Dear Bishop Robinson

Mr Kurtz' Heart of Darkness...

2005-05-29T12:26:04+02:00

A google on marriage in Norway throws up (phrase used deliberately) a host of references to same-sex marriage and the decline of traditional marriage there. A closer look reveals, however, that they are all copies of a paper by a right-winger called Stanley Kurtz.

The Council of Europe 2003 statistics on Norway do show changes in the pattern of family life. However, as the Executive Summary states:

"The main features of nuptiality are the declining number of marriages, the rise in the number of separations and the appearance of other forms of union, particularly cohabitation. There has also been a widespread parallel increase in the number of births outside marriage. In certain countries, such as Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia and the former German Democratic Republic, such births represent more than 50% of the total."

The Christian right uses statistics in the same way they use bible quotes -- they find a piece to support their case, and totally ignore anything that doesn't support their "presuppositions". For example, why should the ex-GDR show an increase in number of births outside marriage and the former West Germany not, now that they've been one country for fifteen years with the same law on domestic partnership? Oh, sorry, that would require some thought, wouldn't it?

And Mr Kurtz? He's a Fellow at the Hoover Institution:

"Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Kurtz graduated from Haverford College, where he majored in comparative religion. Before taking his doctorate in social anthropology, Kurtz studied comparative religion at Harvard Divinity School. Since leaving the academy for the world of policy think tank, Kurtz has gained a reputation as an outspoken combatant in America's culture wars and an innovative commentator on the social foundations of the war on terror." (Bio on the website of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Comments

The Nashville Declaration

2005-05-29T11:51:15+02:00

A Commentary in the latest Advocate "Articles of faith: Biblical values for American families" by Reverend Jay Emerson Johnson points me to this vile piece of "Christian" thinking, "The Nashville Declararion on Same-Sex Marriage".

Some excerpts:

# "Same-sex marriage" undermines commitment to genuine marriage. Studies of the state of marriage in the Scandinavian countries that have legalized "same-sex marriage" reveal that traditional marriage has been adversely affected by the redefinition of marriage. In some Norwegian counties traditional marriage has practically disappeared.

# "Same-sex marriage" is detrimental to society. By undermining commitment to genuine marriage, "same-sex marriage" weakens the family, which is the foundational social institution of culture.

# "Same-sex marriage" is inadequate as a family context for children. It does not provide children with an opportunity to observe and understand the uniqueness of both sexes and to develop their own sexual identity in relationship to a father and a mother.

# "Same-sex marriage" is destructive personally. Homosexual behavior has negative physical, social, and spiritual consequences.

Needless to say, while they refer prolifically to the Bible, there are no references to anything to back up any of these statements. The last three are simple assertions of opinion, and I'd challenge them to come up with any reputable study that showed that the Norwegians are no longer marrying because they have partnerskap (“partnership”) for gays and lesbians, as well as full ekteskap ("marriage") for straights.

Comments

Leviticus in Oregon...

2005-05-29T11:28:32+02:00

From the "Advocate" this morning:

05/28/05-05/30/05

Oregon students stunned by antigay fliers

Students and campus officials at Southern Oregon University are stunned by a set of fliers placed on students' doors that call for violence against gays and lesbians. The threatening fliers, which suggest that gays should be murdered, have led to a police investigation and a campuswide safety alert.

Eric Rodriguez, Southern Oregon University's interim security director, said several versions of the fliers were found attached to doors and in mailboxes on the Ashland campus. The early versions were more tame, he said, and then became "more and more" graphic and violent in nature. "The Bible says that homosexual offenders should be put to death!" read one flier. No one has claimed responsibility for the pamphlets. Students held a campus protest Thursday. A vigil and rally was planned for Friday night.

The authors and distributors of the fliers could face charges of harassment and intimidation, Rodriguez said. Southern Oregon University president Elisabeth Zinser sent a campuswide letter condemning the incident and vowing to reiterate the campus culture of tolerance. (AP)

Comments

Love Activism or Outrage Activism

2005-05-28T13:09:10+02:00

And I realise there's an issue here for me... I've been a "protesting" activist for the most part. In other wards, while I've not (I'm pretty sure) been "hating", I have been working on outrage. And I've never been that interested in what might be thought of as "love" activism -- helping others. My sympathies have always been with the underdog, rather than those in power, but my method of helping has been to fight against the powerful rather than directly helping the oppressed.

Food for thought for me...

Comments

Outrage or Love

2005-05-28T13:03:29+02:00

Re-reading Rick Santorum's quotes, I realise how perfectly he's encapsulated the difference between his type of Christianity and Merton's, between Lionel Blue's type of Judaism and the Gush Emunim version.

One is about "outrage" -- hatred of anyone who isn't like you, or who has different ideas and values, it is about fear and power and control and authority.

The other is about "love" -- openness, curiosity, self-confident, smiling.

It is no surprise at all that the one thing I associate with those I admire, is precisely that -- an open-eyed smile. Just think of the Dalai Lama laughing... Pema Chödrön's huge smile... Lionel Blue's voice which is full of smile and self-amusement... Bishop Robinson's smile. Then think of those chilling voices: Jerry Falwell, Ian Paisley, John Paul II... condemning, hating, blaming.

Perhaps I am beginning to understand Bishop Spong's point about faith in Christ -- but I've a long way to go yet!

FOOTNOTE ON BLUE:
From his Thought for the Day, 24th May 2005:

"When I was a youngster I went in for third rate ideologies and religions because I was having a hard time with puberty and adolescence and desperately needed security. I wanted instant answers, and reach-me-down belief I didn't have to think through or take responsibility for. I wanted to emote, so I shouted slogans in Marxist processions and sang sticky nationalist songs round camp fires.
"I was then attracted to know-it-all religious teachers and preachers who had the answer to everything. But after getting my first hundred wrong answers I retched it all up. Never mind! My foray into fundamentalism has stood me in good stead because I now understand why so much religion goes awry - why some settlers in Gaza believe on rather shaky evidence that that's the place God wants them to settle and why pious suicide bombers want to blow them off it and themselves into paradise.

"But as I've got older, my religion's become simpler and humbler. I no longer think doubt is a disease but something precious which helps us grow up. I don't pray for difficulties to disappear, just for courage to face them. Also to know God I must know myself because he's within me.

"I've also found my own humility through humour, of which there isn't much in scripture. When I'm drunk on clericalism I remember the old boy in the front row of the Synagogue who snored his way through my sermon. 'Shake him!' I told the beadle.

" 'Shake him yourself, your reverence,' he snorted, 'since your sermon put him to sleep!' A joke can deflate you more efficiently than an hour on your knees."

Comments

Santorum : Evangelical Example

2005-05-28T12:53:52+02:00

I found a little comment on "The Emmaus Theory" (a wonderfully encouraging blog!) about Rick Santorum, Republican Senator for Pennsylvania. He's quoted in the New York Times magazine on 22nd May as saying: "I've never read the Bible cover to cover; maybe I should have." A google on him reveals that Time magazine recently voted him one of the "25 Most Influential Evangelicals." Leaving aside the interesting issue of an evangelical who confesses not to having bothered to read the book which is supposed to define their values, the New York Times article has some further revealing points:

Like very many right-wing Christians, he feels they are victims and under threat -- 'As a person of faith, he feels under attack, even victimized. He has stepped forward as a defender of the unborn, of religious Americans whose voices have been stifled':

''How is it possible, I wonder, to believe in the existence of God yet refuse to express outrage when his moral code is flouted?'' he asked that day. ''To have faith in God, but to reject moral absolutes? How is it possible that there exists so little space in the public square for expressions of faith and the standards that follow from belief in a transcendent God?''

Even though he's a Catholic, he's as keen as the Protestant fundamentalists to turn the US into a religious state:

'His line of reasoning usually goes like this: The founding fathers were men of faith. They believed in a nation based on traditional, religiously derived values, the same ''moral absolutes'' that he finds in his faith, and to diverge from them is to undermine the health of American society. The same reasoning, taken to its extreme, edges toward treating the Constitution as a kind of Christian document, but Santorum doesn't go quite that far.'

He's so anti-gay that he's happy to overturn pro-privacy law; for a Brit, this really isn't a surprise, but I assume for US citizens, it would be more paradoxical:

"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. "It destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family. Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be."

As to this last point, I actually agree with him on the use of the privacy law to protect gays and lesbians. Gays and lesbians have a perfect right to be as totally open about sexuality and love and relationships as do straights. Privacy is not the issue, openness is.

Comments

Flying with the Bishop...

2005-05-28T12:47:09+02:00

I've just read an excerpt from Bishop Spong's book against fundamentalism , which has a lovely little story:

"One irate reader of a newspaper article wrote that he was praying that the next plane I took would crash, carrying me to my grave. The next time I boarded a flight I felt I should stop at the front of the plane and say, 'Folks, there's something you need to know before this plane takes off..."

Ah, the power of prayer!

Comments

Implicit Activism...

2005-05-28T00:54:50+02:00

Earlier this evening I was reading the commentary on 1 & 2 Kings in the evangelical Hill & Walton "A Survey of the Old Testament". They list eight factors which contributed to the eventual downfall of Solomon's kingdom. They read like the political bogeymen of the Christian right-wing in the US:

# Political allegiance to foreign nations

# Tendencies towards religious syncretism ("in an effort to appease" foreign residents)

# Administrative realignments ("a practice similar to 'gerrymandering' in modern politics")

# "The proliferation of state bureaucracy"

# "Lavish building projects" (shades of the New Deal, eh?)

# "The influx of pagan political and religious ideology...as a result of international trade and commerce"

# "The revolt of satellite states as Solomon's military power waned" (pity the poor Latin Americans)

# "...offset by increased taxation"

The suspicion towards foreigners and a centralised state, linked with the assumption that satellite states are there to be kept down by military might, is clearly laid bare. I'd commented on Hill & Walton's view of The Tower of Babel some weeks ago in "Merton's Quest".

"God then placed limitations on people's ability to unite by means of geographical dispersion and linguistic differentiation. This...restricted human ability to act in solidarity." (p98)

And there's John Bolton revealed in all his ugliness.

For forty years I've ignored Christianity as an irrelevance. I started this quest as a purely religious one; it seems to be bringing me full circle back to a need for activism.

Comments

Alter erit Johannes Paulus ll...

2005-05-27T20:16:47+02:00

Much as I appreciate a lot of what he writes in "A New Christianity for a New World", one thing does trouble me. It might just be my Ecclesiastes side coming out... "There is nothing new under the sun" for "another Tiphys will sail for Troy".

I agree wholeheartedly with Bishop Spong on the inappropriateness of much of traditional Christianity for the modern world. I also respect him hugely for having been able to stare into the jaws of the fearsome fundamentalists. But I'm afraid the numbers and the politics are against him. This is one reason I so admire him and Bishop Robinson. On the one hand they might seem to be on the side of irresistible progress, riding a tide of change into a more mature, adult world, "come of age". What I see is the most powerful nation in world with three-quarters of its population professing Christianity in the face of one ideological enemy after another. Communism has been "defeated", now they're taking on Islam. And Bishops Spong and Robinson are also in their sights -- I use the metaphor of the rifle consciously.

Christian fundamentalists put science on the back foot in one state after another. An Alabama judge might be forced to step down for raising the Ten Commandments outside his courthouse, but George Bush himself gives access to the highest power in the world to Christian lobbyists. And John Paul II, a man I am amazed to see praised by the entire world, blind to the misery caused by his policies on AIDS, abortion, birth control, and any mildly progressive cause, is replaced by someone even worse, "God's Rottweiler", indeed, a man whose strongest statement about his membership of the Hitler Youth is that he didn't particularly enjoy it...

And the numbers. The US Census is barred by law from asking about US citizens' religious affiliations, but there are data available from other sources, collated by the US Census. There were 207,980,000 adults in the US in 2001. Of these 159,506,000 said they were Christian -- that's over 76%. Of these only 27,000 explicitly call themselves fundamentalists (that's 1.3%), but 33,830,000 call themselves Baptists, 1,032,000 call themselves Evangelicals and a host of other fundamentalist-type cults make up a good 5 million more. Only 3,451,000 call themselves Episcopalian or Anglican. So the numbers don't look good. What to me is the sensible wing of Christianity seems to be a tiny minority in a sea of weirdness.

My heart is with Bishop Spong and Bishop Robinson, but it seems to me they represent, as Christians, an even smaller percentage of decent folk than my one-in-ten does the general population.

Comments

Thought, Action, Ritual... and Prayer

2005-05-26T23:51:27+02:00

My "Merton's Quest" blog is the place where I'm exploring the religious impulse from a systematic and intellectual point of view. Systematic because my intention is to look at Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Wicca through their major writings and teachings. Intellectual because my touchstone will be my own reason -- however contaminated by western, liberal, 60s student values. It's not a surprise that I am in a profession demanding thought and analysis, it is my natural modus operandi and I'm not going to check it in with the evangelical hat-girl as I enter the world of religion.

I am not a natural activist. I prefer the study. But I've been involved in politics for most of my life -- apart from the last ten years when I've wanted to concentrate on my son. I've sat on icy roads blockading USAF missile bases, joined civil service strikes, even stood for Parliament as a Green Party candidate. But none of this has really achieved anything beyond the Quakers' "light a candle" effect, which in truth I've got some problems with. I can't claim to have achieved anything whatsoever in public life. But I acknowledge the need to be involved. We are a social species, and that "social" implies work for the good of something other than oneself and one's biological kin.

I was brought up in the Anglican church -- even though I was baptised Welsh Methodist and went to the only Methodist public school in England and Wales. Boarding school meant church on Sundays, and later chapel every day, twice on Wednesdays and three times on Sundays. Boarding school also meant the structured life of the total institution (I read Erving Goffman the year I left school!). I've been a hill-walker and rock climber since I was fifteen -- the mountains are my natural habitat. All this makes it natural for me to find joy and comfort in rhythm, ritual and recurrence. It's no surprise that a key chapter of the novel I'm currently writing has this as a key theme -- the only surprise is that it took my study of Wicca to make me aware of the value and the need for this.

So: thought, action and ritual. The fourth -- missing -- element is prayer, contemplation, meditation. What attracted me in my earlier explorations of religion in 1969-1970 was mysticism. It seemed to me at the time the one thing that all religions had in common. I am not a contemplative and if prayer involves a personal, transcendental, God "up there" then I'll never manage it. But prayer is obviously something I can't ignore in these searchings, and this blog is the place for me to explore it.

"Merton's Quest" is my study and "Dear Bishop Robinson" should be where I look at action, ritual and prayer.

Comments

The surprise reply, and the challenge...

2005-05-22T12:42:00+02:00

Since my email was sent in the run-up to Bishop Robinson's consecration and he'd have far more important things to worry about than replying, I was more than surprised to get an answer -- and by the standards of email correspondence, a pretty quick one!

Although this blog is meant to be a private one, I'm not going to copy in the text of that email to me, following a probably outmoded convention that private correspondence should only be published with permission. It was a short email and in the last sentence he asked me to pray for him.

This was a very wise thing to do. I might have expected a Christian to ask me to pray for his opponents -- particularly since I'd made a point of naming Fred Phelps in my email. And if he'd asked me to pray for people like Fred, I'd have dismissed it and forgotten all about him. I might have expected a Bishop-elect to have enough concern and love around him that he wouldn't need to ask an old atheist like me to pray for him. At most, I might have expected a polite "thank you".

Of all the things he could have written to me, asking me to pray for him was the most cunning.

This blog is about how I've had to struggle with that challenge. I've tried on several occasions to write back to Bishop Robinson, but partly because I think he definitely will now have more important things to concern himself with than my pilgimage, and partly because it's in the nature of a pilgrimage to be somewhat "on-going", I'm going to use this blog as a one-way correspondence, with the thought that some time I'll invite him to read it.

Comments

The first email...

2005-05-22T12:26:34+02:00

I didn't intend this to be the beginning of anything at all. Least of all did I expect it to lead to me calling myself "Pererin", Welsh for "Pilgrim". This is how it started on 26th October, 2003:

Dear Bishop Robinson,

I've just read on the BBC news web site that among the hate mail you've received, there have been some from Britain. This is an attempt to redress the balance.

I was confirmed an Anglican (a long time ago!) while at the only Methodist public school in England and Wales. Being bisexual was my other heterodoxy...

However, while I'm still bisexual, I'm sorry to say I gave up on the Church a long while back. Part of the reason I did so has to do with people like the dreadful Fred Phelps of www.godhatesfags.com infamy.

There are very few things that would ever tempt me back into the Church, and the courage and dignity of people like you is, probably, the only thing that would do so.

So, you don't need the encouragement of someone like me, I know, but none the less, I hope you can accept my very many good wishes -- if only as a little counterweight to the hate shown by the people who seem to think that hatred has any part in Christianity.

Love,

Comments