Religious belief

I am as horrified by the events in Bangladesh in the news today as everyone else. Believers in anything calling for those who do not share their beliefs to be hanged is about as ghastly a thing as can be imagined, except that their wish should become reality.

But it is a sign or symptom of what I am for ever banging on about. Religion is not an intellectual commitment, it is an emotional one, held in the guts, and therefore the irrational motor of extreme feelings and actions.

Just consider a few examples of very clever people justifying their religious commitment with serious argument. The one I know most about is Augustine, Bishop of Hippo and intellectual giant of his time. In his writings you can find clearly set out his struggle with himself and his attempt to justify and develop doctrine through philosophy. His influence is still being felt today. But deeply as Augustine's thought ran, it's hard to see him other than as a man who felt, and felt deeply, first, and thought after.

I know very little about the Jewish philosopher Saadia Gaon, or the Arab philosopher Abū Bakr al-Rāzī. In fact, only what I've learned from Peter Adamson's podcasts. But it seems to me that both these learned and intelligent men were reasoning from within an established philosophical background in order to support their religious beliefs. It would be possible to make the same argument about many others, including such greats as Thomas Aquinas, right down to the present day.

As a theological student I was taught by a lady for whom I had the greatest respect and affection. She was unremittingly rigorous in following hard questions where ever they led. If I owe my move into atheism to anyone, it's her. But even she started from her religious conviction and argued in support of it, sometimes very radically. So much so she was on the fringe of being called, with al-Rāzī, "The Heretic".

If this is the case even for the most subtle thinkers how can it be less so for the rest of us? Without the intellectual capacity of philosophers, most believers don't actually reflect critically on their faith to any significant extent. This may be a sweeping generalisation, but my experience as a clergyman convinced me that there are some who are prepared to think hard, and to shift their position within the faith when forced by the line their thinking travels. There are some who find thinking about religious issues threatening, and who may join a Lent course once every few years, but largely they don't want to think in a way that challenges belief, they want to be confirmed and comforted. And there are the rest who don't think critically about their faith at all. For them, faith is a given, a fundamental emotional commitment. And when it is attacked, or perceived to be attacked, it is an emotional, sometimes violent, response that is provoked.

It seems to me that this holds true for every religious person that I have ever discussed the content of belief with. Once, long ago, when my own reflections on religion were beginning, I heard an august member of my local church say that science was no problem for his belief - there was nothing in scientific discovery that he could not reconcile with his faith. Then he paused - I remember clearly (but not necessarily correctly) the room, the time of day, the elder he was talking to: it made such an impression on me. And after the pause he said "If scientists could create life in a test tube, that might be the end of belief for me". I was 14 at the time. I have never met another believer who could say that there might be a rational cause for the end of faith.

Look at me: I had long realised that my beliefs did not stand examination, certainly not the kind of rigorous critical questioning that my doctrine teacher had encouraged. I recognised that all the evidence I knew about was that the Universe was very far from the place religion described. I was convinced by people like Don Cupitt that religion was a human invention. And still, I was a clergyman, taking services, to which I now think I was addicted in some way, for years after reaching that point. It was an emotional experience, the death from cancer of a friend, also a clergyman, who, with only days left to live asked me where I though God was "in all this", that finally killed what I had grown up with and been motivated by all my life.

Criticising the content of belief on rational grounds convinces no-one. Believers are satisfied that much of religion is and will always remain a mystery, and they don't expect to make sense of it. What remains important is criticising the pernicious effects that religion often has, which we see, sadly, all around us.

Immigrants clog the NHS?

It especially annoys me when I read the "Immigrants clog up the NHS" claptrap. Old people in need of expensive, recurring and long term care clog up the NHS - people like me in fact. Immigrants are normally younger, therefore healthy, and make few demands. If you see many Asians in hospital they will usually be older, they'll usually have been here many years, they'll usually have paid their taxes and NI Contributions, and so on.

Being married to an immigrant, I may have an axe to grind, but not a few of my friends are immigrants, and none of them fit the stereotype. My wife certainly doesn't clog up the NHS, despite being in an older age group. She works for it, has suffered stress because of it, and conscientiously does her utmost to provide the best possible service to its customers. She is not alone in that.

Last time I was briefly in hospital, in the cardiac unit, there were no immigrants among the patients, and several among the nurses, all of whom did a great job. When I was on the table the cardiologist giving me the benefit of her expertise was an immigrant, and the consultant in the department is at least of Asian descent, whether he is himself an immigrant or not.

Persecution? WHAT?

Carey, former ABofC, says that UK Christians feel like a persecuted minority. Frankly that makes me sick. The Christian church knows what persecution feels like. It can recall persecution long ago in Ancient Rome, and persecution in more recent times in Stalin's Russia. To call what it now happening, namely a reminder from the secular world of human rights and a rejection of religious privilege and flummery, 'persecution' is a deep insult to those who really suffered for their faith.

It also displays a profound lack of historical perspective which amounts to ignorance. And it displays an arrogance which thinks it has a right to privilege in Government (such as automatic seats in the Upper Chamber and the right to be kow-towed to in certain issues) just because the rest of society thinks it is time to move on from 2000 year old moral prescriptions towards something more authentic and fit for the present day.

Unchanging doctrine?

Round about the year 50CE the church had to get together to resolve an serious argument among its leaders about what counted as it's teaching and what didn't. In the middle ages the pope changed the definition of the terrible sin of usury when he realised that they needed to benefit from capital investments. In 1633 the Roman Catholic church condemned Galileo for teaching that the Earth and the planets went round the Sun, which it finally recanted in 1992. For more than 1800 years the church did not blink at slavery, which is accepted throughout the bible, and which it now condemns. In 1930 the Church of England reversed it's position on contraception. When I was a clergyman I was not allowed to remarry divorced people. Since 2002 that changed (grudgingly).

So what is anyone doing saying that the church's doctrines come from God and cannot be changed? Even the central teachings about Jesus himself come from an argument between St Paul and James, Jesus' brother, which Paul happened to win. How can Mr Welby pretend to be holding the line on homosexuality when he must surely realise that history is against him? The same Church of England fought itself to a standstill in my time as a clergyman over the ordination of women, which it now accepts (although still resisted in some quarters), and is doing it again over women bishops.

Is there something that prevents the religious looking at their own history and learning from it?

Homosexuality and the clergy

I have been stimulated to quite a bit of thought by recent events and the fall of Cardinal O'Brien. What follows below in no way purports to describe him. It's written from my own imagination, but also from my long-ago experience as a Church of England clergyman, and I think it contains some truth. I have seen a lot of harsh things written about clergymen who fail in their vocation. Many of those have been written from ignorant and simplistic viewpoints, so I want to stress the other, human, side of a man struggling against himself. Everything below refers to adults - candidates for ordination and older. No excuses are offered here for those who abuse children.


Okay, so you're a gay man, probably deeply in denial, who thinks he has a vocation to the Roman Catholic priesthood. The fact that the Roman clergy are not allowed any sex, let alone gay sex, is part of the attraction because it promises to curb the unwelcome urges you are experiencing, urges you believe to be sinful.

All goes well. At seminary you meet and make friends with other young men and strong bonds are formed. These powerful attractions can be described in terms of clerical fraternity, and their sexual undercurrent can be pushed away and denied.

Ordination means that you're living with other men, or alone. Some of the men you meet are attractive. Some of these attractive young men come to confess that they are having sinful, homosexual, urges and they want your guidance and help. How can you help them when you can't help yourself? But you allow friendships to develop and keep trying to push the sexuality away. It's of the Devil! You teach and preach against it – as much for your own benefit as that of your parishioners.

But the more you push it away the more the pressure grows – and you put your arm round, perhaps embrace, an attractive young man who is then overwhelmed, frightened and disgusted by the powerful sexuality conveyed in your touch.

You withdraw, you beat yourself up emotionally for having given way. Your teaching about sexuality becomes ever more vicious, aimed at yourself and your evil urges which somehow you cannot control. This vocation was supposed to help you defeat the Devil, but in fact it has got worse with the years. As you get older, and more senior, the young men you are brought into contact with by the church get younger and more attractive.

You give way again, and put your hand on one young man's knee, and he recoils in horror. So do you,  revolted by what you've done. Once more you beat yourself up – never, ever, again.

But of course it doesn't stop, and as you get more prominent and more senior, so the fears grow that it might perhaps one day come out. And you hate yourself more for what you've done, for the evil feelings you think you shouldn't have.

And in the end, a complaint, public humiliation and disaster.

Frankly my view is that the church, hung up on sexuality, has done more to wound young gay men and women than almost anyone else. It is no surprise that working with such intense pressures some clergy fail to keep their vows. That doesn't make it right, nor excuse it, but it is at least understandable.

Half asleep thoughts...

At some time during the night I heard a snippet of an item on the BBC World Service. Three people contributed to it, apart from the presenter. Two were immigrants, one was a UK-born commentator. Immigrant 1 had taken a low-paid job in an Internet Cafe, done well and got a glowing reference when he applied for a better, but still lowly, IT job. He had risen into management, his wife was now also in IT, and they had a household income in the £100,000 range. And he pointed out that he and his wife were making their home here and repaying their debt to the country through their taxes.

Immigrant 2 had come to take a labouring job, with the aim of saving enough money to retire to a cottage on the South Coast. Well, that wasn't going to happen, especially as he defined a good day in terms of litres of vodka. He was now homeless.

The UK commentator's only contribution was that Immigrant 1 should not have been given a job that could have gone to a UK National. Half asleep, my only thought was that if he'd take the low-paid first job and had what it takes (talent in IT, industrious attitude, application to become fluent in the language) and no-one else did, then he deserved the success. Immigrant 1 made the point that any UK-born applicant would have had a tremendous advantage - fluent English (well, that's debatable as far as some of the yoofs I have met are concerned) knowledge of The System which he had to learn, and so on. He beat the competition despite these disadvantages, but he could not say why. Maybe he was prepared to work harder. His English now was certainly impeccable with the merest hint of an East European accent.

Immigrant 2 did not speak more than a few words of English after some time here. And he had a vodka habit. And his initial ambitions were totally unrealistic. So compared to the locals, he multiplied his disadvantage from the off. His failure should not have been a surprise.

I am sure there are more lessons to draw from this. There are certainly differences between people in attitude and talent. A few years ago there were no hand car washes. Some immigrant spotted the gap in the market and had the initiative to roll his sleeves up and fill it. Some immigrants are now, years later, workers in car washes. Others own a chain of them and are making serious money (and I hope paying their taxes).

I also wonder what I would have done. I have some French and German from school, and a smattering of Russian I picked up on the chess-playing circuit. Would I, had it been possible when I was looking to restart my career when I left the church and had neither job nor home, have gone to another country with the attitude required to make a success of myself? I have friends who have done exactly that. Somehow I doubt I would have done the same, so I am not in a position to be critical of those that do so.

Richard III at Leicester

I'm not as young as I used to be - I know that now. Today I had planned a short drive, 40 miles, to Leicester to see the Richard III exhibition, then back and out again this evening, less than 20 miles, to Milton Keynes. I had to cancel the second event as the first wiped me out. So was it worth it?

The exhibition is at the Guildhall Museum in Leicester, which is definitely worth a visit in itself if you happen to be in the area. The Guildhall is adjacent to the Cathedral, which while rather nice inside is not any more nice than a good few parish churches I know, and a good deal less nice than some. It is the least attractive Cathedral I know, even allowing for my personal fondness for Southwark owing more than a little to it being the place I was ordained. As the majority of Bonnie's photos are of the cathedral, that tells you something.

I suppose the timing was bad - and that isn't a reference to the joke about Richard IIIs body having been there for 500 years and we turned up not long after it was moved. It was a cold day, and it was half term. Those are both bad conditions for standing on stone flagstones queueing for an hour without access to refreshments.

If the exhibition had been scintillating, that would have made up for it. "Wow, I'm glad I saw that - well worth the wait!" - I know I've had that experience in the past. But it wasn't. It was nice to see, interesting if you happened to be passing, and, crucially, also had not seen either the broadcast of the press conference announcing that the bones were indeed Richard III, or the 90 minute documentary on Channel 4 giving a pretty full account of the quest. There was only two things in the exhibition that had not been on one or other of the TV programmes, and obviously, in a small exhibition, a great deal was left out that was in the programmes. One of those things was a photograph of a mediaeval flag stone recovered from the long-destroyed Grey Friars church. The other was some feedback about modern scoliosis sufferers.

There were some nice informative displays - one of the skeleton particularly drew my attention - laid out on a table-size touch screen. I thought it was a good display - but there were children and teenagers milling around the table/screen, and as fast as I touched it and brought up a display I wanted to study, one of these youngsters touched it somewhere else and changed it.

I thought there were a lot of things that could have been done that maybe will be when the exhibition is reincarnated in the future. For example, something could be made of the Shakespearean exploitation of Richard's deformity to underwrite his villainy  First, he did not have a hunch back. Second we do not know, but it seems likely the extent of his deformity would have caused him pain, none the less he was known before he became king as a wise and fair administrator and valiant in battle. Deformity is not a sign of God's judgement on evil, nor a reason for condemnation of bullying.

Then there is room for a discussion of the Princes in the Tower issue - there is no evidence, but a statement of the arguments why one might think the popular rumour true, and arguments why not, would not be out of place. Prejudice enters into most opinions, and some rational evaluation might have made that point as well as suspending judgement in the particular case.

Another interesting, and related, issue is the strength of Richard's claim to the throne. If the Princes were illegitimate, and certainly when they were dead, he was, I think the rightful heir. So how good is the claim they were illegitimate? The issue is phrased with a judgemental tone "Richard had Parliament declare..." But if they were illegitimate Parliament was right to so declare and might have done so of its own initiative. In any case, how strong was Edward Tudor's claim? If Richard and Edward had gone before a court of law to settle the issue instead of slugging it out in Bosworth Field, what was the likely outcome?

Surely, too, there was room for a chart showing the genealogical evidence - why the modern descendants are known to be such, and how the DNA analysis works. I'd also have been interested in the work still unfinished on the male line (the modern descendants are of Richard's sister) - why is it more difficult? when are the results expected? and what might we expect to learn?

No doubt space was the main constraint. The exhibition area is small, and a lot of space was given over, correctly, to the project, leaving less for Richard.

In short - I'm glad I went. I wanted to see the exhibition. I knew it was not at the archaeological site, but I had hoped to see the actual excavation. Instead that area is closed to the public. But if I hadn't gone I'd have regretted it. But as I did go, I wish I had planned it better and chosen a warmer day without half term and therefore a shorter queue. I'd still have my feeling that the exhibition left me no wiser, but I might not have got home half dead.