Pope on a rope

Do you remember them? I dredged it up from my rather worryingly selective memory – a soap in the shape of a pope on a rope so you could hang it conveniently in the shower.

Reading some of the stuff about the imminent visit by Pope Benedict XVI to the UK later this week, you could be forgiven for thinking that lots of otherwise reasonable people would be quite happy to see the Pontiff suspended from a rope. The nature and degree of the personal venom directed against him raises other questions about what it is that fires such vindictiveness.

Cards on the table: this Pope is a PR disaster and, while being as brainy as one could hope for in a spiritual leader, seems to have little or no grasp of symbols or gestures or how these work in relationships or communications at any level. I disagree with some elements of his social ethics (contraception and condoms being the obvious target), but I do know how he gets there. I don’t like the way he has taken the Roman Catholic Church back towards a pre-Vatican II map in which Rome sits bang at the centre and everything else revolves around it.

But, on the other hand, I respect a man who refuses to go along with ‘contemporary’ cultural and ethical mores simply because he is expected to. Benedict has a brain. His arguments need to be heard and understood before a response is offered. What we are reading this week doesn’t show much of a rational grasp of what all this is about.

Sorry to pick an easy target, but the sheer sloppiness of Polly Toynbee‘s tirade (yes, another one) in today’s Guardian is breathtaking. Let’s be clear: a rational, reasonable, informed, credible critique of the Pope and his assumptions should be achievable and might even be welcomed by Christians (among others). Get the argument going. Tackle the philosophical and theological assumptions which then shape the Pope’s doctrine and ethics. Prove him to be flawed, stupid, wrong, misguided or dangerous – if that’s appropriate – but just to throw things at him from your pram is both inadequate and sad.

Here are some examples from Polly Toynbee’s piece (which seems to have been rather uncritically welcomed by many readers whose sentiments she articulates):

…sex lies at the poisoned heart of all that is wrong with just about every major faith.

Er… and at the heart of nothing else? Sex and how we handle it (so to speak) is a human issue, not just a religious issue. It is not self-evidently true that ‘sexual freedom’ sets us free and improves human relationships or well-being. Everyone wrestles with sex (if you see what I mean…).

Women’s bodies are the common battleground, symbols of all religions’ authority and identity. Cover them up with veil or burka, keep them from the altar, shave their heads, give them ritual baths, church them, make them walk a step behind, subject them to men’s authority, keep priests celibately free of women, unclean and unworthy. Eve is the cause of all temptation in Abrahamic faiths. Only by suppressing women can priests and imams hold down the power of sex, the flesh and the devil. The Church of England is on the point of schism over gay priests, women bishops and African homophobia. The secular world looks on in utter perplexity.

So, let’s pick on the worst elements of religious expression (which millions of religious people also find weird and/or dodgy), shall we, and ignore the rest? What response would I get if I used Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and the other usual suspects as the epitome of secular atheism? Like everything else in this world – the real one in which most of us live – religious institutions or movements comprise huge ranges of agreement and dispute with just about everything the institution or movement lays claim to. There is no objective monolith – not even when leaders pretend there is.

And, just to be really clear, (elements of) the secular world looks on with utter perplexity at all sorts of religious motivation, belief and behaviour: self-sacrifice, humility, generosity, etc. (There I go again – generalising…) The mere fact that ‘the secular world looks on with utter peplexity’ tells us nothing other than that some people are perplexed by other people – it says nothing about the subject of the perplexity itself.

But the Vatican still talks of a few bad apples requiring internal discipline, the pope refusing to hand rapists over to secular law.

The Vatican might not want me as its defender, but that is simply nonsense. But why let reality intrude into a good rant?

The other dominion the religions control is death. Were it not for the faiths with their grip on hospices and palliative care, the law on assisted dying would be reformed.

Good grief! Clearly the assumptions behind Polly Toynbee’s view on the ethics of assisted dying are self-evidently true and the development of palliative care through the hospice movement (which is also concerned with the whole person in the context of the whole family, etc) is clearly a destructive fraud on dying people. Oh, right. No need to argue that point, then.

Where once secularism and humanism were relics of a bygone religious age, its voice is important again. But pointing out the blindingly obvious need to keep faiths in their private sphere has united religious gunfire against secularists.

Now, that really is breathtaking. It seems ‘blindingly obvious’ to some of us that Polly Toynbee has not bothered to listen to any challenge to her root assumption that her world view is self-evidently true – and therefore needs to have privileged place in the public square – while that of religious people is self-evidently stupid and dangerous and needs to be confined to the private sphere where it can’t do any harm. This nonsense has been knocked on the head in the last twenty years even by atheists.

All atheists now tend to be called “militant”, yet we seek to silence none, to burn no books, to stop no masses or Friday prayers, impose no laws, asking only free choice over sex and death.

No, not all atheists are being called ‘militant’. That’s ridiculous. That’s like bleating that all religious people are being labelled ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘brain-dead’. It might apply to some, but not to all. Please give us the rational atheists (of which there are plenty) instead of this sort of unthinking tirade.

And, actually, you are ‘wanting to silence’… by insisting on religion being confined to the private sphere (like an unmentionable hobby or embarrassing habit). You can’t have it both ways.

Religion deserves its say, but only proportional to its numbers.

Really? We all know how to play with numbers and proportions. Add the membership of the National Secular Society and the British Humanist Society together and ask if they would have any voice anywhere in proportion to their ‘numbers’. And, if the argument is that many more people are secularists than belong to the formal societies, then the self-same argument can be made for religion. Which gets us nowhere.

No privileges, no special protection against feeling offended.

At last, I agree. But it is amazingly easy to offend those who object to the ease with which religious people are offended. Watch this space…

Anyway, there are reasons for objecting to the Pope’s visit and the basis on which it has been set up. But, Polly Toynbee’s argument isn’t one of them.

 

The loss of the local?

I have banged on in this blog a number of times about Nick Davies’s excellent book Flat Earth News in which he describes the death of journalism as we have known and loved it for centuries. His is not a lone voice crying in the developing wilderness. Several thousand jobs in local journalism have disappeared in the last twelve months alone – 1000 last week from the Daily Mail’s regional/local organs. The response to the outcry from journalists against the loss of their jobs and the death of their newspapers has mostly been some version of:’ What’s so special about journalists anyway? They just have to cope like the car workers, financiers and everybody else who is finding the world has changed, but not in their favour.’

In today’s Guardian Polly Toynbee hits the nail on the head when she exposes what is happening to notions of ‘local belonging’, of which for generations local newspapers have been vital agents. She writes: ‘The government talks piously of community engagement – and a newspaper with real journalism is the most vital local forum of all. Before the end of the year, every local paper will be into heavy loss: money unlikely to return in the good times. So how can they be saved, in print and online?’

She goes on at the end of her article to say: ‘Bring in the money available from awful ITV local news. Add in some BBC money: their local news is shamingly bad too, partly because the area covered is too wide. Then oblige local councils to stop wasting money on their own Pravda sheets, and to buy space in clearly defined zones in their local news trusts. It might need a small subvention from council tax, too. Roll all this into a local trust with an obligation to good reporting, fair rules and open access, and you could have independent local news across web, print, radio and television offering a genuine community service. It is on the table.’

She ventures a final appeal: ‘But this is an emergency. Battalions of journalists with local knowledge are being sacked and newspaper expertise lost. Does the government have the imagination and capacity to create an environment where small, locally run independent trusts could flourish?’

Local journalism has until relatively recently provided the main way in which local people could find out what was happening in the place where they live. Local newspapers would be filled with names and faces and the possibility that ‘you’ might be in the news. But these same newspapers have increasingly become ‘scandal rags’, playing the same games as the tabloids in the search for sales and revenue. Here in Croydon we sometimes wonder if the local newspaper can ever bring itself to celebrate anything here rather than knock it or pick out the dodgy stuff.

But the loss of the local newspaper also takes with it the loss of local accountability. Councils can be slagged off for their spending or inconsistencies, but rarely is the local council meeting fully reported and decisions analysed intelligently. So, the loss is more than jobs and paper; it is also a serious loss of accountability and informed opinion forming.

It will be argued that this role has been overtaken by online journalism. But this is not the case. Internet journalism is usually driven by motivated individuals who bring their own subjective ‘spin’ to their comment (which is what a blog is, surely) – there is no wider accountability involved and ‘information’ can be recorded as fact when there is no check on it and possibly no foundation to it.

Several years ago I heard a national newspaper editor confidently predict the end of newspapers as we know them. He claimed that within five years no newspaper would be paid for, but that newspapers would be free in paper format as they advertised the online content which would be supported by online advertising. He might be right. But it seems to me that we are now going through yet another revolution which could have unintended consequences: not just a shift in the way ‘news’ is brought ot those who wish to hear it, but the potential loss of a common sense of place or belonging or community or accountability.

I strongly warm to Polly Toynbee’s suggestion that local money is put into local news organs with local accountability run by local trusts set up to ensure good reporting of things that matter to a community. The money that currently goes into councils providing their propaganda to every household could go into local newspaper communication, thus encouraging local people to read it (the main source of such information) and demonstrating local commitment to it (subsidised through Council Tax).

The idea of the ‘local’ might have to be redefined and rediscovered in the next couple of years. It must not be lost.

 

Irrational rationalists

What is it about rationalists that some of them become so irrational when it comes to religion? Polly Toynbee, one of the best, most articulate and intelligent columnists in the British media, is also president of the British Humanist Association and honorary associate of the National Secular Society. She writes about British politics and people with compassion and, often, great wisdom. But when it comes to religion in general and Christianity in particular, all rationality goes out of the window and everything turns to irritable fluff.

In today’s Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/23/atheism-disestablishentment-rowan-williams-humanism) she writes of the Archbishop of Canterbury ‘with his usual confused mumbling into his beard’. Oh, come on, Polly – grow up.

She then goes on as follows: ‘The 26 bishops in the Lords interfere regularly: they are a threat on abortion, and their campaign sank the Joffe bill, giving the terminally ill the right to die in dignity. Of course they should not be there, when only 16% of people will grace the pews on Christmas Day, and Christian Research forecasts church attendance falling by 90%. But a dying faith clings hard to its inexplicable influence on public life.’

It is hard to know where to start to respond to such nonsense; but, here goes.

The bishops in the House of Lords ‘regularly interfere’, do they? And what do all the other members of the Upper House do? Presumably, they make ‘intelligent contributions’ or ‘help shape the political and moral agenda’. Is it only bishops who, by fulfilling their responsibilities (whether or not one approves of them having them in the first place – which is a different argument), are technically ‘interfering’? Or is it simply that if you happen to disagree with Polly Toynbee, you are clearly either ‘interfering’ or somehow illegitimate?

What underlies this is the arrogant assumption that her assumptions about the world are self-evidently true while the assumptions of others (Christians, for example) are to be derided or disregarded. The bishops are a ‘threat’ on abortion. In what sense? Because they don’t necessarily agree with her own views – which are, of course, self-evidently true? What sort of a society does this sort of irrational and hysterical rationalism want: one in which only certain views are to be respected and which is led and shaped by people who assume (without argument) that their world view is self-evidently right? Give me anytime the confident humility of the Church Toynbee so derides – which, at least, argues its case and allows for the possibility that it might not have the final word on every subject under the sun. (But don’t get me started on the Pope’s statement on gender boundaries…)

Just to push the point firmly home, Toynbee also uses spurious statistics on church membership that were disowned even by the organisation that produced them. The statistical base for the flat-line projections offered by Christian Research at the end of 2007 were ridiculed by everyone except those who have an ideological need to claim them. Had they been Government statistics on poverty (for example), Polly Toynbee would have dismissed them as fundamentally flawed, deeply misleading and unworthy of a creditable organisation.

The two organisations to which Polly belongs have a membership of 3000 (National Secular Society) and 5000 (British Humanist Association) – and it is probable that there is some duplication in those figures as some will be members of both. Both organisations are regularly consulted by Government and media as if they had credibility. I think they do – on the grounds that minority perspectives need to be taken into account and that they oftes have interesting observations to make. But, if Polly wants to argue that numbers justify influence, shouldn’t we just ignore two groups of people that would fit into two of our larger cathedrals in one go? Do 1.7 million Anglican worshippers (every month since 2000) – to say nothing of other denominations – have less right to ‘influence’ than a few thousand people who are angry about ‘religion’?

‘The unctuous claim there is a special religious ethos that can be poured like a sauce over schools and public services to improve them morally’ is a carefully phrased bit of dismissive nonsense. If Polly Toynbee really thinks that is how these things work, then she has a bigger problem than we thought. I think she has a serious point about protection of religious sensibilities from criticism in the public sphere – but she doesn’t help develop an argument by using such silly language to express her irritation that she can’t have it her way.

I won’t go on. The rest of the article should be read, if only to demonstrate how irrational a rationalist can be. Is it not possible for there to be a sensible conversation about this sort of thing? Yes, there are religious people who take irrationalism to new heights. Yes, there are religious people who are, frankly, dangerous. Yes, there are religious people whose faith is a pile of wishful thinking and fantasy. But there are also religious people who are deeply rational, socially compassionate, not bigotted and open to intelligent discussion and debate. We could start with the ‘bearded one’ Polly Toynbee sneers at at the beginning of her article.