Dogma, pedagogy and helicopters.

It's been that long, I realise, since I wrote anything on these pages that it must have seemed like I'd given it up forever. It becomes an easy habit to break, this, and with every week that passes without a new entry, a harder one to re-establish. The longer it goes without an entry, the better it's got to be when it does finally reappear, right? At least that's how it feels from this end.

So, finally dipping my fingers back into the murky waters of the typing pool, you'll forgive me, I hope, if this one falls rather short of the standard that might be expected after a five-month hiatus, for that is what it's been. (I genuinely hadn't realised it had gone that long).

So, comment on general election to come. Clegg's tears, Miliband's rather startled realisation that his brother should have got the job all along, and Farage's defeat will no doubt feature. See if you can guess, before I write that entry, which one of those three things gave me the most pleasure. In the meantime, a bit of comment on what Danny Baker might call the Iron Horse of this blog, the good old Catholic Church.

I've had the very good fortune these past couple of weekends to head out to Spain for each of them. It may seem a bit la-di-dah jet set to fly out on a Friday, back on a Monday, out again on a Thursday and back once more on the Monday, but that's how it fell. First for a wedding, then for a birthday celebration. I've written on here before about Spanish weddings, I think - their length compared to the British ceremonies I've attended, never having to pay for a drink at the reception, the very Spanish music partnered by dancing late into the night. Then there's just how, well, Catholic the actual ceremony is. This usually includes a sermon, in both senses of the word, and the one delivered by the priest administering the wedding I attended a couple of Saturdays back was an absolute doozy.

I usually hear my girlfriend, a fervent atheist brought up in a Catholic country, muttering in quiet disagreement during these ceremonies as the priests do their thing. On this occasion, though, she actually felt moved to get up and leave the church mid-way through the thing, ostensibly to assist a mum with one of her two babies, who'd started fussing a bit - who can blame them? - but really to cool her anger at what she was hearing. My Spanish has not come on sufficiently to follow everything said at these occasions, especially when it's punctuated by the typical call-and-response refrain of the church's own peculiar argot.

Her later explanation was that the priest had had a bit of a go at parents who leave it to teachers to educate their kids. Teachers, he'd explained, merely teach. They can't educate - only the Church, through their parents, can do that. So all this stuff the schools fill kids' heads with can't be allowed to take root as incredulity, as questioning, lest they veer from the perfect truth of the Church. As a former teacher, this was basically the perfect storm for her, so out she bailed, for a while at least.

All ended well, though. They got married, there was dancing, and I got completely shit-faced because a) the bar's free, remember, and b) you always forget they don't bother with measures like we do, so you're getting at least a treble every time you order a short. The hotel room was doing the helicopter thing when I crashed into bed at who-knows-what hour of Sunday morning, knowing I had to be back at work Monday afternoon and recovery time was therefore short.

This weekend just passed, however, was completely different. I got completely shit-faced at a birthday party instead, and the spare room of the house I was staying in was doing the helicopter thing as I crashed into bed at who-knows-what hour of Sunday morning, knowing I had to be back at work... you get the idea.

What did I learn from these occasions? Well, it might be a good idea to get wasted before any subsequent wedding ceremony I attend out there. The church may do the helicopter thing while the nuptials are going on, but I've noticed that my confidence in my Spanish is correlative with the amount of alcohol I've consumed. So have a few early doors and I'd at least think I could understand the sermon sufficiently to understand what my missus is muttering about as she stands next to me.

An offer you can refuse. But don't need to.

The Catholic Church seems to have been sending some rather mixed messages in 2013. Forgive me being rather late to this but I don't keep that close an eye on the goings-on at the Vatican so didn't catch this at the time. It seems that in May the Pope, in a quite startling departure from accepted tenets, came out with this in an open letter to La Reppublica.

It's not exactly a once-in-a-lifetime offer - the head of a Church you don't belong to reassuring you that a God you don't believe in will forgive you and allow you a place in a Heaven which doesn't exist if you 'follow your conscience' - but from any secular viewpoint it's certainly a positive sign of moderation and modernity from the Pontiff. Any kind of recognition, especially from the Catholic Church, that atheists can be good people, is to be welcomed. It suggests at least a man who recognises the shape of the wider world in which his Church's followers live. The Church of which he's nominal leader, though, moved quickly to disavow any such notion.

So much for modernising - central tenets are going to take rather longer to change, it seems, than even the Pope may prefer. There are, though, some areas where the modernising momentum is clear. Check this out.

This is one of the most bizarre examples of mixing old and new I've ever seen; the Catholic Church showing that they can be both thoroughly modern on the one hand and simultaneously archaic on the other. It seems that the Church is now on Twitter [it probably has been for some time, but I'm a) not on Twitter and b) in any case extremely unlikely to 'follow' a religious Twitter feed, so was unaware of this]. I wonder how many aggregate years in Purgatory were saved overall as a result of this offer to the contrite. And who keeps the numbers, if anybody? Is there some celestial logbook somewhere, in which a heavenly functionary marks the time off for those eligible with a Godly pencil, or has that too been modernised, computerised even? I'd love to ask this Sacred Apostilic Penitentiary how they track these things. (Who appointed them, by the way, thereby giving them the authority to pronounce on these matters? Shouldn't they regard this as the exclusive right of God?)

Anyway, the Pope and his modernist tendencies. He may, to use The Tablet's Vatican correspondent's words, be 'seeking to have a more meaningful dialogue with the world', but there's only so much he can do, no matter how determined he may be. This is, after all, a 2000-year-old institution with some 1.2 billion members and a multi-layered, complex organisational structure. His job must be like trying to steer the largest ship on a gigantic ocean - no matter which way he's looking, or which way he turns the helm, the thing changes direction so slowly that it's imperceptible. Any changes he tries to make now are not likely to make the slightest difference until he has, in the eyes of his Church's members, long joined all those good atheists upstairs. Oh, hang on, that was one of the things that hadn't in fact changed after all, wasn't it? Oh well. Never mind.

If you change your mind...

I saw The Book of Mormon recently. Bloody good fun it was, and considerably more positive about the Mormons than some of the hysterical conservative press would have you believe. The Mormons are a funny lot - their absolute faith in their president being a living prophet, and their belief in the existence of the golden plates for example, despite nobody ever having set eyes on them, are excellent standards of the blindness of religious certainty. They are, though, to be praised for their response to the musical itself. Not for them mass demonstrations, burning torches and the promise of damnation for the creators. Rather, they've plastered central London with adverts for their faith and generally tried to engage with it. Kudos to them.

On that certainty, though. This piece on the Beeb caught my eye not long after I'd seen the show. I've written on here before about some of the central tenets around which religions are built - the concept of original sin in the Catholic Church, for example. The struggle between such pillars of belief systems and the need of all faiths to modernise if they want to engage with modern people, particularly in the West, cannot be a simple one.

We live, in Britain at the moment, in a society which is riven with examples of the trouble these certainties can cause, whether they're theological certainties or secular ones. Aircraft grounded on the way in from Pakistan, vehicles stopped mid-motorway, attacks on Mosques - knee-jerk reaction to an act of unspeakable and all too human brutality in Woolwich, nothing to do with religious teachings. At such times, it's only natural to lean on one's own convictions, the beliefs that sustain you when things are shit. When those convictions are born of religious faith, though, is that necessarily helpful? The divisions between religious and secular, and between the faiths themselves, seem to be widening at the moment. A little more doubt, a little more questioning, would probably do us all a bit of good.

It is such questioning, such reinterpretation, that has allowed some religious thinking to survive at all in a smaller, less credulous and more integrated world, and find its place in the modern West. It can be done – the same Church that persecuted Galileo for stating that the Earth revolved around the sun, heresy at the time, found itself formally exonerating him in the late 20th century, when it was kind of stupid to argue otherwise. The Vatican now has its own 'in-house' astronomer, no less.

If only all such changes of position could be so completely arranged, so comprehensively and neatly played out. I wonder, over the centuries, how many groups of learned elders have pored over their religious tract of choice, seeking guidance from their Almighty on some startling new revelation, some new science which casts doubt on the previously solid pillars around which their faith were built? At what point did the Vatican realise, for example, that Galileo was right? Did they secretly realise he was on to something even during the man's lifetime, only to hide the truth, knowing how dangerous to their Church it would be? Given the AIDS crisis in Africa, will they ever get round to addressing the use of condoms? And how would the various Churches deal with First Contact, when and if it eventually happens?

I have to go back to The Book of Mormon for what I suspect lies behind the response to some of the more shattering revelations science may afford us from time to time. (And, yes, those revelations may yet of course back up things that the theologians have been saying). One of the better songs in the thing addressed how to deal with thoughts or feelings that conflicted with Mormon teachings.

"Turn it off, like a light switch. Just go click! It's a cool little Mormon trick! We do it all the time. When you're feeling certain feels that just don't feel right, treat those pesky feelings like a reading light, and turn 'em off."

It'd be cool indeed of some of the more outdated, conflicting and downright idiotic religious shibboleths could be similarly excised, but as Galileo's pardon took 360 years, I'm not expecting miracles.

Easter messages

A pleasant Easter weekend, featuring my 41st birthday (what a dread phrase that is), passed by with much chocolate and occasional football, and a very pleasant evening in the pub on Good Friday night. But let's not get all positive and happy about this, when there's perfectly infuriating stuff to write about from the same weekend(!) There is always, at Easter, the Pope's message to get worked up about. During his visit to Britain some time back, I wrote about the anger his speech in Hyde Park had prompted, during which he complained about people viewing religion as a matter of choice. Well, this Easter he's again let us all know that this opening of eyes as the years pass, the awakening within people that they do have a choice in whether to follow the Church or not, is clearly a Very Bad Thing.

Apparently, his Holiness thinks we're all in 'darkness':  "The darkness that poses a real threat to mankind is the fact he can see and investigate material things but cannot see where the world is going or whence it comes, where our own life is going, what is good and what is evil."

Well, I think I can tell what is good and what is evil, but I know I can tell what's tosh. That word 'material' is particularly misleading. He should perhaps have said 'physical', but that wouldn't have carried the negative connotations he wanted. We can see and investigate the universe almost back to its beginnings, and are beginning to pick at the very strings of reality itself as humanity starts trying to understand quantum physics. It may indeed be true that plenty of western kids grow up thinking only about material things, but that doesn't mean the entire human race is in darkness. And those western (and other, of course) cultures are also producing the sort of minds which are working to understand the nature of the universe itself. If we are in darkness, it's only because we're such a young species and are only just beginning to light up some of reality's gloomier recesses.

The Church, of course, doesn't see it that way. But I find it mind boggling that an organisation which clings to an anti-condom message, in an age where AIDS is ravaging parts of Africa, for example, and which teaches the concept of original sin, and still prevents women from joining the priesthood, has the gall to tell non-believers like myself that we're the ones in darkness. The automatic fear of God, and the thrall in which that enabled all the Churches to keep ordinary people, has largely gone in many western cultures. People's eyes are open, not just to their choice in the matter of theology, but to their right to question religious dogma which can be far out of touch with many of the societies they purport to serve. Is it any wonder, when some of the messages coming out of their Churches' highest offices are so apparently antiquated, that people are secularising?

As always, while I entirely respect the views of an elder, I'd respect them more if they came from an elder who had not lived out most of his existence within he strictures of a religious ideology. I don't mean this disrespectfully, but I don't think an 84-year-old man who hasn't lived outside the Catholic church since he was a child can teach me anything about how to lead my life in the early 21st century. I genuinely believe that lights are going on all over the place, banishing the darkness of the Church, not the other way round.

Religion? Shit it.

Forgive me quoting a sweary Stephen Fry as a title, but I saw something on the Beeb last night that made me incandescent with rage at the cruelty of religious dogma. A programme called 'Limbo Babies' related the experiences of a group of Catholic women in Northern Ireland the mid/late 20th century who'd given birth to dead babies. Traumatic, straight away. Worsened, considerably, by the fact that those babies were taken from their mothers literally immediately and buried in a swamp in unconsecrated ground next to their church graveyard. The reason? Unbaptised. Therefore not allowed in a Catholic graveyard.

The suffering of these poor women of losing a child, something unimaginably horrible and traumatic to anybody but those who've experienced it, was made much worse by this insult to their children's memories. The Catholic faith carries with it the concept of Original Sin. We're born with this, and only baptism can eradicate it. If you're not baptised, you can't get into Heaven, and that's it. If you die unbaptised and you've led the life of a saint, or too brief a life to have committed sin in the first place, you go to a place called Limbo. Forever.

Though the Church's position has supposedly softened on this since these outrages, of which more in a moment, at the time this was an absolute position. One woman, clearly still desperately upset about the loss of her child 50 years on, related how, on asking the priest why she couldn't have her baby buried alongside her grandparents, said, "I spoke to the priest, and he said, 'You couldn't have had that anyway, because the baby wasn't baptized. And she'll be in Limbo now, until the end of time.' " A priest, a man supposed to bring the comfort and love of the Church to people, said that to a woman who had, just days before, lost her child.

I don't suppose it helps of course that the Catholic clergy is entirely populated by men, so there's not a single member of it, from the Pope himself to the newest inductee, who could possibly even begin to relate to the suffering of a mother who's lost her child. But this cruelty, this twisting of a knife into a mother's already suffering heart, beggars belief.

Despite their Church telling them otherwise, some of the women displayed a much more thorough understanding of what a faith should, I think, if you're to have one, be all about. A woman, frail and elderly now but still crying for her child of almost 70 years ago, said, "He shouldn't be in that ground. What did the wee baby do? Nothing. Nothing. They're all innocent, and not only mine, like. All of them that was buried there." She clearly understands the reality of sin far better than her Church.

It made me glad, once again, of my atheism. Somehow, despite its supposed role in life, the Church had found a way to make atheism look like the more comforting belief. These women suffered so profoundly already. Losing a child and then wracked by guilt, they genuinely believed that their children were in Limbo. Had they been atheists, at least they'd have been spared that further agony.

I mentioned earlier that the Catholic Church had softened its position somewhat in what should be more enlightened times now. This, for example, from the International Theological Commission in 2007: "We may hope for the salvation of the children who have died without baptism. The reasons for that hope are very great indeed." While better than the absolutist brutalism that the mums were faced with during their youth, this is basically a fudge. They can't back too far away from the basic concept of Original Sin completely because it's too far entrenched in the Catholic belief system, as this very modern quote from a Catholic priest on the same programme demonstrates: "Baptism was necessary because humanity had fallen away from God. There was the fall, we often speak about Original Sin. And everybody was born with Original Sin, baptism corrects that, and baptism then becomes the gateway to everlasting life, and the vision of God."

So all they can basically do is 'hope' that, in the face of that all too human dogma, some leeway is allowed by the man upstairs. I only hope that these poor women eventually find comfort. After a long campaign by some of the mothers, and siblings who never got to meet their brothers or sisters, the ground in which their children were dumped, (literally unceremoniously, having been denied even the sacrament) has been re-consecrated so they can draw some succour from that. But unless the Church changes its position on one of the most fundamental tenets of Catholicism, they'll go to their own graves believing their children are in Limbo.

Like I said. Religion? Shit it.

Sorry to bang on about it

I know some of the recent entries have contained little other than criticism of the theological tide washing over us at the moment, one the media are all too happy to surf upon, with wall-to-wall coverage on BBC News, a channel run by a publicly-funded organisation let's not forget.

But yet again I've been stirred to write on something the Pope said in last night's vigil, which was preparation for today's beatification ceremony of Cardinal Newman in Birmingham. The following is a direct, word for word transcription of what he said;

"At the end of his life, Newman would describe his life’s work as a struggle against the growing tendency to view religion as a purely private and subjective matter, a question of personal opinion. Here is the first lesson we can learn from his life: in our day, when an intellectual and moral relativism threatens to sap the very foundations of our society, Newman reminds us that, as men and women made in the image and likeness of God, we were created to know the truth, to find in that truth our ultimate freedom and the fulfilment of our deepest human aspirations."

I've got very serious problems with this part of his speech in particular. Firstly, the idea that intellectual relativism and moral relativism are somehow the same thing is bizarre to me. Just because I had a different education, and share different mores and cultural influences to those proclaimed by the Catholic Church, does not mean that I am incapable of establishing a firm moral code, for example, which is one of the implications I took from this passage, whether that was his intent or not. His fundamental problem with this relativism, as he describes it, seems to be that my morality will therefore likely be different from his absolutist morality, and no such freedoms are permitted within the 'truth' handed down by, and from, the Church. Surely, the 'ultimate freedom' he speaks of is only possible when I am free to make up my own mind? How can his peculiar absolutism ever, ever be freer than this matter of personal choice which he, and Cardinal Newman, even in the 19th century, found so threatening?

That's one of the Church's fundamental problems - people with the freedom to choose for themselves may reject the values and beliefs the Church works so hard to inculcate into them. Reason enough to reject the teachings in the first place, if they leave no room for doubt, no room for question, no room for even the possibility that they could be wrong. I just, frankly, didn't think the Pope would be quite so open about his Church's rejection of such (what I see as) open-mindedness.

Sorry, probably a bit dry this one! I'll get back to the matters in hand, namely Albion's excellent point at Carlisle yesterday, in due course.

Pontiff-icating

We keep being told that we live in straightened times and cuts are inevitable across the board in public sector expenditure. I don't think this will come as a great surprise to any of us - we've all seen or experienced job losses for ourselves lately regardless of the sector we work in.

So I was moved to quiet fury a few minutes ago when I saw on the news that the forthcoming visit of the Pope to Britain is going to cost, in addition to policing costs, between £10 million and £12 million. This is a man who, let's not forget, as the figurehead of one of the world's most widespread religions, thinks that there's no place for women in the priesthood, nor even for the discussion of the matter. Who thinks that, even if a man is infected with HIV, that the wearing of a condom during sex is a sin. And that even if a woman has been raped, if she falls pregnant she should not have the choice as to whether to carry the foetus to full term.

So we're all picking up the tab for this individual (a former member of the Hitler Youth) to come over hear and preach to the no doubt already-converted in their thousands. I'd like to know why the Catholic Church doesn't pick up the bill, if they want to listen to him. They are, after all, charging people for the so-called "Pilgrims' Passes" which allow people into the Mass in Cofton Park in Coventry. 52,000 tickets at £25 a time. If the Church can't or won't pick up the bill, then why not invite Catholics in this country to cover it? I don't see why I, and millions like me who have no truck with the man's messages, should have to cough up for this while at the same time I watch public services and charities across the country, as I've written about before, gird their loins for swingeing cuts which are doubtless coming in the forthcoming Comprehensive Spending Review.

This sense of priority is absolutely staggering to me. The Church says his visit going to be 'good value for money'. For them, no doubt. For the rest of us? I think not.