Author: Ophelia Benson

So then to round out the festival of silliness there’s darling Cardinal Buttercup I mean Murphy-O’Connor again. (Nice of the major UK newspapers to give him so much oxygen of publicity, isn’t it? Wouldn’t do for them just to ignore his absurd woolgathering, would it.)

It’s just the same old stuff – word for word, some of it. Once again ‘atheism has become more vocal and aggressive.’ There’s something intriguing about the way clerics and apologists like to get up and say harsh things about secularists and atheists all the time and then squeal like pigs when secularists and atheists have the gall to say anything in return. It’s kind of like a playground bully complaining about a kid who resists the bullying. Anyway – Cardinal Buttercup is looking around for more soldiers.

This unfriendly climate for people of all religious faiths has led to the recognition that what we have in common as Christian believers is infinitely more important than what divides us…

Right. Credulity is infinitely more important than the actual content that one is credulous about. It doesn’t matter what you believe for no good reason, just believe something that way.

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

Yes, that’s true (though not as true as it ought to be, and even less so in the US). That would be because there is such a conflict. That would be because you want to persecute homosexuals and force women to remain pregnant when they don’t want to and convince people not to use condoms during an AIDS pandemic. There are other reasons too, but I haven’t got all day.

[T]here 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).

Notice what a lot he gives away there – notice that he apparently objects to bans on anything that can be interpreted as racial, sexual or gender discrimination – notice that he apparently wants to go in for such discrimination – as of course he does.

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

In other words not all women will spend their entire adult lives in the kitchen, not all couples will have children, not all couples will be straight, and other such horrors. In other words Cardinal Daffodil is upset that it’s not still 1955. Well suck it up, Cardie.

So then there’s this other thing with this ‘junior dictionary’ (what’s a junior dictionary? why not just have a regular dictionary and use it as needed? what’s the point of having a special dictionary that won’t have the words that you don’t know what they mean?) that’s part of a sinister plot to get rid of words about Christianity and the queen and flowers so that there won’t be any more Britishness. Something like that.

Oxford University Press has removed words like “aisle”, “bishop”, “chapel”, “empire” and “monarch” from its Junior Dictionary and replaced them with words like “blog”, “broadband” and “celebrity”. Dozens of words related to the countryside have also been culled.

Really? How does Julie Henry know that OUP replaced the first words with the other words? Did OUP tell her that? Did OUP confess to having held editorial meetings in which everyone sat around saying ‘let’s drop “bishop” and replace it with “blog”‘ and ‘hoo ya let’s do that hey’?

The publisher claims the changes have been made to reflect the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society.

Well, somebody should give them a good hard kick if they really said that, for sure, but I still doubt the whole replacement scenario.

An analysis of the word choices made by the dictionary lexicographers has revealed that entries from “abbey” to “willow” have been axed. Instead, words such as “MP3 player”, “voicemail” and “attachment” have taken their place.

Entries ‘from “abbey” to “willow”‘ – meaning what? All the words between abbey and willow? Probably not. But what then? Oh, you know – you can do the math – words like clerestory, and nuncio, and archepiscopal, and other words like tapir, and hystrix, and tamandua. But what the two categories have to do with each other…only a master at a private school could say.

Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College, a leading private school in Berkshire, said: “I am stunned that words like “saint”, “buttercup”, “heather” and “sycamore” have all gone and I grieve it.

Well quite. Children who want to pray to Saint Buttercup have nowhere to go now. It’s heart-rending.

There’s this Australian MP who can really spot a sinister coincidence and then having spotted it figure out that it’s not a coincidence at all but a joined-up sequence of events with one (after a gap of six months) causing the other. If only more people had talents like that, All would be Explained.

Labor MP James Bidgood, the first-time MP under investigation for selling pictures of a protester attempting to set fire to himself outside Parliament House, has declared the global financial crisis an act of God…”In 1987 there was another march for Jesus. That took place in April. And guess what happened in October 1987? The stock market crashed.”

Oooooooooooooh – I never noticed that before. Makes you think, don’t it? Makes the chills run up your spine? Ohhhhhhhhhhhh my my my – there was a march for Jesus in April, and in October the stock market crashed. It’s so obvious! Why has no one pointed it out before?!

Well I suppose that could be because some other things happened that April, and then more things in May, and some more in June, and so on…and also because some other things happened in October – so drawing all the lines that join up all these different things gets to be kind of complicated, and scratchy, so people didn’t spot the pattern. I can see where that would happen. But James Bidgood has a special talent that allows him to single out this one thing that happened in April and this other, larger thing that happened in October, and unerringly draw the solid heavy thick black line that joins them up. That’s why he’s an MP and you’re not.

So Cherie Blair is giving a lecture in Rome on Friday titled ‘Religion as a force in protecting women’s human rights’. So…..what’s she going to say then? What can she say? It would be interesting to know.

One wonders if she’s going to just…make stuff up. People do that you know. I’ve noticed it. They like women’s rights, and they like religion, so they want to say the one helps or supports or fosters or protects the other – but there is very little evidence of that, and quite a lot of evidence of its opposite. So what are they to do? Well…just say things, that’s what. Religion allows that, and most other institutions and bystanders allow it too. It’s even expected. Religion is a good thing (the idea seems to be); other good things are good things; religion should be associated with these other good things; therefore when saying things about religion it’s commendable to use a certain kind of verb (helps, supports, etc) between the word ‘religion’ and the good things. No need to look for evidence or consider the plausibility of the use of such verbs; just do the necessary. So Karen Armstrong informs us that ‘at the core of every single one of the world religions is the virtue of compassion’ – which just isn’t true. The seven deadly sins don’t even mention cruelty, which is just as well given how vindictive the OT god is, and Jesus is not much better. It’s the modern piety that religion is all about compassion – that compassion is ‘at the core of’ all religions, whatever ‘at the core’ of means – but compassion has not always been the important virtue that it is now; Armstrong is just blatantly reading her own modern morality back into the old religions. It seems unlikely that Cherie Blair will be attempting anything else.