies of gay rights and women’s rights and rights to free thought and speech. It is unbecoming for a Labour recently-ex Prime Minister to blow that off with a ‘happen to.’