Category: Society

Do you re-read books, or re-visit places? Some people do, and some don’t. I’m in the former category, as is Eve Garrard. Her essay In Praise Of Again gets to the heart of it for me.

I pass the same stand of seven oak trees nearly every day while walking the dog. Despite their familiarity, they are always different.

In the final analysis, it is not religions that deserve our respect. A religion is a collection of metaphysical ideas and moral ideals. Ideas are believed or disbelieved; ideals are pursued or rejected. Admiration, appreciation, perhaps, but respect? No. What deserves respect are persons. Surely, the feelings of persons–individuals believers–can be affected when their beliefs are attacked or ridiculed. These feelings are real and important. However, feelings of offense do not generate a right not to be offended.

Respect for persons does not require that we never hurt their feelings, but rather that we treat them as possessing dignity equal to our own, and therefore hold them to the same fundamental intellectual, ethical, and legal standards to which we hold ourselves, to see them as autonomous, self-legislating creatures. Therefore, respect for a person is not only consistent with criticism of a person’s beliefs; respect for a person sometimes requires criticism of his or her beliefs. Sometimes in order to respect, we must disagree. Anything less is not respect, but indifference.

When you demand “respect”, you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade.

"I’m hoping for the best (from Obama) and expecting the worst, as one must do with any politician, and indeed with life." 

…the case for liberty has never been that it protects sensibilities. It is rather that by allowing people’s beliefs to be scrutinised, criticised and — yes — insulted, bad ideas are more likely to be superseded by better ones. 

"And now, O Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance. And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family".

"O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and  warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe.  We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one.  We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe.  Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

AMEN".

While I’m mentioning Darwin, I might as well draw your attention to another piece by ‘Our Maddy of the Sorrows’. This time Madeleine Bunting is urging us not to let the great man be hijacked by “New Atheists” – whatever they might be. I rather suspect that they are just the same as plain old atheists, i.e. people who lack beliefs in gods. No matter, after writing some accurate stuff in her article about Darwin’s achievements (to give her due credit), Maddy can’t resist launching off into some very silly riffs indeed.

The fear is that the anniversary will be hijacked by the New Atheism as the perfect battleground for another round of jousting over the absurdity of belief (a position that Darwin pointedly never took up). Many of the prominent voices in the New Atheism are lined up to reassert that it is simply impossible to believe in God and accept Darwin’s theory of evolution; Richard Dawkins and the US philosopher Daniel Dennett are among those due to appear in Darwin200 events.

I would assume that Dawkins and Dennett are amongst those due to appear because they have both done much good work examining various aspects of evolutionary theory. The fact that they are both atheists (Maddy, please note, not “New” atheists) is not really relevant. Besides, neither of those two gentlemen have ever, to my knowledge, asserted that “it is simply impossible to believe in God and accept Darwin’s theory of evolution”. I do wish Bunting would stop constructing strawmen.

What Darwin did was to show how complexity and apparent design could arise in the biological world through very simple principles. The collateral damage of his theory was to remove the need for the hand of God to be at work in the formation of species. Basically, he inadvertently blew a hole beneath the waterline of the good ship “Argument from Design”, which had been steaming about for centuries since being launched by the ancient Greeks and given a refit by the Rev. William Paley. And despite Bunting’s assertion, the best that the theory of evolution can be said to do is to posit an alternative explanation to the “GodDidIt” argument – it certainly can’t be said to prove the “impossibility of God”.

Oh, and one last thing, Bunting misquotes the title of Darwin’s seminal work as “On the Origin of the Species”. As Dawkins can’t resist pointing out (somewhat impishly, I feel):

A telling litmus test of an ignoramus on the subject of Darwin is their rendering of the title of his great book. The diagnostic solecism — remarkably common — is to stick a ‘the’ before ‘species’. Sure enough, Madeleine Bunting falls right into it, exactly as you would expect. The correct title, of course, is On the Origin of Species.

Here in the Netherlands, there’s an annual award for the best TV commercial, which is voted for by the public. Usually, the winner is a commercial with humour, but this year, the winner was the commercial produced by the Dutch Socialist Party for its campaign for better homecare for the elderly. The commercial is startlingly simple, and probably quite shocking to many people. It also probably could not get screened in many countries.

It is exceedingly effective. Go and watch it here.

I am reminded about something that happened earlier this week. I had gone to Amsterdam by train to visit the bookshops. On the train from Arnhem to Utrecht, I overheard an elderly lady telling her friend the following story.

My brother is 80, and together with his wife, he lives in an old people’s home in The Hague. His wife is somewhat senile, so they have separate rooms. Recently, I went to visit him, and when I got to his room, I found the door shut and locked. That’s unusual, because his door is usually open, but I thought that perhaps he was visiting his wife. However, when I went to her room, I found her alone. I went back to his room, and as there was a cleaner in the corridor, I asked her where Mr. Hooft might be. “Mr Hooft?”, she replied, “He doesn’t live here anymore”.

Well, I was astonished, and went to the office. I asked the person there where Mr. Hooft was. “Mr. Hooft?”, she replied, “He doesn’t live here anymore”. “But, how is that possible?” I said, “What do you mean?” She reacted sharply to me: “And who might you be, madame?” “I’m his sister”, I replied, “What is going on here?”

Well, she then told me that he had had a fall, and been sent to hospital. While he was there, the home’s administrators decided that it would be better that he didn’t return there, and arranged for him to be put into another home in Voorburg. They didn’t tell anyone else in the family, not me, not my other brother who is supposed to be our contact point, they just went ahead and did it. So there I found him, stuck in another home in Voorburg, separated from his wife, and no-one knew or cared…

As Bette Davis once said: “Old Age is no place for sissies”. Your dignity is likely to be the first casualty.  

That’s the sound of my irony meter exploding. I did warn you here and here that irony was at dangerous levels. However, the latest pronouncements by Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor have pushed it beyond breaking point. Where to start? Well, as usual, Ophelia flenses his bollocks with her usual efficiency, so I’d advise you to go and read her answer to his statements.

Just to be clear, I’m perfectly happy for the Cardinal to carry on making his pronouncements. But he shouldn’t be surprised or “hurt” when we react in this way to his words. We’re not being unfriendly, we’re just calling them out for the self-serving, lying nonsense that they are.