Magi Mike’s Blog

A study, coauthored by Notre Dame social scientists, Darren W Davis and Donald B Pope-Davis, focusing on African American Catholics, challenges common assumptions about one of the Black community’s less popular Christian churches. Commissioned by the National Black Catholic Congress and the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Church Life and Office of the President, it tested whether anecdotal accounts that Black Catholics were becoming increasingly disengaged from their religion were true. It is historic in that it is the largest sample of African American Catholics ever surveyed on their faith. Although the focus of the survey is on African American Catholics, a comparison is made with white Catholics, yielding notable findings about them too. Among the findings of the survey are:

• On almost every measure of religious engagement, African American Catholics are considered stronger in their faith than white Catholics:
  • 78 percent of Black Catholics report that their parish meets their spiritual needs compared to only 69 percent of white Catholics.
  • 76 percent of African American Catholics say their parish meets their emotional needs, compared to 60 percent of white Catholics.
  • 48 percent of African Americans attend church at least once per week, compared to only 30 percent of white Catholics.
• A major difference in the religious engagement between African American Catholics and white Catholics is the importance each group attaches to social networks in the parish.
  • 29 percent of African Americans considered it was important that friends attended their church, while only eight percent of white Catholics considered it important.

African American’s increased appreciation of religious social interactions and tendency to attend all Black parishes contributes to their satisfaction. Davis commented:

This finding also shows up among African American Catholics who attend predominantly black parishes. A greater sense of community that comes from worshipping with others who share cultural heritage heightens religious engagement. Whatever forces are working against white Catholics’ religious identity and engagement were set in motion decades ago and those forces do not appear to be working against African American Catholics. Thus, it is quite possible that understanding African American Catholicity may inform us about the religious challenges of white Catholics. Too often we approach questions of religiosity in a vacuum. Comparable studies of religiosity are critical.

While there is generally high satisfaction with various aspects of Mass and church service, such as preaching, music, readings and prayers, Catholics’—both white and black Americans—level of satisfaction with these aspects of Mass are noticeably lower than Protestants. Pope-Davis noted:

This finding is interesting because we often hear anecdotal complaints about the Catholic Mass as quiescent, but most Catholics do not share this view. But, relative to the components of Protestant church service, Catholics are not as satisfied.

Racial Discontent

Despite their high level of religious engagement, African American Catholics are not completely satisfied with the scope of racial inclusiveness in the Church:

• About one in four African American Catholics perceive racism in their parish:
  • 32 percent say they are uncomfortable because they are the only person of color in their parish
  • 26 percent say that fellow parishioners avoid them because of their race,
  • 24 percent say that fellow parishioners reluctantly shake their hands
  • 25 percent say they have experienced racial insensitivity toward African Americans from their priest.
• African American Catholics see room for growth in the racial positions of the Catholic Church:
  • 37 percent are satisfied with the targeting of black vocations
  • 38 percent are satisfied with the Church’s emphasis on black saints
  • 40 percent are satisfied with promoting black bishops
  • 40 percent are satisfied with the Church’s support for issues like affirmative action
  • 44 percent are satisfied with the Church’s position on problems in Africa
  • 45 percent are satisfied with the promotion of racial integration in the Church.
• But 23 percent of African Americans consider the Catholic Church racist against African Americans.

Davis points out:

Asking questions about abstract racism in the Church breaks down somewhat when asked about specific elements of the Church. This is not that unusual in survey research. But, it is clear that while there are still challenges for many African American Catholics in their parishes, the views of the institutional Church are more jaundiced or jaded.

The survey also uncovered notable national demographic trends that are evident within religious denominations that have great consequences for the future church:

• 53 percent of African American Catholics and 53 percent of African American Protestants are at least 45 years old, compared to 63 percent of white Catholics and 62 percent of white Protestants
• 33 percent of African American Catholics and 35 percent of African American Protestants are married, compared to 21 percent of white Catholics and 14 percent of white Protestants.
• A larger percentage of African American Catholics have college degrees than African American Protestants, but a larger percentage of Catholics are college educated.

Summary

The US’s estimated three million Black Catholics are highly educated and deeply engaged in the church. They value the social and communal aspects of religious worship and some are concerned about the status of racism within the church—some are discontent about racial inclusiveness in the church. Nearly one in four respondents felt that the Catholic Church is racist against African Americans. More than 31 percent say they are uncomfortable because they are the only person of color in their parish, and about a quarter say that fellow parishioners avoid them because of their race, that fellow parishioners reluctantly shake their hands and that they have experienced racial insensitivity from their priest.

The research team hopes that the information gathered in the survey will help the Catholic church respond more efficiently to the needs of parishioners. Pope-Davis observed:

The forces that shape white Catholicity are different from the forces that shape African American Catholicity.

Ancient

For most of the dark ages, so called because of the absence of learning brought about by the victory of Christianity, people lived in misery largely because of their poverty, not because they had ideas beyond their station. Peasants knew their place in the social system, and even in the nineteenth century, the wife of the Bishop of Armagh was going to make sure the little scallywags at Sunday school knew it:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

All things bright and beautiful, Mrs C F Alexander

Most people were effectively slaves throughout the time of the Feudal system. They had a notional freedom, but in practice were tied to their lord and master and the bit of his land he allotted to the peasant to pay him for his otherwise corvée service to the manor. As Mrs Alexander wrote, God had “ordered their estate”, and few villeins entertained any idea of getting on in the world.

Some however, did, and especially after the millennium year (1000 AD) when the parousia did not happen and Christ failed to appear as the bishops had been promising for centuries. Thereafter, some people objected to their propaganda (Catholic lies—the original meaning of the word), many of them in the south of France, in Languedoc. They were Cathars and Vaudois, and preached spontaneously against Catholicism as being a Satanic plot. The Church organized a crusade against them, massacring and scattering them, then set up the Inquisition to pursue the scattered remains throughout Europe, calling them witches, and projecting on to them the accusation of being Satanic that the witches had originally pinned on the Catholic clergy. As the Church won, it is witches who are now remembered as Satanic.

The Cathars and Waldenses were the first Protestants and the first capitalists, for many had to travel around earning what living they could as craftsmen and tinkers. Their preaching against Catholicism inspired people like Wycliffe and Tyndall, and the Lollards. They also motivated the peasantry to think strange thoughts, thoughts that God had not ordered everyone’s place, and that human beings need not be tied to the land. In England in 1381, the peasants revolted. A Lollard preacher, John Ball, taught quite a different message from that which the serfs held habitually and unquestioningly until then:

When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then a gentleman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord.

These dissenting Christians were reading the bible for themselves, and Ball plainly meant that God had not made any such prescription in Genesis, so the presumed order of society had been arranged by the nobility and the clergy hand in hand for their own benefit, and contrary to God’s intention.

Primeval Human Groups

Adam and Eve in the bible had willingly chosen to disobey God, but the notion of God had sociologically come from the interpretation of their societies that early humans, just awakening into consciousness, found themselves living in. These small human groups were essentially classless. Leaders were treated with somewhat greater respect than ordinary members of the group, because they had to take decisions on the group’s behalf, but otherwise they barely differed from the others, living, sharing and caring equally with them.

A child was born into the group, and knew nothing else. When they were ill or hungry, it was the group that looked after them. The purpose of the leader was to keep them united when they were attacked by a predator or a rival group, so every member looked to others for defense and security too. And that was just how they saw it as they died. The group always provided for them and protected them from birth until death. It was, to them, as much part of Nature as the rising of the sun. It seemed eternal because it was in existence when they were born, it still was when they were dying, and so it had always been. The group was led by one member, the most competent of them to do it, and particularly good leaders were remembered, and became identified with the group first as a totem, then an ancestor or a father. In time the benefits of the tribe transferred to a mythical founding leader, who thereby became a god.

So the imagined benefits of the supernatural god or God were inherited from the benefits of the primitive tribe. God is a supernaturalized society, but the society he represents was the egalitarian society of early human beings, a society that made everyone feel secure and safe, and was ever present.

Freedom in Paradise

We can see now, that there was no way that this early simple society could have sustained a division into “haves” and “have nots”. Had it done so, the “have nots” would have upped and left—there could have been nothing in it for them, and the “haves” would have had to become “have nots” to survive. They would have had to do their own delving and spinning. This is the stage when the original hypothetical social contract that founded the original group could have been abandoned, had the social contract been violated.

Were the people in this early human group free? They were and they were not! They benefitted from the help offered by others in the group, and they in turn had to help the others. So they were not free to do as they liked. They had a social duty to perform in return for the social benefits they received. But all of them could rely on the others, for any rogue or antisocial member would have been disciplined by the rest, perhaps even being killed in extreme cases, as chimpanzees do, but also being driven out where they were likely to die unless a nearby group took them in. Members of the groups felt secure, and could participate in evicting a poor or old leader who was no longer effective, thereby participating in a rough and ready democracy—but they were obligated to the group by duty.

Here is the natural source of the ideas of positive and negative freedom. Negative freedom meant that none of the group members felt enslaved or confined. None could be made to do more than their fair share for the group, and could withdraw from the group if they felt some caucus in it was asking too much of them. But they were able to make their own contribution to the group, just the same as the others did, and also could help in replacing an ineffective leader. So, they had positive freedom. True freedom is the right balance of the two of them, and that is what the primitive human group had.

Modern

Overdoing negative freedom breaks down the cohesiveness of the group. People may be able to do a lot of things they could not do while they felt more obligated to the group, but they also feel that the help of others was waning, leading to their growing anxiety and insecurity.

For long periods in the dark and middle ages, though their lords could be oppressive, people could not imagine what freedom was. Equally, though poor, and liable to have hard times in bad seasons through cold, drought or flood, the normal working year was short, and people had a lot of free time waiting for crops to grow, and saints days for merriment. They also had the same strong feeling of community that the primitive group had. In short, the anxiety they felt was real, through poverty and providence, but was not generally social. Social anguish has grown steadily in the twentieth century along with the collapse of caring society into greed and exploitation.

People are feeling the absence of the kindness that close groups always had as a compensation for the random hardships of living—positive freedom. Instead they want more negative freedom—with its attendant failing cohesion of society.

Christianity had certain advantages over most religions of the Roman empire before it. One was its missionary activity—its proselytizing. Pagan religions generally did not proselytize. Members thought to be valuable as members would be approached or recommended, but on an exclusive basis. They had to be morally acceptable, but Christianity was glad to accept those whom the Pagan religions rejected. Novice Pagans were taught by a hierophant what was expected of them and what they were required to know and do as full members. Christian catechumens were similarly instructed, for several years, by a presbyter. With full membership, the mystoi had secret objects revealed to them, and similarly, catechumens had the local Church’s creed revealed to them. The Churches had no united creed until after the Nicene Council, and it was an unpopular move among some bishops to remove its secrecy before catechumens had been instructed correctly.

Not all Pagans followed a religion. Also popular, especially among intellectuals, were the philosophies that offered a world outlook like Stoicism, Epicureanism and Neoplatonism, each of which offered codes of morals and methods of pursuing virtue. Even so, some philosophies had religions associated with them like the Pythagoreans whose religion, Orphism, was to purify the mind, but which also had expiatory rites like the eastern mysteries. So some Pagans sought membership of religions by living lives acceptable to their gods, while others, like the noble emperor, Marcus Aurelius, a Stoic, sought virtue by living a life of philosophical morality.

Christians had a different approach to morality. Its members did not have to be virtuous to become Christians, but instead had to stop being a sinner, and thereby enter communion with God. By rejecting sin—crimes against the will of God—Christianity aimed to make morality central by vigorously preaching sinlessness, with the open threat that sinfulness means the withdrawal of the Holy Communion, and the permanent loss of the afterlife reward of perpetual bliss with God.

Christians’ motives for virtue, despite their modern obsession with free will, was not a fair choice, as it was for Pagans, it was coercion. The Christian God of love was a mask for the wrath and jealousy of a more basic, cruel and primitive Old Testament God. The misery of this life was to be compensated—for the compliant Christian—by an eternal life of bliss, but only when the convert had succeeded in pleasing God. Christ had explained how strict the rules were. The least sin could mean the loss of the eternally blissful life. It was much easier to miss out on the reward than it was to receive it.

Not only that, though. Although the Revelation of John is clear that consignment to the fires of hell constituted a rapid final and permanent death for the sinner, the idea of a never ending torture without death in perpetual flames was a more effective way of ensuring compliance and obedience among the considerable riff-raff that comprised much of early Christianity. The enormity of the consequences of even minor sins was driven into the poor people and slaves who had become Christians in the hope of life offering them something more than constant suffering in their tortured lives. It proved to be a powerful incentive to conform with the rules of the Church, long before anything certain was known about psychology.

W E H Lecky summarized the difference in approaches of Pagans and Christians:

The eye of the Pagan philosopher was ever fixed upon virtue, the eye of the Christian teacher upon sin. The first sought to amend men by extolling the beauty of holiness, the second by awakening the sentiment of remorse.

A History of European Morals

The Christian negative approach has been and still is, as Christians like to boast, sometimes succesful in bringing those who are thoroughly depraved and apparently impossible to reform to such a state of guilt and remorse in the face of the fear of Judgement that they have broken down and promised to abandon their objectionable behavior. The trouble is that the cure is based on promises that are so far from being verifiable as to be opportunistic lies. The Christian seeks to avoid sin in the hope of an eternal reward by living a life of lies.

Moreover, to control the whole of the membership of the Church, the clergy had to maintain that sinfulness was the norm for all human beings by Original Sin—so that the utmost self sacrifice for others could not absolve even the best human being from the need for clerical intervention via the application of the magical sacraments which soon became as essential as or even more essential than sinlessness or repentance for the sinner to qualify for the ultimate reward.

Humanity whose nature and basic instincts are to be concerned for the welfare of other human beings—and even animals—was denounced by Christians as perpetually depraved and sinful unless immunized by the magic and mumbo jumbo of the mass.

“When despots fall, religion plays key role in rebuilding societies: expert“

Rashid Omar, Research Scholar of Islamic Studies and Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, is an imam at the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town, South Africa. Omar’s research and teaching focus on religion, violence and peacebuilding, especially the Islamic ethics of war and peace and interreligious dialogue. The headline describes him as an “expert”. So when he was thus recently publicized in PhysOrg.com, a “leading web based science, research and technology news service”, saying “religion can play a key role in rebuilding societies after despots fall and violent, oppressive governments are toppled, as happened in Egypt and Tunisia”, is it justifiable for it to be treated as if it were some sort of research?

Surely there is nothing scientific about it, and someone at PhysOrg.com is spreading a message rather different from the website’s objectives. It is not science speaking but his own irrational commitment to religion. Is PhysOrg.com aiming for a Templeton grant?

We read there, in a piece by Shannon Chapla, that Omar thinks religion and religious people, so often considered part of the problem, can instead play key roles in rebuilding society:

In the midst of the worst kind of barbarism, people of different faith traditions found solace and healing in their own faiths and in interreligious solidarity. Now the scene in Tahrir Square is being duplicated all across North Africa and the Middle East. Recently in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, Rev Daniel Farrugia, a senior Roman Catholic priest at St. Francis Catholic Church, refused to be evacuated, choosing instead to stay and serve with “our sisters”, nearly 100 nuns working in hospitals and health centers treating the sick and injured.

Are we meant to think that all the other nurses and doctors had left their posts, and the lives of thousands depended on these dedicated Christians? Most of the staff in an Arab hospital, one can reasonably guess, would have been Moslems. Did the Moslems all abandon their patients, leaving only Catholic nuns to care for people who were ill or wounded? People whose vocation is to care for the sick, whether Christians, Moslems, Atheists, or any other category of human being, can be expected to feel the calling of their vocation at such times. It is that, not the calling of God or Allah, that should motivate them to do their jobs.

In just the same way, people instinctively help others simply because we are human, and have that instinct as a human. We are a communal animal, and have evolved characteristics that strengthen the value of the community to us. We live socially to have the help of others, and the security that a group around us offers. In turn we help them. Naturally altruistic people do not like spongers and free loaders getting help and doing nothing to help others. In the distant past, anyone sufficiently so inclined to be noticed would have been thrown out of the tribe and told to look after themselves. Generally they would not have managed on their own, and died. Meanwhile the tribe became more altrusitic by expelling its free loaders.

That is the reason human beings have certain morals, and the core of them are actions that support sociality between us. And Lo! what do we find the Christian God incarnate teaching?

Do unto others as you would be done by.

Yet Omar thinks it is religion that makes people kind:

In my own country of South Africa, black Christians, Muslims and many people of faith struggling against apartheid played a central role in transforming their society from racial oppression and dehumanization towards hope and justice. In the midst of the “Tunisami” now sweeping away despotic rulers across North Africa and the Middle East, ordinary people can collect the threads of peace and justice that are at the heart of both Islam and Christianity to transform their bleak worlds of indignity and dehumanization into freedom, democracy and justice.

It is utterly bogus and unscientific to claim religion is responsible for people acting naturally. Being robbed and oppressed by tyrants is not why we live in a society. We do not volunteer to be someone else’s slave. We expect respect and service from others in society, and we expect to do the same in return. None of us should expect to be exploited for some rich family or class, yet we tolerate it up to a point. It becomes intolerable when we feel we are getting less from society than we put in, when society is manifestly unfair and unjust.

More often than not, it is religion that makes people act unnaturally, makes people hate and want to kill each other. The reason for that is also explained by the evolution of humanity as a social animal. We lived in small tribes of about 150 for a very long time, and it was during those myriads of years that we learnt to love people in our social group. But we also learnt to hate people in other tribes who were alien from us, had a different culture, ate different food, had different manners, and probably spoke a different dialect or even different language. Mainly, tribes remained apart, but when they came together competing for the same herds or patch of woodland, they would fight. Religions are modern tribes, tribes resurrected when they had died out in society otherwise, and people in different religious groups tend to hate the others. In today’s massive urban sprawls, we are better off without religions, which base hatred on false beliefs about God.

Yet Omar, as an imam in Cape Town, before and after the transition to democracy, says he is trying to build “a bridge between my faith commitment and my participation in protest against racism and apartheid”. Why should he need to build any such commitment, when it is natural for us to live together and love one another providing that we recognize the purpose of human society?

Those who wish to divide society on spurious grounds need to be taught a little science, and a little evolutionary morality to make them realise that we cannot live together harmoniously in deeply divided societies, and nor can we live in deeply unfair societies. These are the objectives that should unite us, not superstitions. This is what our commitment should be, and it is at the core of most of the imperial religions because it is at the core of our being.

A news item somewhere informs us that John Dominic Crossan, once a Catholic priest, and now a long time member of the Jesus Seminar, has written an explanation of the Pater Noster or the Lord’s Prayer—“Our Father…” Apparently it is a prayer about the father of a household and the need to distribute the household’s food fairly. He may be a bit right!

Christians have always tried to maintain that Jesus was a member of an ordinary family, one of the motivations, no doubt, for the invention of the Birth Narratives, stories that no one in the main gospels ever refers to or seemingly knows anything about. And for the very good reason that few scholars doubt that they were later inventions tacked on to two of the gospels when they were compiled.

I cannot imagine why the prayer should not refer to God, as most Christians believe, but in the context not of people who lived in family groups, but of people who lived in religious communities, namely, the Essenes. They had a special meal, like the Eucharist, and most likely its source—the scenes where Jesus broke bread, and fed the four and five thousand—called the Messianic Meal, and it seems that the head of the table would recite the prayer on that occasion.

Jesus was an Essene beyond reasonable doubt. That Christians persistently deny it shows they are unreasonable. The Essenes were a Jewish church and, like Jews, and many others, called God their Father. To them, God was the Father of the human race, so all men were sons of God, but they were sons in a hierarchy of sons, the head of each level in the hierarchy being a father to his own sons.

Familiar? The later gentile church retained the system. Bishops, monks and priests are called father by others, monks are led by a father, an abbot, a Patriarch is a Head Father, an archbishop, and a Pope is a Father (Latin Papa, Greek, Pappas). In Aramaean, “abba” means father, and “ab” or “av” does in Hebrew. So, Barabbas means Son of the Father in Aramaean, and Barabbas was Jesus, indeed modern gospels admit that Barabbas was called Jesus!

The Essene hierarchies were not based on material status, on wealth, but on service to others. “The last is first and the first last” being an expression of rewarding service as opposed to status. God’s sons, the human race, were to be valued for their service to others, not on the basis of wealth, so the Essenes, like the apostles in Acts, held all their goods in common. They were communists. That is one big reason why American Christians cannot face up to the truth about Christ.

Christians are having a lot of fun at the expense of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. An example is some US lawyer who describes himself as a neoconservative Catholic.

He has a blog in which he and someone else sneer at atheists by featuring Richard Dawkins’ US associate, Josh Timonen, whom the RDF is suing for stealing its funds. The person in question denies the allegation, but will have the chance to demonstrate in court an innocent explanation of where the money has gone. Until he is unable to do so, he is legally considered innocent, and the charges are allegations, not affirmed facts.

Is the neoconservative Catholic author really a practising lawyer? Maybe. He is careful to use the adverb “allegedly” while speaking of the supposed theft, but his guest or partner whom he allows to speak in his own right on the same blog, assumes that Mr Timonen is guilty, despite his plea of innocence.

Of course, we have seen under the Bush years that neoconservatives haven’t a clue what legality means—torture is legal as long as it is suitably defined, international law does not exist being simply what Bush and the neocons say it is—and nor do they know what Christianity means for that matter. Bush and presumably all of those Christian neocons who supported him, and still support the far right of the Republican Party, think Christ said things like:

• if someone steals your coat take his life in revenge
• if a man hits you on the cheek blow out his brains
• if someone forces you to walk a mile, cut off his legs
• if you find a foreigner laying senseless on the ground, take the chance to rob him of his wallet, go rape his wife and daughters, kill them all, burn down his house, and blow up his village.

They are proud to torture and kill people without any process of law whatsoever, apparently because they know their Christian judgements must be right, so law is the Devil’s work, meant to interfere with God’s own Christian justice. Neoconservatives do not have suspects because to be suspect means to be guilty.

If they are serious about salvation, and they most probably use the whole notion of religion only to gull the gullible Christians who believe them, then they should go back and read the Christian gospels for themselves.

If they then seriously think that God, if that is who Christ is, approves of neoconservative ideology, then they truly are unfit to be lawyers because they plainly cannot comprehend English.

Richard Dawkins’s speech delivered in Whitehall at the London rally against the Pope, 18th Sept 2010, was shorter than the full text, mostly because the rally was so huge—an estimated 15,000—that the speeches started late and had to be curtailed. This is the original speech from Dawkins’s own website:

Should Joseph Ratzinger have been welcomed with all the pomp and ceremony due to a Head of State? No. As Geoffrey Robertson has shown in The Case of the Pope, the Holy See’s claim to statehood is founded on a Faustian deal in which Mussolini handed over 1.2 square miles of central Rome in exchange for Church support of his fascist regime. Our government chose the occasion of the pope’s visit to announce their intention to “do God”. As a friend has remarked to me, presumably we should expect the imminent hand over of Hyde Park to the Vatican, to clinch the deal?

Should Ratzinger, then, be welcomed as the head of a church? By all means, if individual Catholics wish to overlook his many transgressions and lay out the red carpet for his designer red shoes, let them do so. But don’t ask the rest of us to pay. Don’t ask the British taxpayer to subsidize the propaganda mission of an institution whose wealth is measured in the tens of billions: wealth for which the phrase “ill-gotten” might have been specifically coined. And spare us the nauseating spectacle of the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and assorted Lord Lieutenants and other dignitaries cringing and fawning sycophantically all over him as though he were somebody we should respect.

Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, was respected by some as a saintly man. But nobody could call Benedict XVI saintly and keep a straight face. Whatever this leering old fixer may be, he is not saintly. Is he intellectual? Scholarly? That is often claimed, although it is far from clear what there is in theology to be scholarly about. Surely nothing to respect.

The unfortunate little fact that Joseph Ratzinger joined the Hitler Youth has been the subject of a widely observed moratorium. I’ve respected it myself, hitherto. But after the Pope’s outrageous speech in Edinburgh, blaming atheism for Hitler, one can’t help feeling that the gloves are off. Did you hear what he said?

“Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews… As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century…”

You have to wonder about the PR skills of the advisors who let that paragraph through. Oh but of course, I was forgetting, his senior advisor is that Cardinal who takes one look at the immigration officials at Heathrow and concludes that he must have landed in the Third World. The poor man was no doubt prescribed a bushel of Hail Marys, on top of his swift attack of diplomatic gout—and one can’t help wondering whether the afflicted foot was the one he puts in his mouth.

At first I was annoyed by the Pope’s disgraceful attack on atheists and secularists, but then I saw it as reassuring. It suggests that we have rattled them so much that they have to resort to insulting us, in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the child rape scandal.

It probably is too harsh to expect the 15-year-old Ratzinger to have seen through the Nazis. As a devout Catholic, he would have had dinned into him, along with the Catechism, the obnoxious idea that all Jews are to be held responsible for killing Jesus—the “Christ-killer” libel—not repudiated until the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). The German Roman Catholic psyche of the time was still shot through with the anti-Semitism of centuries.

Adolf Hitler was a Roman Catholic. Or at least he was as much a Roman Catholic as the 5 million so-called Roman Catholics in this country today. For Hitler never renounced his baptismal Catholicism, which was doubtless the criterion for counting the 5 million alleged British Catholics today. You cannot have it both ways. Either you have 5 million British Catholics, in which case you have to have Hitler too. Or Hitler was not a Catholic, in which case you have to give us an honest figure for the number of genuine Catholics in Britain today—the number who really believe Jesus turns himself into a wafer, as the former Professor Ratzinger presumably does.

In any case, Hitler certainly was not an atheist. In 1933 he claimed to have “stamped atheism out”, having banned most of Germany’s atheist organizations, including the German Freethinkers League whose building was then turned into an information bureau for church affairs.

At very least, Hitler believed in a personified “Providence”, presumably akin to the Divine Providence invoked by the Cardinal Archbishop of Munich in 1939, when Hitler escaped assassination and the Cardinal ordered a special Te Deum in Munich Cathedral:

“To thank Divine Providence in the name of the Archdiocese for the Führer’s fortunate escape.”

We may never know whether Hitler identified his “Providence” with the Cardinal’s God. But he certainly knew his overwhelmingly Christian constituency, the millions of good Christian Germans with “Gott mit uns” on their belt buckles, who actually did his dirty work for him. He knew his support base. Hitler most certainly did “do God”. Here’s part of a speech he made in Munich, the heart of Catholic Bavaria, in 1922:

“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who—God’s truth!—was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.”

That is just one of numerous speeches, and passages in Mein Kampf, where Hitler invoked his Christianity. No wonder he received such warm support from within the Catholic hierarchy of Germany. And Benedict’s predecessor, Pius XII, is not guiltless, as the Catholic writer John Cornwell devastatingly showed, in his book Hitler’s Pope.

It would be unkind to prolong this point, but Ratzinger’s speech in Edinburgh on Thursday was so disgraceful, so hypocritical, so redolent of the sound of stones hurled from within a glass house, I felt that I had to reply.

Even if Hitler had been an atheist—as Stalin more surely was—how dare Ratzinger suggest that atheism has any connection whatsoever with their horrific deeds? Any more than Hitler and Stalin’s non-belief in leprechauns or unicorns. Any more than their sporting of a moustache—along with Franco and Saddam Hussein. There is no logical pathway from atheism to wickedness.

Unless, that is, you are steeped in the vile obscenity at the heart of Catholic theology. I refer—and I am indebted to Paula Kirby for the point—to the doctrine of Original Sin. These people believe—and they teach this to tiny children, at the same time as they teach them the terrifying falsehood of hell—that every baby is “born in sin”. That would be Adam’s sin, by the way, Adam who, as they themselves now admit, never existed. Original sin means that, from the moment we are born, we are wicked, corrupt, damned. Unless we believe in their God. Or unless we fall for the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell. That, ladies and gentleman, is the disgusting theory that leads them to presume that it was godlessness that made Hitler and Stalin the monsters that they were. We are all monsters unless redeemed by Jesus. What a vile, depraved, inhuman theory to base your life on.

Joseph Ratzinger is an enemy of humanity

1. He is an enemy of children, whose bodies he has allowed to be raped and whose minds he has encouraged to be infected with guilt. It is embarrassingly clear that the church is less concerned with saving child bodies from rapists than with saving priestly souls from hell—and most concerned with saving the long-term reputation of the church itself.
2. He is an enemy of gay people, bestowing on them the sort of bigotry that his church used to reserve for Jews.
3. He is an enemy of women—barring them from the priesthood as though a penis were an essential tool for pastoral duties. What other employer is allowed to discriminate on grounds of sex, when filling a job that manifestly doesn’t require physical strength or some other quality that only males might be thought to have?
4. He is an enemy of truth, promoting barefaced lies about condoms not protecting against AIDS, especially in Africa.
5. He is an enemy of the poorest people on the planet, condemning them to inflated families that they cannot feed, and so keeping them in the bondage of perpetual poverty. A poverty that sits ill with the obscene riches of the Vatican.
6. He is an enemy of science, obstructing vital stem-cell research, on grounds not of morality but of pre-scientific superstition.
7. Less seriously from my point of view, Ratzinger is even an enemy of the Queen’s own church, arrogantly endorsing a predecessor’s dissing of Anglican Orders as “absolutely null and utterly void”, while shamelessly trying to poach Anglican vicars to shore up his own pitifully declining priesthood.
8. Finally, perhaps of most personal concern to me, he is an enemy of education. Quite apart from the lifelong psychological damage caused by the guilt and fear that have made catholic education infamous throughout the world, he and his church foster the educationally pernicious doctrine that evidence is a less reliable basis for belief than faith, tradition, revelation and authority—his authority.

It is not often that I find myself agreeing with a Catholic cardinal. They are usually much more intent on defending Vatican politics than acting according to the ethics of the Christian god, Jesus Christ. Regrettably most Christian laypeople are no better. They haven’t a clue what Christ taught because they never read what the gospels have to say about him, and take all their directions regarding morality from their priests and pastors, or more often from their relatives and friends.

Interviewed by BBC Scotland, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, has emphasized to that vast Christian country, the USA, that they ought to act with Christian morality if they are to claim to be a Christian country. He has agreed with the Scottish government that it was right to free Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan found guilty of bombing a civil aeroplane flying over Locherbie in Scotland, on grounds of compassion. He is suffering from terminal cancer.

270 innocent people on board Pan Am flight 103 were murdered when it was blown up over town of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988. The cardinal agrees it was “an act of unbelievable horror and gratuitous barbarity”, and that bereaved people have a right in civilized countries to expect justice for such a heinous crime.

Two Libyans were brought to trial over the attack, Kalifa Fhima and Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi who was found guilty and made to serve a lifetime sentence in Scotland, the country where the crime occurred. Justice seemed to be done. But after about ten years of incarceration Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. To the chagrin of, it seems, most of the USA, the Scottish government agreed to the release of al-Magrahi on compassionate grounds. He was thought to have only three months to live.

The US since then has at all levels from the public through the media up to the political—congress—have been baying for some scapegoat, even demanding that the sovereign authorities of Scotland must appear before the Senate as if they were criminals, or, failing that, appearing before a Senate committee meeting in Scotland. The cardinal answers:

The Scottish government has made the decision and the Scottish government is answerable to the Scottish people—not the US government or US citizens. Everyone acted according to Scots law in releasing Megrahi on compassionate grounds, having taken medical advice. I still think they did the right thing, although the man is still alive. We shouldn’t be crawling out to America, or having them come here and questioning us on our own territory.

The Criminal, Justice and Parole Division of the Scottish Government earlier had said:

The perpetration of an atrocity should not be a reason for losing sight of the values people in Scotland seek to uphold and the faith and beliefs by which we seek to live the values of humanity and compassion.

Cardinal O’Brien thought it was a clash of cultures. Americans were focused only on retribution, but Scotland had a culture of care. Through their justice system, Scots have cultivated a culture of compassion, but many Americans had an attitude towards the concept of justice which amounted to a culture of vengeance:

In many states—more than half—they kill the perpetrators of horrible crimes, by lethal injection or even firing squad—I say that is a culture of vengeance. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—that is not our culture in Scotland and I would like to think that the US government, and these states that do still have capital punishment, would learn something from us.

The Americans are not in good company in their eagerness to punish its citizens and others by the most severe sentences imaginable, including terminating human life—something they are excellent at, whether at home or abroad. Since 1976, 1,221 people have been executed in the US. Its execution rate is only outdone by Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and China. In Iraq, international experts estimate a million innocent people have been murdered consequent upon the Bush invasion. A few decades back the figure in Vietnam was two million innocents, and in both places many continue to suffer today because of the utterly barbaric and inhuman methods used to secure victory.

Americans are good at revenge. What they are not good at is justice.

Cardinal O’Brien thinks it is in the midst of such inhuman barbarism, that we must affirm our humanity. In moments of grief and despair we must show the world that the standards of the murderer and his disdain for human life are not our standards. Though they plunge to the depths of human conduct, we will not follow them. Americans should “direct their gaze inwards” rather than fussing about the Scottish justice system.

Suspects are not guilty until proven to be, yet anyone “suspected” of terrorism, under the oppressive laws brought in by Bush and Blair in their respective countries, are assumed to be terrorists. Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter lost her life in the atrocity, and other British people who were bereaved in the bombing, were never satisfied that the trial of the Libyan suspects was fair. He wanted the trial to be held in Scotland precisely because in the USA…

…both men would be judicially executed by a system which operates perilously close to the doctrine that might is right, and that truth can be bought. Moreover, for those deemed to be the enemy of “God’s Own Country” the quality of the evidence against them might be less important than the opportunity for vengeance to be seen to be done—that death should be delivered summarily. Unfortunately the notion that God is on your country’s side has led men to commit so much malevolent slaughter down the ages that the whole name of religion can be criticized.

Swire knew Scottish justice was among the best judicial systems in the world.

Those who seem to lust for this man’s death should look not at the details of why he was released, but the question of whether he really was guilty… Meanwhile let us join with the Cardinal in giving thanks to our God if we admit One, that this man, who may well be innocent has not been judicially executed in our names.

The point Swire is making and that the Americans, baying for a victim rather than justice, ignore is that the evidence which condemned al-Magrahi was apparently bought by the US government. The chief witness linking al-Magrahi with the flight received $2 million for his exertions. Now, to people in the UK who, like Dr Swire, notice these things, something smells horribly foul. Al-Magrahi was released quite properly for compassionate reasons, but it looks very likely that he ought never to have been locked up in the first place. The outcry from the US then makes more sense—US perfidy and deceit might be, for once, exposed.

The GAP (Great American Public) never notice bad smells that the US government give rise to, even when it blows off in their faces. Americans are too angelic to be evil. And, in any case, the GCN (Great Christian Nation) simply has no idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ, and therefore no moral basis to judge—no Christian one, at any rate. The cardinal might have quoted the gospels:

Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.

Matthew 18:21-22

Here is the GCN that will not forgive once, even for a dying man whose guilt is far from certain. Of course, the Christian will say forgiving seven times let alone seventy is pure stupidity. OK, but then you are not a Christian are you? Or they will complain it is too hard for a mere mortal, even if God can manage it. But Christ also said:

Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.

Luke 6:36

Their own God, God the Son, directs them to be merciful just as their own God, God the Father, is in heaven. They just have no excuse at all. The clear implication is that they must be merciful if they expect God to show the mercy to them they expect post mortem. Even so, they will argue that their faith is sufficient, because their pastors tell them so, but these words of Christ are not just optional extras. They are imperatives—commands. Faith is not sufficient. Christians have to do things to be saved. Too bad they only listen to the TV evangelists who are in it for the bucks they get out of the ignorant. These are not Christians but the opposite.

It is novel, though, for a senior cleric to be pointing out the hypocrisy of the Great Christian Nation!

American high schools have atheist clubs, warns the head of US Catholic bishops. Kids confirmed in the eighth grade, are atheists by the time they’re sophomores in high school. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, President of the US Catholic Bishops’ Conference, notes that atheism is getting popular among teenagers and students in the USA. Atheism is growing rapidly in the 18-25 age group, and Catholic and Protestant professionals alike are getting worried about it. Young Americans are beginning to get the courage to go against the pressure of their parents and peers and proudly declare their atheism, flooding YouTube with atheistic videos. The US is getting like Europe. People who have long believed that religion is part of the American psyche are beginning to doubt!

It is hard for the scientific skeptic to imagine that human beings differ greatly in the way they think, but the religious believe they do think differently from nonbelievers. How then can devout Christian youth be persuaded by godless atheism? Indeed why should the Christian confident that they think differently from the atheist even worry that they can be deconverted by mere arguments? There could be no reason, if it were true, but it is not. UCLA researchers have found that Christians and nonbelievers use the same parts of the brain in categorizing the truth of articles of religious faith. Sam Harris, who recently completed a doctoral dissertation in cognitive neuroscience at UCLA, is one of the researchers. 15 Christian believers and 15 nonbelievers judged the truth of religious tenets while their brains were being monitored in a scanner. For both groups:

1. judging religious assertions activated parts of the brain related with emotional judgment, uncertainty, rewards and self
2. thinking about facts used parts of the brain that are strongly associated with memory retrieval
3. asked to declare as true or false matters of faith took longer to respond than when asked to categorize matters of fact.

If anything, it shows that humans generally find matters of faith more puzzling and emotional than matters of fact, so even the faithful must have their doubts. The Cardinal sees it the other way round. Atheists are evangelical in their proselytizing, so they are thinking like believers!

It’s the mirror image of a kind of fundamentalism, because it’s very restrictive in its use of reason. It’s also very triumphalistic and self-righteous.

Either way, the mode of thinking of the pious and the profane are the same, and atheism can be taught to the next generation just as belief is, so any rise in atheism at the expense of religion is likely to continue to grow. Christian professionals are praying that the fear of death will change the minds of the newly atheistical youth, as they grow older.

The cardinal says that unbelief among young people is not just rejection of going to church, it is new atheism and every bit as intolerant as Christian fundamentalism. That is just old fashioned scaremongering, itself a form of intolerance. The intolerance of patriarchal religion is not surprising. It is the foremost teaching of the Old Testament God, in deed if not always in word. American youth are right to reject it.

The London Catholic Herald explains to us in the words of one Marc Sidwell, an Anglo Catholic, that California has its own “College of Light”. Would you believe it, it is called Thomas Aquinas College? It seems that this rather plainly Catholic College offers “a liberal education as if truth mattered”, and “an escape from skepticism”.

The author sees no contradiction in all this. What I mean is that liberal inquiry has found that truth can only be approached through skepticism, that Catholicism is the trunk of Christianity, and Christianity not only requires belief to be credulously accepted, it is far from being liberal in any sense close to any truth.

Sidwell, seemingly a master of liberal education himself, considers TAC as a “Great Books school” whose students “engage” with thinkers that define Western civilization like St Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Euclid, Plato and Shakespeare, and whose teachers use the Socratic method. Certain that truth exists, and unsaid but obviously true itself, that they have it, TAC rejects the relativism denounced by no less than the pope himself! It all defies analysis unless one is ready to admit that it is bollocks.

The TAC scholars have obviously never heard of begging the question, and cannot comprehend that believing one knows the truth is not the same as knowing it. But that’s Christianity for you. They assure each other that it is so, and take heart that all these clever people cannot be wrong.

Dr Sidwell assures his Catholic readers that liberal education even precedes Catholicism, thus proving he is not bigoted. It began in fifth century Athens as the right of a free man. It did not, then have anything to do with the God of the Hebrews who at that time was too busy helping the Jews to build a “temple, God, for the adoration of…” The church became involved only when Greek tradition and Jewish tradition met and mingled in the creative maelstrom of Pagan Rome. The Romans, culturally influenced by these Greeks, though they considered them effeminate, began to make tentative moves away from the slavery that engulfed them all, towards freedom, but then were engulfed instead by the backwards, conservative, massive intolerance of the religion of the Hebrew God in its new manifestation of Christianity.

Preserved in the Benedictine orders, transmitted by schoolmaster-priests, it was the Christian liberal educators who kept the life of the mind alive through centuries of uncertainty and civil strife.

Eh? Is this sleight of word and history, the liberal education these Catholics mean? Who were responsible for the centuries of uncertainty and civil strife? The Christians destroyed classical civilization after little more than a century of power in Rome, launching Europe into a ten century long dark age. The original sixth century formation of the Benedictine order had no influence on the collapse of civilization. The monks were as corrupt and ignorant as clerics generally. It was the reaction against the wealth and corruption of traditional monastic orders like the Benedictines that signified the beginning of the end of the Christian hegemony called Christendom, and the start of the Renaissance, with the twelfth century foundation of orders like the Franciscans. As for schoolmaster priests, even a rough military prince, Charlemagne, at the height of Christian power was appalled by the ignorance of the supposedly educated clergy.

Anyone who has had a liberal education will see Sidwell’s travesty of an account as an unmitigated lie, but that is what Christians are truly good at. They have had a lot of practice over the centuries. But Dr Sidwell takes as his evidence of the educational calling of the church, the doctor angelicus, Thomas Aquinas himself.

St Thomas Aquinas, is proof of the high value Catholicism has always placed upon reasoned enquiry into creation. Yet the sceptics like Richard Dawkins continue to sneer at Christianity as an intellectual vacancy. They misquote Tertullian as “I believe because it is absurd” and do not know St Anselm of Canterbury’s Credo ut intelligam. (“I believe so as to understand”).

Our guru of the modern Catholic liberal education says critics of Christianity misquote Tertullian when Catholics have long accepted “I believe because it is absurd” as a summary of Tertullian’s:

Born is the Son of God, shamelessly, because it is shameful. And dead is the Son of God, believably, because it is absurd. And, buried, He rose again, assuredly, because impossible.

De Carne Christi

A Christian educator is lying to make a feeble case against his critics, but Anselm’s (1033-1109) citation goes completely against any sort of liberal education, notably because it harks back to the middle of the Christian dark age when belief was compulsory. To base understanding on belief with no evidence that it is well founded other than the belief that it is so is utterly illiberal. It is the teaching of confidence tricksters and mountebanks, but still fools billions of naïve and ignorant Catholics, and not a few intelligent ones.

Anyway, to return to Aquinas (1225-1274), son of a wealthy nobleman, a corpulent monk at a time when peasants were dropping dead in the fields, sick and malnourished, Aquinas was less liberal a thinker than his teacher Albertus Magnus, and the Schoolmen that he founded became increasingly less liberal and increasingly bogged down in irrelevant dogma over the next couple of centuries. Though Aquinas was a great thinker for his time, he was an early Rennaissance Man, his thought triggered by the newly discovered Aristotle, but channelled into nothing productive, just as all thought for the previous eight Christian centuries had been drained away.

If “the human mind is ordered to truth”, as Sidwell quotes college president, Dr Thomas E Dillon, as saying, then the whole Christian endeavour has been set against truth not for it, and this eulogy of TAC is part of the continuing scam, given a modicum of truth by the shocking neglect of education in the public sector.

Sidwell perpetuates the transparent lie that Christianity has tried to perpetuate learning. It is sophistry, true in a minor sense only. Christianity did maintain some clever men and some education throughout the dark ages, but purely for devotional reasons. Rudimentary Latin was taught so that priests could theoretically know what the mass meant. Many did not, and never got to understand the Latin either. For this reason, some Latin books were preserved, but far more were allowed to decay, and have been lost forever. Greek was worse off. Greek and Greek books were effectively lost, and only rediscovered by contact with the eastern Church and the Moslems during the crusades making Aquinas possible. Art and architecture, science and engineering, perfected in classical times were lost for over half a millennium. Towns decayed, trade collapsed, slavery was maintained under the guise of serfdom. The world regressed into little short of barbarity, yet the argument persists that Christianity preserved classical culture. Christianity destroyed it almost completely, and the sophistry is not an outright lie only because a tiny fraction was preserved in an utterly haphazard way for the education of clergymen.

Sidwell is either self deluded or a typical Christian sociopath. He fantasizes about what wonders the Catholic Church might have come up with, had it not been for the puritan revolution, but seems incapable of thinking about what it did come up with when left to its own devices. Maybe it is because it is too horrible to think about. Nevertheless, Catholicism deliberately hounded and murdered millions, and mostly cruelly and unjustly. Today, it is fashionable for popes to apologise for matters that cannot be apologized for. Only Catholics are impressed. What can any apology mean to someone you have slowly roasted to death? The record of the Churches, and of patriarchal religion as a whole is disgusting, and no odour of sanctity is miraculous enough to cover the smell of it.