“Archbishop of York”? What kind of silly, made-up title is that?

The Archbishop of York has said British Christians should see Muslims as allies in the struggle against secularism.
In a speech at York Minster, Dr John Sentamu said British Muslims were not offended by Christianity and preferred it to a secular state.

Or maybe he was just mistranslated? Apparently not.

It has often been Muslims, as well as leaders of other faiths, who have joined with Christians in refusing to accept the creeping secularisation that would replace ‘Christmas’ with ‘Winterval’, and remove references to faith from public noticeboards for fear of causing offence. It is both my view and my experience, that most British Muslims do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundations but by the cynicism of secularised culture that denies its own foundations. What they object to is the attempt to build human society without God. And so given the choice between the two prefer a faith environment, even one which they do not share, to that of a secularist state.

Oh. It’s the War on Christmas already.

He has asked me to post this section of his book to show that he had not suggested that human origins and the Cambrian explosion might have been a miracle.

To the nonbeliever, there is no spiritual reality, and hence no miracles. To a person of faith, miracles display the greater purposes of God, giving them a meaning that transcends physical reality.

If this is true, why shouldn’t we allow that the creation of our species was a miracle? Or why not agree that the sudden explosion of life in the Cambrian might have been a miracle. Both might have been. In 1900, we could easily have said that the sun’s fire was a miracle. Unable to explain the biological basis of immunity, we could have chalked that up to God, too. And for good measure, we could have told our students that the interior heat of the earth might be the work of the devil.

We are now far enough along in the development of science to appreciate that its track record suggests that ultimately it will find natural causes for natural phenomena.

Did he say it might have been a miracle? Well, sort of. Did he say natural causes are sufficient? Well, sort of. Miracles, no miracles, you can read into it what you want. This is an objection I have to this entire section of the book—in theology, anything goes. I dug a little deeper to see what he means by “miracle.”

By definition, the miraculous is beyond explanation, beyond our understanding, beyond science. This does not mean that miracles do not occur. A key doctrine in my own faith is that Jesus was born of a virgin, even though it makes no scientific sense—there is the matter of Jesus’s Y-chromosome to account for. But that is the point. Miracles, by definition, do not have to make scientific sense.

That’s a very handy excuse—they don’t need to make sense!

Because their priorities are screwed up.

Benedict—on the second day of a visit to his native
Bavaria—said that spreading the word of Jesus Christ
was more important than all the emergency and development
aid that rich churches like those in Germany gave to poor
countries.

Don’t even get me started on his complaints that science is scaring away the gullible, tithing rubes.

(via Hank Fox)

My baby sister (she was in her thirties and had two kids of her own, but she’ll always be my little sis) died a few years ago of one of those sudden, massive infections—the kind of unexpected reminder of bacterial dominance that killed Jim Henson. When I attended the funeral, I was reminded of another lower life form that afflicts humanity: the minister was an ecstatic Jesus freak who, rather than talking about the young woman we’d lost, or trying to give words of reassurance to a grieving family, instead tried to turn the affair into a revival meeting, asking people to TESTIFY FOR JESUS!!! and otherwise making her superstition the center of attention, rather than Lisa and loss. It galled me no end, as you might guess, and if it weren’t for my respect for members of my family I would have grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and thrown her into the street.

Maybe I should have anyway. Goddamn all preachers, pastors, and priests.

My anger was rekindled by Ken Ham’s “eulogy” for Steve Irwin. The sanctimonious prat uses it as an excuse to babble rationalizations for his religion, throw a little fear at readers to proselytize for his false promises, and use death as a threat. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but the implications he makes are clear. Irwin wasn’t a creationist. Ham knows that people tried to reach out to him with creationist literature. For all his wealth and popularity, Irwin died—and you will too. Repent or burn in hell for all eternity. We’re left to guess where Steve Irwin is right now…except you’d better accept Jesus or you’ll end up in the same place.

Ham is a vile little man, but his sentiments reflect standard Christian tropes. The promises and fears of an afterlife are used to herd the flock into the approved norms of behavior—norms that include respect for and gratuities to the shepherd, naturally—and death becomes an opportunity for reinforcing ‘spiritual’ authority rather than a time for reflection and appreciation. They don’t even use it as a reason to emphasize the importance of living well—death is a reason to waste your time in worship of a phantasm.

The life and death of Steve Irwin reminds us of mortality and enthusiasm and danger and passion. The life of Ken Ham reminds us of how low and despicable and worthless our lives can be if we let religion leech our minds away. Just remind yourself that someday death will whisk Ham away, too, and all he’ll leave is a legacy of lies.

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Speaking of insensitive jerks, I’ve been told that Scott Adams also did a little corpse-spitting, had second thoughts, and deleted the entry. The episode has been archived, though.

Wow, I’m impressed: The J Train finds a small guttering flicker of reason on WingNutDaily. It’s an article by a conservative Christian opposing public prayer at football games—he’d been in Hawai’i, where he’d been shocked to discover that pre-game prayers were given by Buddhist monks, and he found himself an uncomfortable minority in a sea of people following some strange religion (hmmm…does anybody else know what that’s like?)

It’s actually funny to read. He’s plainly horrified that he’d have to be in the presence of someone reciting a pagan prayer! He doesn’t quite get the response right, though.

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