Archives for November 2009

This week's Sunday Sequence comes live from Dublin, and we will explore in detail the findings of the Report of the Dublin Archdiocese Commission of Investigation, which has been headline news around the world. Taoiseach Brian Cowan says the report is a "crushing verdict" on the church and its mishandling of child abuse allegations.

The much-awaited Report into the handling by Church and State authorities of allegations and suspicions of child abuse against clerics of the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin has now been published.

The Report is absolutely damning. It runs to some 700 pages and reveals both a shocking litany of abuse by priests in Dublin over a period of 35 years and the failure of both church and state authorities to respond appropriately to reports of child abuse. In addition to the abuse of children, the Murphy Report claims that the Catholic Church operated a "don't, don't tell" policy and successive bishops and archbishops acted to cover up abuse claims.

The Report is also extremely critical of the Irish police for failing to respond to allegations of abuse.

Read a summary of the Report's key findings here.

The Report is very critical of four successive archbishops of Dublin. They are accused of covering up child abuse allegations and protecting child sex offenders within the ranks of the Dublin clergy.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin's statement in reponse to the Report is published here. Cardinal Sean Brady's reponse is here.

One of the most striking responses to the report is this, from Fr Michael Canny, apeaking on behalf of the Derry diocese,: "The church has no credibility, no standing, and no moral authority."

Eamon Walsh, the Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin, has suggested that the Vatican should apologise for failing to co-operate with the Dublin Commission's investigation.

Donal Murray, now Bishop of Limerick, served as Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin from 1982 to 1996. The Report is critical of his role in a number of cases. Bishop Murray has published a reponse to the Report (read his full statement here), which includes the following: "I wish to state that I never deliberately or knowingly sought to cover up or withhold information brought to my attention. There were, as the report notes, occasions when roles/responsibilities were not clear or where I did not have full information concerning cases in which I was asked to become involved. As I indicated in 2002 in response to one particular case, if I had succeeded in deriving more information, it might have been possible to prevent some of the dreadful suffering of child abuse in that instance. I very much wish that I had been able to do so. It is a matter of the greatest regret to me if any action or omission of mine contributed to the suffering of children who were abused. I sincerely apologise and humbly ask their forgiveness."

Here's a clip of Nell McCafferty at the press conference following the launch of the report, calling on the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland to give up accolades such as "Your Grace" and "Your Eminence".

This curious article published on the website of the archdiocese of Armagh appears to emphasise the claim that "the failures of civil society [that will] will shock most" in this report.

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A new group on the social networking site Facebook is providing a platform for hatred and racism. The group has some 300 members already and its "fans" are celebrating the racist abuse of Romanians, and other ethnic minority groups, in Belfast. It's one of the worst examples I have seen of racism online.

One contributor says he stole the coat of a Belfast rose seller, another says his friend distracted one Romanian lady while others urinated on her. The group administrator even encourages "ambitious types" to post videos on the website.

Most of the the fans registered on this hate site are fully identified, with names, photographs, addresses, and in some cases work or school affiliations.

Some well-known schools are mentioned in fan profile information, and both of Northern Ireland's universities. I suspect all those institutions will wish to be publicly disassociated from those individuals engaging in racist abuse on this site.

Some opponents of the site have also joined in order to post anti-racist comments challenging the group's content. Facebook has been contacted by others seeking to have the hate group removed, and some Facebook users have been in touch with the police to report a hate crime incident in relation to the site.

Update: The hate page has now been removed by Facebook. The Police Service of Northern Ireland have begun an investigation after receiving a number of complaints about a hate crime incident in relation to the site. And I understand that the principal of one of Northern Ireland's best-known schools has begun an investigation into the involvement of his pupils in this group.

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This work of fiction by Rebecca Goldstein isn't, I think, available yet, but it looks like fun. I'm a Goldstein fan, so this is eagerly-awaited. If you haven't read her biography of Spinoza, that's one to check out soon. There is an excerpt from the novel on the Edge site, including an appendix in which Goldstein assaults 36 philosophical arguments for God's existence. Such as:

24. The Argument from Perfect Justice

1. This world provides numerous instances of imperfect justice -- bad things happening to good people and good things happening to bad people.

2. It violates our sense of justice that imperfect justice may prevail.

3. There must be a transcendent realm in which perfect justice prevails (from 1 and 2).

4. A transcendent realm in which perfect justice prevails entails the Perfect Judge.

5. The Perfect Judge is God.

6. God exists.

FLAW: This is a good example of the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Our wishes for how the world should be need not be true; just because we want there to be some realm in which perfect justice applies does not mean that there is such a realm. In other words, there is no way to pass from Premise 2 to Premise 3 without the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking.

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On this day:

The world's first recorded strike took place, when laborers working on a pyramid in Egypt downed tools in 1170 BCE.

There is no evidence of a trade union's involvement.

Update: Jonathan Bartley tells me this historic strike coincides with the CBI's annual conference!

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The much-awaited report into the abuse of children by Catholic clergy in the archdiocese of Dublin over a period of 35 years is expected to be published this week. Some newspapers have already been publishing leaked summaries of key findings. Early indications suggest that this will be an extremely shocking report.

According to the Irish Independent:

"Some boys who were abused by one priest were later passed on to their friends and abused again. In another case, the notorious sex abuser Fr Sean Fortune, who committed suicide, gave the key of a holiday cottage to another priest who abused a girl there.

The Commission, which has trawled through thousands of files over more than nine years, will find that the powerful bishops of Dublin were more concerned with the power and pomp of their Church than they were with the children in their care.

Some of those who complained were met with denial, arrogance and even cover-up, the shocking report will reveal. The report will say that not one of the four archbishops who presided over the Dublin diocese from the 1960s revealed their knowledge of widespread sexual abuse by the clergy to the gardai until late 1995."

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On this day in 1859, Darwin's most famous book, On the Origin of Species, was published by John Murray.

To mark the occasion, you might wish to listen to The Great Tennesee Monkey Trial, Peter Goodchild's adaptation of the official record of the infamous 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, which was this week's Saturday Play on BBC Radio 4. Edward Asner plays the fundamentalist leader William Jennings Bryan, and Neil Patrick Harris is John Scopes. This is a wonderful piece of radio drama. The real-life William Jennings Bryan is pictured in this post in full rhetorical throttle at the trial in 1925.

Listen to the play here. For those wishing to read more about the trial itself, the most comprehensive examination of the events of the trial is Edward J. Larson's Pulitzer prize-winning book Summer For The Gods.

The historian of ideas David Livingstone was my guest in the studio today. He will be giving a lecture tomorrow night (at 7.30 p.m. in Fitzroy Presbyterian Church) which examines the reception of the new Darwinian science in the late 19th century by Presbyterians in Ireland, Scotland and north America. David is one of the world's leading authorities on the relationship between religion and science. If you have access to JSTOR, you can read some of David's previous reflections on this fascinating episode in religious and scientific history here.

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Herman Van Rompuy, president-designate of the European Council, speaking in 2004:

"Turkey is not a part of Europe and will never be part of Europe. An expansion of the EU to include Turkey cannot be considered as just another expansion as in the past . . . The universal values which are in force in Europe, and which are fundamental values of Christianity, will lose vigour with the entry of a large Islamic country such as Turkey."

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Ahead of tomorrow's anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which neatly coincides with this year's BBC Children in Need day, Northern Ireland's humanists have launched an ad campaign to try to persuade parents to stop attaching religious labels to their children.

Humanist spokesman Brian McClinton: "Northern Ireland needs this kind of awareness-raising exercise more than anywhere to counter our extreme levels of religiosity which has been shown to go hand-in-hand with our extreme levels of insularity, xenophobia and bigotry."

Free Presbyterian minister David Mcilveen: "It is the height of arrogance that they would try to interfere between children and parents and what faith they are instructed in."

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New archaeological findings throw more light on the genesis of religious belief. A possible reading of that research:

"Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland. For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless."

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Inspired by a new celebrity charity book featuring letters of advice written by the celebs to their 16 year old selves, Matthew Parris penned his own missive, packed with a lifetime of experience -- including, ". . . Socks: buy ten pairs of black cotton socks and ten woollen; and stick to black for the rest of your life, saving hundreds of hours trying to match odd socks."

Which, in turn, inspired Talk Back listeners to construct this letter: each sentence was submitted to the programme by text message.

Dear Me,

If your fuel light comes on, fill up the tank straight away, or you will run out. Never lose your childlike sense of fun.

If you jump on the haystack often enough you will eventually find the needle. What does not kill you makes you stronger. If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.

Measure twice, cut once. Never say you are going to try, just do it. Try-ers don't succeed, do-ers, do. Things turn out best for those who make the best of the way things turn out.

The only people that fear power are those that dont have it. Think big and you'll be big.

Marry the woman (or man) you want not the one your mother wants. Live every day as your last because some day it will be your last.

Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, so love the people who treat you right, forget about the ones who don't, and believe that everything happens for a reason. There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience. Wear sunscreen.

Yours sincerely,

Me

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Einstein's comment that "God does not play dice with the universe" is often cited as evidence that the most famous scientist of the twentieth century was a theist. The statement in fact reveals no theological commitment of any kind, any more than Stephen Hawking's use of the phrase "the mind of God" at the end of A Brief History of Time implies that he is a religious believer. Einstein's comment was an expression of his concern about the randomness at the heart of the new theory of quantum mechanics, rather than an assertion of God's existence. His actual views on religion, and on sacred texts, emerge in a letter he wrote in 1954. Last year, that letter was sold at auction for £170,000. Richard Dawkins was outbid. The letter is now available online at lettersofnote.com, a fascinating archive of primary source materials.

Money quote:

'The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. ... For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong ... have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything "chosen" about them.'

Read the whole letter here.

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An Irish Catholic bishop wants to have the freedom to explore the case for the ordination of women in public. There is a Vatican-enforced ban on even discussing the issue of female ordination, but Bishop Willie Walsh used an interview with RTE News to call for a public debate.

In 1994, Pope John Paul II published an apostolic letter, On Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone, in which he asserted that the Church's ban on female priests is not open to debate among Catholics. He wrote: "I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful".

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, later issued a statement declaring that the Catholic Church's teaching on women priests was infallible. Nevertheless, Catholic theologians disagree about the status of the CDF's claim that Pope John Paul's statement constituted an infallible decree. (Read more about that debate here.)

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Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of the greatest minds in the history of the Christian Church, was born on this day in the year 354.

He was African; yet that basic fact about him is too often forgotten in the white-washed history of the church. A great theologian, he was also the author of the first autobiography in the history of Western literature -- The Confessions.

I've read Augustine's memoir many times over the years, and I have collected a number of editions of the work. It is as alive today as it was when he penned it, and it remains a great inspiration to me, as it does to many people across the world.

Augustine once wrote: "Wisdom and folly both are like meats that are wholesome and unwholesome, and courtly or simple words are like town-made or rustic vessels -- both kinds of food may be served in either kind of dish."

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Hanna Rosin has a fascinating piece in the current edition of The Atlantic about how the so-called Word of Faith movement and its prosperity teaching may have contributed to the materialist boom before the financial bust.

She writes: "America's mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated--one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it's still going strong."

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Here's one for fans of canon law: the full text of Pope Benedict's Apostolic Constitution, which provides a way into the Catholic Church for Anglican clergy and laity who have become, perhaps, unhappy about the recent direction taken by the Anglican Communion.

The Vatican says, "This Apostolic Constitution opens a new avenue for the promotion of Christian unity while, at the same time, granting legitimate diversity in the expression of our common faith. It represents not an initiative on the part of the Holy See, but a generous response from the Holy Father to the legitimate aspirations of these Anglican groups. The provision of this new structure is consistent with the commitment to ecumenical dialogue, which continues to be a priority for the Catholic Church."

Some critics will regard that as ecclesiastical spin of the highest order, and will consider this document a route map for annexation.

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That was the title of this year's Thomas More Lecture, delivered by Francis Campbell, the UK's Ambassador to the Holy See, on 5 November at Allen Hall Seminary in London. Topics explored in the lecture include the Pope's commitment to the dialogue between faith and reason, and his contribution to global debates about climate change, disarmament and international development.

The full text of the lecture is below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry

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The new report on the future of Remembrance Day from the religion and society think-tank Ekklesia is getting massive coverage across the media. Jonathan Bartley, Ekklesia's co-director, will be on tomorrow's Sunday Sequence to discuss the report's findings and recommendations. You can read the report in full here.

Here's the abstract: "Remembrance Day needs to be re-imagined to make it more inclusive, more truthful and more meaningful for future generations, says this report. This would include an honest acknowledgement that some did "die in vain", an end to "selective remembrance", a positive stress on peacemaking, and making Armistice Day a bank holiday. The report follows the death of the 'last Tommy', Harry Patch from World War 1, who sadly described current patterns of Remembrance Day as "just show business". Remembrance has been 'cheapened' by a failure to back up words with action, particularly when it comes to successive Government's care for war veterans, but also the lack of resources put into peacebuilding. The report traces the development of Britain's remembrance tradition and makes a series of proposals about how Remembrance Day might be updated and made more accessible. It also includes reflection on the meaning and practice of 'memory', not least from a Christian theological standpoint."

Also taking part in our discussion, which begins shortly after 9am on BBC Radio Ulster, is the philosopher Alan Haworth. Alan is an expert on political philosophy; his textbook Understanding the Political Philosophers: from Ancient to Modern Times (Routledge 2004) is now used in many courses. Tomorrow, we'll ask him to talk about John Stuart Mill's essay "On Liberty". Mill's essay was published in November 1859, so this is an opportunity to mark that significant anniversary (which the essay shares with Darwin's On the Origin of Species) and also to examine Mill's contribution to our understanding of freedom. Alan wrote a short analysis of On Liberty for the British Humanist Association, which was recently sent to all MPs and peers.

We will try to examine the relationship between "remembrance" and "freedom", and explore how various understandings of liberty were, and are, implicated in debates about war and conflict.

Harry Patch's biographer, Peter Parker, also joins me tomorrow to talk about his new book. The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War.

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'I don't drop to my knees and pray for guidance', says the Tory leader David Cameron, but he does regard religious faith as important.

Money quotes from his Evening Standard interview:

'My own faith is there, it's not always the rock that perhaps it should be. I've a sort of fairly classic Church of England faith, a faith that grows hotter and colder by moments.'

'I suppose I sort of started life believing that one's individual faith was important, but actually the institutions of the church were less important.'

'I do think that organised religion can get things wrong, but the Church of England and the other churches do play a very important role in society.'

'I think that it's perfectly possible to live a good life without having faith, by which I mean a positive and altruistic life, but I think the teachings of Jesus, just as the teachings of other religions, are a good guide to help us through.'

What do we make of that? He creates space for all faiths, even humanism, and sees religious beliefs as conversation partners -- optional guides, which can be useful from time to time. Religious groups have an important societal role, but they are open to criticism too. And, perhaps most importantly, a political leader should feel feel to talk about his own attitude to religion.

He was careful to deny that he has a 'direct line' to God. After George W Bush, few politicians would speak comfortably of that kind of prayer-line. Cameron's media strategy contrasts with Tony Blair's discomfort about public expressions of faith -- even though, ironically, it is Blair who is clearly the more strident religious believer. Gordon Brown's comments on faith usually involve references to his father's work as a Presbyterian minister and the biblical roots of Christian Socialism, which tend to give the impression, rightly or wrongly, that Brown is more interested in the social and political implications of faith than faith itself.

Cameron has offered intimate aspects of his personal narrative to the public in this interview, and we can expect a great deal more of that as we approach the general election. This is further evidence of a drift towards the American presidential election model, where personal narratives are more important than manifesto commitments.

Cameron presents himself as a religious everyman figure: he has questions, he has doubts, but faith keeps returning, at key moments of his life, as an available anchor. Many people in Britain can relate to that kind of non-confessional faith, where religious belief is less like a marriage and more like an important friendship.

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Benny Hinn is one of the world's most controversial evangelists. In this rare interview with ABC's Nightline, he talks about money, faith and the miraculous.

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Here is the full version of the report everyone is talking about today.

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In my case, not very religious at all, it would appear. That's according to Stephen Goddard, who tops the poll. In reverse order:

10= Peter Meadows, Bible Society - 0
10= Bents Garden Centre - 0
8 Rev Pam Smith - 24.69
7 Bishop of Croydon, Rt Rev Nicholas Baines - 25.59
6 Martin Beckford Religious Affairs, Daily Telegraph - 34.62
5 William Crawley, Religious Affairs, BBC Radio Ulster - 43.59
4 Bishop of Willesden, Rt Rev Pete Broadbent - 85.12
3 Ruth Gledhill Religious Affairs, The Times - 100.13
2 Rev Peter M Phillips, St Johns College, Durham - 103.49
1 Stephen Goddard - 175.43

I've a theory that Stephen Goddard has outperformed everyone else because his name includes the word "God", which may have registered extra content on the TweetPsych analysis. That's my story, anyway! In my case, I write about religion, ethics, science, politics, the arts, books, and the X Factor, and those relativities may have reduced my proportionate tweeting score for religion stories. Ahem.

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The entire Bible illustrated using Lego. That's Brendan Powell Smith's eventual goal. A large chunk of text still has to get the Brick Testament treatment, but he sounded, on today's programme, like a man with a Moses-like vision. There's a search engine on The Brick Testament website, so you can search your favourite Bible verse to see how Brendan has translated the text into a Lego diorama. Some of the Bible's context involves rather 'adult' content, so be warned: some of these Lego models are naked, or engage in sexual or violent behaviour -- and some even curse. Be especially careful

Some texts lend themselves more naturally to Brendan's treatment than others. You may like to suggest candidates for the most difficult Bible verse to translate into Lego, and I'd enjoy seeing some of your favourite examples of completed dioramas.

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