Esteem Me!
May 9, 2008 by athinkingman
It’s official. You have to show me more deep respect. The Roman Catholic Archbishop has said so!
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor called for more understanding and appreciation between believers and non-believers, urging Christians to treat atheists and agnostics with “deep esteem”. In a lecture given at Westminster Cathedral, which comes after a spate of public clashes with secularists over issues such as stem-cell research, gay adoption and faith schools, it appears that the Cardinal is trying to build bridges.
There are two reasons why you should esteem me:
- Atheists, apparently, can’t be held entirely responsible for the decline of faith in the UK. Believers share some of the guilt as well and shouldn’t therefore adapt condemnatory attitudes to secularists without looking in their own back yards first.
- Apparently there is a ‘hidden God’ active in everyone’s life, including even the lives of atheists.
The first point is a welcome self-awareness that is blindingly obvious to many outside of the Church. The second point is a statement that is so general as to have no substantial meaning. I might just as well claim that everyone has a ‘hidden dog’ inside them. If you ask me for evidence I can find a few of your more pleasing attributes and say that the hidden dog has caused them. Such a claim would be as valid as the Cardinal’s. Neither of us could point to any proof other than our sincere beliefs that it was really, really so.
It would seem that the Cardinal has some awareness of the difficulty of his position. He seems to know that it just won’t wash for many people using their brains that have either evolved or been given them by god. That organ helps us detect hogwash. We look for evidence. We use reason. In every other area of our lives we can smell a rat a mile off. Knowing that he cannot pass those tests, the Cardinal has to change the rules and create a special universe (cloud-cuckoo-land?) where you accept big things because someone says so and you cannot apply the normal verification rules.
He claimed that God is not a “fact in the world” as though God could be treated as “one thing among other things to be empirically investigated” and affirmed or denied on the “basis of observation … If Christians really believed in the mystery of God, we would realise that proper talk about God is always difficult, always tentative.” Doubt is the great unifying factor that can help Catholics embrace atheists and agnostics. So we are united by ignorance because the great proclaimer of truth admits that it is uncertain (while he continues to propagate life-restricting practices emanating from apparent certainty).
So, as I was saying, there is a dog, and a hidden dog in all of us, even those who don’t believe in dog. And you can’t really dispute that because it is a great mystery that you have to believe. (You may not be able to prove me wrong, but on the balance of probability - you know, that kind of judgement you normally use all the time - you know I’m crazy! Really, you do!)
I am saddened by many things about Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. I am saddened that while Roman Catholic Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, he moved a priest who had been a paedophile since 1959 and committed over 20 known offences rather than remove his license. The priest continued to abuse boys until 1985 (see Structural and Moral Failure). I am saddened by his attempts to subvert the British Medical Associations Code of Ethics in a Roman Catholic hospital (see Divided Loyalty). I am saddened by many other things too - his attempts to increase sectarianism by the promotion of faith schools, his views on abortion and gays etc. However, I am sure that like all of us, he is a talented, significant, creative and fallible human being, and because of that I am willing to give him my respect. If he wants my esteem, he has to earn it, and he hasn’t done that yet. If he ever manages that, it will be because of qualities he displays that I value, rather than because of any mythical notion of a hidden god.
The thing that really gets my goat is his attempt to move the debate into another dimension - to change the rules of discourse, to move the goalposts. It really, really isn’t good enough to claim mystery and then expect belief. Historically that has got people into all sorts of trouble and is an affront to my dignity as a human being.
In fact, it is very, very disrespectful!
(Source: BBC)
See also Terry Sanderson’s I don’t believe it.
The “hidden god” hypothesis is a mistake and a bad one. It is one of those explanations which, as Popper pointed out, because they explain everything, thereby explain nothing. For thoughtful unbelievers, it raises far more questions than it answers.
There is a more interesting question, however. Call me cynical but I am always suspicious when the enemy’s champion adopts a conciliatory tone. Why, suddenly, would he encourage believers to esteem unbelievers? I smell a rat(zinger).
There is at the moment an unholy (sic) alliance among religious groups to make “respect” for their beliefs a legal requirement. Any government that went along with this would be insane, of course, but when I look at Gordon Brown and his gibbering cohorts, sanity is not the first quality that jumps out at me. (ID cards, anyone?)
Could it be that the good Cardinal has realized that in order to demand respect, one needs to show it? Well, at least until the legislation has been passed.
Could it be, in a word, that this conciliatory tone is a cynical ploy to sound oh-so-reasonable while the pot of respect for religion is gently simmering in government minds?
How long before we hear a similar love-atheists message from the Archdruid of Cant?
Countdown begins…
It does sound a little bit dodgy to me as well. I personally have no beef with religion or people with faith until that faith starts to try to dictate how others who don’t necessarily share those beliefs should live their lives.
I might just as well claim that everyone has a ‘hidden dog’ inside them.
Ha, ha….I have a tigress inside of me…so my husband tells me. aarrrrrrrrrrrrgggg!
That organ helps us detect hogwash. We look for evidence. We use reason.
I think that what people call god is our brain. But it can’t be god because it helps us understand that there is not god. So my brain is my brain, and god–well–is not God.
The thing that really gets my goat is his attempt to move the debate into another dimension - to change the rules of discourse
Well, yes, what he is doing is conceding a little, so as to keep the progressive in the fold. Unfortunately for his church, his arguments aren’t progressive enough to win the skeptics.
What’s going to happen is that the “true” Christians are going to find themselves a hard-line church, and the “progressives” are not going to come, leaving his church with more empty pews.