The Ethics of the Possible - Chatbotic Sermons

Interesting piece by Deena Prichep, in which clergy agonize as to the ethics of using a chatbot to construct a sermon.

The first point is that it is easy - perhaps too easy. ChatGPT currently advertises its sermon-writing services as follows: 

Your preaching companion. Transform Your Message into Impactful Sermons. Just provide your topic, choose from three tailor-made outlines, and let's co-create a captivating sermon. Fully adaptable to your congregation's needs - denomination, duration, tone, and language.

And for busy clergy the results seem almost touched by the Holy Spirit (aka Ghost in the Machine). Prichep quotes a Lutheran pastor whose first reaction was Oh my God, this is really good. (I may be doing my own research here, but I think there may be something in the Bible about taking the name of the Lord in vain.)

But just because you can doesn't mean you should. One of the arguments in favour of letting a large language model write your sermons for you is that it frees up your time to do more important things, like pastoral care. But are these things really more important? Brad East argues (following Calvin) that the primary task of ministry is the service of Word and sacrament, and that use of Artificial Intelligence shortchanges something essential.

So the underlying principle here seems to be that it might be okay to use AI tools for less important tasks but not for your most important task.

However, there are some other issues with the use of AI tools, including the environmental cost. And East notes the possiblity that large language models might fabricate material as well as pushing a particular agenda, although one might think preachers have always been able to do this without the aid of technology.

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Brad East, AI Has No Place in the Pulpit (Christianity Today, 27 September 2023)

Deena Prichep, We asked clergy if they use AI to help write sermons. Here's what they said (NPR 17 July 2025) HT Carissa Véliz

Deena Prichep, Encore: Religion and AI, what does it mean when the word of God comes from a chatbot? (NPR 19 July 2025)

John Rector, The Ghost in the Machine (19 June 2024) 

Brad Turner, Beatitudes or Platitudes (Milton Church of Christ, 19 December 2021) 

Just About Managing

In the UK from 2013 to 2016 there were old Etonians in three important posts: Prime Minister, Mayor of London, and Archibishop of Canterbury. Justin Welby had spent much of his life in the oil industry, and had only been a bishop for just over a year when appointed to the top job in the Church of England. Initially praised for his crisp business-like approach, and expected to drive improvements across the Anglican congregation, some critics thought he ended up achieving very little, reduced to bland words and sleight of hand.

When you spoke to him, you sensed he was a CEO who had mentally allocated you five minutes before passing on to the next matter to be dealt with. That is agenda-driven episcopacy, rather than a listening episcopacy. You can’t run a church with a handbook full of business buzzwords. Pepinster

Mr Welby has undoubtedly seen it as a big part of his job to hold together very different factions within the Church of England and, even more difficult, in the wider global Church, the Anglican Communion of 85 million people. ... He has expended a huge amount of energy in this endeavour of finding common ground through 12 years during which there has been other momentous social change, and at times has shown himself to be an astute political operator. Maqbook

But his failure to tackle the safeguarding issue properly has damaged the Church and brought an end to his tenure. Martyn Percy argues that the safeguarding measures that Welby oversaw are ill-thought-out and arbitrarily enforced, and deter the sort of volunteers on whom the church has traditionally relied for local good works 

And Ian Paul thought Welby was a poor leader overall. Justin managed to make enemies of every single group. He made enemies of liberals by talking about evangelism. He made enemies of evangelicals by talking about sexuality. He made enemies of conservatives by talking about new forms of church.

So much for his management skills then.

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Andrew Anthony, The Church of England is beset by shame and division. Can it survive? (Observer 17 November 2024)

Stephen Bates, Just About Managing (The Tablet, 16 March 2017) (Note: link is to the archived page because of trojan warning on live page)

Stephen Bates, Justin Welby: why archbishop chosen for his managerial skills had to go (Guardian 12 November 2024)

Aleem Maqbool, Church at precarious moment after Welby resignation (BBC News, 13 November 2024)

Catherine Pepinster, Why did Justin Welby fall so tragically short? Because he was preoccupied with efficiency, not listening (Guardian 13 November 2024)

Harriet Sherwood, The C of E’s CEO: how will history judge Justin Welby’s tenure as archbishop of Canterbury? (Guardian 13 November 2024)

Wikipedia: Old Etonians

Vain Repetition

At the time of writing this post, the US election is not quite over. The mainstream media (now including the Murdoch empire) are presenting the strong likelihood that the Biden-Harris ticket will turn out to have won, but President Trump and his loyal supporters appear optimistic of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, with the aid of legal arguments, aggressive protest outside the vote counting stations, and of course prayer.

In this post, I want to talk about a prayer session on the Thursday after the election led by Paula White-Cain, Trump's controversial spiritual advisor.

Presidential spiritual adviser Paula White is currently leading an impassioned prayer service in an effort to secure Trump's reelection. pic.twitter.com/hCSRh84d6g

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) November 5, 2020

A number of people have offered musical interpretations and mashups. @pjgrisar of @jdforward saw parallels with Steve Reich's 1965 composition It's Gonna Rain, which used a tape recording of an apocalyptic Pentecostal street preacher called Brother Walter.

Meanwhile, many people took to social media to remind Mrs White of something Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. (Matthew 6:7).

Regular readers of this blog may not be surprised to learn that this verse has been subject to many different translations and interpretations, going back at least as far as Martin Luther. (The Greek version features the curious word battalogein, but Jesus's original words were probably in Aramaic.)

Theologians sometimes argue that there is no problem with repetition as such, the problem is with the vanity of the repetition. Steven Winiarski argues that repetition becomes vain when it is used with bad motives. Bad motives for repetition include any attempt to use music and repetition to elicit a purely emotional response, to gain a personal audience, or to manipulate God.

So what exactly was the purpose and intended effect of Mrs White's incantation?

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P.J. Grisar, Paula White’s wild Trump sermon is begging for the Steve Reich treatment (Forward, 5 November 2020)

Tom McCarthy, Rupert Murdoch-owned US outlets turn on Trump, urging him to act with 'grace' (The Guardian, 7 November 2020)

Seren Morris, Paula White's Trump Prayers Go Viral on Twitter, Inspire Memes and Remixes (Newsweek, 5 November 2020)

Nicholas Till, Joy in Repetition: Critical genealogies of musical minimalism (Performance Research 20:5, 2015)

Steven Winiarski, Music, Culture, and Vain Repetition: Matthew 6 in its Context (Artistic Theologian 4, 5 April 2016)

Wikipedia: It's Gonna Rain, Language of Jesus, Matthew 6:7, Paula White

Related post: Worshipping the Golden Calf (October 2008)

Book of the Dead

A few years ago, the British Museum had a large exhibition for the Egyptian Book of the Dead. According to John Taylor, the curator of the exhibition, it's a practical guide to the next world, with spells that would help you on your journey:

• spells for controlling your own body after death;
• spells for protecting yourself from attack;
• spells for satisfying the gods and demons guarding the gateways you must pass through.

We bought a jigsaw puzzle at the time, which we finally got around to solving this Christmas. The jigsaw at least we solved. But what about the meaning of the picture?

Page from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer, c. 1275 B.C.E., 19th Dynasty, 45.7 x 83.4 cm, Thebes, Egypt © Trustees of the British Museum

The picture shows a ceremony called the Opening of the Mouth. This is a ritual performed on a mummy (in this case, Hunefer) to enable the dead person to breathe, to speak, and to consume ritual offerings. The priests are waving the foreleg of a bull calf over the heads of Hunefer's grieving wife and daughter.
 
But the spell has already been cast, so why would Hunefer need to know the spell? To my mind, the purpose of this particular page doesn't seem like practical guidance at all, but more like bureaucratic compliance. It is a certificate (audit trail) to prove that the Opening of the Mouth ceremony has been correctly cast. One might imagine an official in the Egyptian afterlife scanning the document, rather in the same manner as a US immigration official checking your visa waiver and customs declaration form. 

So the Book of the Dead seems to conflate and confuse the functions of guidebook and logbook. John Taylor acknowledges that parts of the Book don't make sense to the modern mind, and speculates:

"Perhaps there was a box-ticking mentality going on here: you should have one of these in your tomb so you get it and it doesn’t really matter if it’s completely accurate or not. You’ve got it, it’s there, it’s in the tomb, and it has got the right spells on it. It’s a part of the burial kit you must have."

Box-ticking? From one of the most bureaucratic cultures in the Ancient World? Surely not!

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Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Exhibition at the British Museum, November 2010 - March 2011.

Page from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer, 1285 BC (Google Cultural Institute, retrieved 2 Jan 2016)

Hunefer, Book of the Dead (Khan Academy, retrieved 2 Jan 2016)

John Taylor, What is a Book of the Dead? (British Museum Blog, September 2010). A bit of afterlife admin? (British Museum Blog, December 2010).

Wikipedia: Ancient Egypt, Opening of the Mouth Ceremony

Dissing the Pope

What is the purpose of the phrase "f...ing pope", shouted across a busy newsroom? A Catholic sub-editor at the Times newspaper felt that the defacto purpose of the phrase was "harassment on grounds of religion", with the (intended? predictable?) effect of creating an adverse working environment for himself and other Catholics. There is an interesting question here about conscious motivation and deliberate action.

The Employment Tribunal and the Employment Appeal Tribunal disagreed. If Mr Heafield experienced the environment as adverse, that was unreasonable of him. They didn't ask - but we might well ask - what was Mr Heafield's real purpose for pursuing the case?

Although some Renaissance popes allegedly led active sex lives (appointing their "nephews" to prominent positions in the Church), the term "f...ing pope" is probably regarded by Catholics and non-believers alike as a term that doesn't refer to any living person. (Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions could be relevant here.)

Screaming pope maybe. Would it count as "harassment on grounds of religion"to display a reproduction of Francis Bacon's famous painting?



Daniel Barnett, Harassment on Grounds of Religion (14 February 2013)

The Purpose of Marriage

formerly What is Marriage For?

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@lfeatherstone, who is a Lib Dem MP and Equalities minister in the Coalition government, argues that neither the state nor the church "owns" marriage. Quoting a remark by a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, who had said that the Church doesn't own marriage, she interprets this to mean that marriage should belong to the people, and urges people not to polarize the debate on extending marriage to same-sex couples.

However, Lord Carey disputes her interpretation of his remark. "When I said that not even the Church owns it (marriage), I meant that the Church has no authority to change the definition of marriage as far as Christian thinking is concerned - there is a givenness to it."

Meanwhile for Pope Benedict XVI, marriage owns reproduction. Wrapping up a 3-day Vatican conference on infertility, His Holiness asserted that marriage and marital sexual intercourse (putting it in and jiggling it about a bit) is the proper way to create a human being, and reiterated his attack on artificial procreation (including IVF) as a form of arrogance. Matrimony, he said, “constitutes the only ‘place’ worthy of the call to existence of a new human being”.

The opposition to same-sex marriage seems to be based on the converse assertion, that reproduction owns marriage. The purpose of marriage being to propagate the species, or so the argument goes, therefore no relationship can count as true marriage if it lacks the potential to propagate.

We might imagine that this exclusion would also rule out the marriage of infertile people, as well as those who are past child-bearing age. But there are many examples in the Bible of elderly and infertile women suddenly producing children (Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Hannah, Elizabeth, ...), so if faith can overcome such obstacles, why can't a child spring (like Dionysus) from the thigh of a man?

Elsewhere, the purpose of marriage is said to be companionship, binding two people together in love and spiritual union, although theologians tie themselves in knots when they try to restrict this to sexual love. (Why shouldn't two elderly sisters who share a house have the same rights of inheritance as a lesbian couple? Why is civil partnership only available to those who share a bed? And what about the curious concept of a celibate civil partnership, which seems to be the only option available to homosexual priests?)

The confusion here is that marriage has many purposes, including social and legal ones. We may not wish to pry into the bedrooms of our friends, and we may be very reluctant to grant the immigration and tax authorities the right to pry into anyone's bedroom. And when a couple (of any kind) proudly and lovingly produce a child, it really shouldn't matter by what feats of acrobatics or bioengineering, and with the collaboration of which other parties, the child was engendered. 

But I'm guessing that Archbishop Carey and Pope Ratzinger aren't going to be in a hurry to bless the offspring of - to pick a random example - Elton John and David Furnish.

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Lynne Featherstone, This is not gay rights versus religious beliefs (Daily Telegraph, 24 February 2012)

John Bingham, Lynne Featherstone tells Church 'don't polarise gay marriage debate' (Daily Telegraph, 24 February 2012)

Church 'does not own marriage' (BBC News, 25 February 2012)

Pope decries artifical procreation; fertility treatments as ‘arrogant’ (New York Daily News 25 February 2012)

Pope says arrogance drives infertility field, tells couples to shun artificial procreation (Washington Post, 25 February 2012)

Juniper Berry, What the Bible says about God and the infertile woman (Squidoo)


Updated 13 June 2015

Does Religious Education Work?

Does religious education work? asks Professor James Conroy (via Guardian 22 February 2012).
Judith Burns, Teaching of Christianity 'lacks intellectual development' (BBC News 26 Nov 2012)

Andrew Copson, of the British Humanist Association, notes that Christianity is often poorly taught but said the same thing was true of non-religious beliefs such as Humanism.

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One answer from systems thinking (for example Stafford Beer's POSIWID principle) is that these systems just do what they do. We may note that there are multiple stakeholders for each of these systems, with overlapping and conflicting purposes.

POSIWID suggests that systems work for themselves. To take another example, @keithlard asks whether prison works.

Obviously prison works just fine for the people who organize prisons. So why would you expect it to work for anyone else?

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Coming back to religious education, its possible purposes may include 

• to indoctrinate schoolchildren into the religious beliefs and practices of a particular religion, and to familiarize them with sacred texts
• to expose schoolchildren to a broad range of religious beliefs and practices, and to teach them to treat all of them with tolerance and respect
• to introduce schoolchildren to a range of moral positions and arguments, both religious and secular,

In other words, it could be taught as theology or anthropology or moral philosophy or citizenship.



Updated 22 March 2014

God's Purpose In All Things

Following the breakup of their daughter's marriage, an evangelical couple in America is reported as having praised God for the impending divorce. This seems to contradict their previous opposition to divorce.

It is perhaps a natural human reaction to say "Thank God" when your daughter splits up with a bloke you never really liked. Once upon a time, however, this would have been regarded as tantamount to taking the Lord's name in vain - in other words, blasphemy.

But if one reads the actual quote rather than the headlines, it is more of a silver lining than outright blasphemy.

"I'm sure Katy is trending on the internet just to get you to church tonight," said Mrs Hudson, 63. "I mean all over the world, who knows how God is bringing them in? The most important thing is you are here and God wants to put the fire in you in 2012," [Daily Telegraph 6 January 2012]

Twitter Populi, Twitter Dei.

But @katyperry warns us not to regard the voice of the parents as the voice of God.

"Concerning the gossip, I want to be clear that NO ONE speaks for me. Not a blog, magazine, "close sources" or my family."

Vox parentis non putrem a matre distinguit. (Whatever that means.)

Why Do Sportsman Believe?

Reading an article possibly by Matthew Syed (Religion and sport: Do prayers help players? BBC News Magazine 28 May 2011). There is some evidence that religious belief boosts sporting performance, and there are many examples of strong religious faith at the top level of sport,

Atheists observe that the content of the religion doesn't seem to make much difference, and that the visible superstitions and obsessions of some players (former Kent and England wicket-keeper Alan Knott comes to my mind) appears to perform the same purpose.

The article notes that Jonathan Edwards, the triple jumper, abandoned his strong religious faith when he stopped competing. Obviously we can't generalize from one case, but it is a hint that his faith may have had no other purpose in his life.

Don't Waste A Miracle

Until this week, the term "Miracle of Chile" generally referred to the disputed economic transformation of Chile from the 1980s onwards, attributed by Milton Friedman to monetarism and by Amartya Sen to the rejection of Friedman-style economic liberalism. See Wikipedia.

Yesterday's dramatic rescue of 33 Chilean miners from a mining accident in San Jose has been popularly described as a miracle [Channel4 News, Daily Telegraph, Get Religion, Washington Post]. The Vatican had sent rosaries to the trapped miners, and will doubtless wish to use this miracle in justifying some future beatification or canonization procedure - perhaps even that of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI himself.

In Don't Waste A Crisis, I discussed the cliché "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." We might also think that a miracle is a terrible thing to waste: see my earlier post on The Purpose of Miracles. I don't think we've heard the last of those rosaries.

God or Mammon?

It must make a nice change for #Vatican watchers to have a different kind of scandal. President Ettore Gotti Tedeschi and director-general Paolo Cipriani of the Vatican Institute for Religious Works (IOR) - basically the Vatican bank - are under investigation by Rome magistrates Nello Rossi and Stefano Fava for suspected money laundering [Reuters 21 September 2010].

A Vatican statement has expressed “perplexity and amazement” at the move and “utmost faith” (“massima fiducia”) in the two men who head the bank.

Given that the Catholic Church is in the faith business, I assume they have thought pretty carefully about the theological implications of that statement.

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Update: Mr Tedeschi has now been removed from his post for "dereliction of duty" [BBC News 24 May 2012]. Dr Jeff Mirus speculates that Tedeschi’s frequent comments on world economic affairs may have rubbed many others in the Vatican the wrong way, perhaps particularly those at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace [City Gates, 25 May 2012].

Purpose of Miracles

Several writers have expressed scepticism about a miraculous cure from back pain following routine surgery. The patient himself, who happens to be a deacon of the Catholic Church, has attributed his cure to a picture of Cardinal Newman [BBC News 13 September 2010].

@mjrobbins asked Is God scraping the barrel for miracles? (Guardian 13 Sept 2010) and suggested that Vatican's latest miracle is evidence of a worrying decline in God's powers.

But clearly the purpose of this particular miracle was to allow Vatican to beatify a Cardinal whose own view of such professed miracles is expressed in the following passage from his first essay on Miracles:

"Much more inconclusive are those which are actually attended by a physical cause known or suspected to be adequate to their production. Some of those who were cured at the tomb of the Abbé Paris were at the time making use of the usual remedies; the person whose inflamed eye was relieved was, during his attendance at the sepulchre, under the care of an eminent oculist; another was cured of a lameness in the knee by the mere effort to kneel at the tomb. Arnobius challenges the Heathens to produce one of the pretended miracles of their gods performed without the application of some prescription." [Essays on Miracles]

Similar controversy surrounds the miracle attributed to Mother Teresa for the purposes of her beatification.

In 2002, the Vatican recognized as a miracle the healing of a tumor in the abdomen of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, after the application of a locket containing Mother Teresa's picture. Besra said that a beam of light emanated from the picture, curing the cancerous tumor. Critics — including some of Besra's medical staff and, initially, Besra's husband — insisted that conventional medical treatment had eradicated the tumor [Wikipedia: Mother Teresa].

In March 2010, the miracle cure attributed to the late Pope John Paul II, for the purposes of his beatification, ran into some difficulties.

The inexplicable cure of a young French nun from Parkinson's disease ... seemed difficult for the Vatican to certify as a miracle. According to the Vatican's own rules, the medically inexplicable cure must be instantaneous, complete, and lasting. Some are arguing that the world will have to wait her entire lifetime to determine whether it was lasting, in case the symptoms return. In addition, doubts have been cast about whether she had Parkinson's to begin with [Miracle under scrutiny in John Paul beatification Independent, 29 March 2010].

Within a year, Pope Benedict XVI formally approved this miracle [BBC News 14 January 2011]. Obviously he had no choice. "Nuns can be very useful." [Jesus and Mo, 16 April 2007]

During 2013, a second miracle emerged to enable Pope John Paul II to be canonized. This took the form of a mere memory of the late pope, which was able to emerge from somewhere (a diary perhaps) and cure somebody. (This sounds suspiciously like a horcrux. Clearly the Jesuits have been twisting the Harry Potter books for their own purposes.)

The Holy See has yet to reveal what the miracle was or where and when it took place but Vatican sources said it would “amaze the world”.

Nick Squires, Vatican to announce John Paul II 'miracle' (Telegraph, 19 Jun 2013). See also Barbie Latza Nadeau, After Second Approved Miracle, Pope John Paul II Likely to Become a Saint (Daily Beast July 2013). Pope John Paul II and the trouble with miracles (LA Times, July 2013).

Lacking the sophisticated theological thinking with which the Vatican is blessed, or the devious logic often associated with the Jesuits, popular journalism tends to describe all cases of unexplained recovery as miraculous. For example, an elderly widower appears to have regained his sight after kissing a photograph of his late wife.

It's a miracle! Daily Mail 17 Feb 2011. Obituary notice November 2009.

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Meanwhile Lourdes. In 2007, Pope Benedict offered special indulgencies for anyone visiting the site of the Virgin Mary's miraculous appearance in the 150th anniversary year. The BBC offered the following explanation for the spiritually unenlightened.

Indulgences became infamous in the 16th century for being sold rather than earned, helping, historians say, trigger the Protestant reformation. While some might consider indulgences an outdated concept, great spiritual importance have been assigned to them by Benedict XVI and his predecessor, Pope John Paul II. BBC News 6 December 2007

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If a dramatic and unexpected cure can be regarded as a miracle, what about a dramatic and unexpected death?

For example, an 80-year-old Spanish cardinal Agustin Garcia Gasco Vicente, in Rome for the beatification of late pope John Paul II in May 2011, died of a heart attack shortly before the start of the ceremony. [News24 1 May 2011].

For another example, an Italian man was killed when a giant crucifix toppled on top of him. The crucifix had been erected to celebrate the canonization of the late Pope John Paul II in April 2014. In a bizarre twist, the dead man is said to have been living in his home town of Lovere on a street named after Pope John XXIII, who was to be canonized on the same day. (BBC News 24 April 2014, Christian Today 25 April 2014, Huffington Post 25 April 2014).


Don't these deaths cancel out the miracles?

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Update 2019

A second miracle has been attributed to Cardinal Newman, which will allow Pope Francis to declare him a saint. "I was healed by Cardinal Newman" (Catholic Herald, 5 July 2019). This one seems less amenable to a conventional medical explanation, but how does it satisfty the cardinal's own notion of what might count as a miracle? After all, Newman thought it was "often very difficult to distinguish between a providence and a miracle". The key question seems to be about agency - to what extent can the cure be credited to Newman himself (because the woman cured had been praying to him) rather than to God alone (which Newman referred to as providential mercy).

Commentators have also observed that both the miracles attributed to Newman occurred in the United States. Newman's view was that miracles were more likely to occur "in a country in which faith and prayer abound".


See also

Adam Buick, Newman on Miracles (The Sceptic, 22 September 2010)

Christopher Howse, Cardinal Newman's miraculous bones (Telegraph, 23 Aug 2008)

Colbert I. King, This country is in need of a miracle (Washington Post, 19 April 2019)

Peter Le, David Hume and Henry Newman on Miracle (undated)

Garry Wills, Stealing Newman, (NYR Blog September 2010), Does the Pope Matter? (NYR Blog March 2013), Popes Making Popes Saints (NYR Blog July 2013).

Papal Canonizations a Lesson in Subtle Art of Catholic Politics (Newsmax 25 April 2014)

Wikipedia: Canonisation of John Henry Newman, Mother Theresa


Updated 7 July 2019

Dove World Outrage Center

A tiny church in Florida is punching above its weight by threatening to burn copies of the Qur'an on 11 September. The pastor appears to have no knowledge of what the Qur'an actually says, but has convinced himself and his followers that the Qur'an is "full of lies" [BBC News 8 September 2010].

This threat has attracted wide publicity, and has been condemned by American and other Western leaders including

• Tony Blair, former British prime minister
• Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State
• Robert Gates, US Secretary of Defense
• Eric Holder, US Attorney General
• Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary General 
• Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington
• Peter MacKay, Canadian Defence Minister
• General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Afghanistan
• Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO Secretary General 

Even key figures of the American right such as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have criticized the plan. But in a world where traditional leadership can be defied and disrespected by tiny groups of trouble-makers, mere verbal condemnation (expressing one's outrage on Twitter) hardly seems adequate.

There is a general problem with protesting against extremism of all kinds, which is that such protests are often counter-productive, merely alienating the extremists and reinforcing their beliefs. But what is the alternative? In this case, there is an obvious remedy: I hope that Christian leaders, especially in America, have the courage to organize mass readings of the holy books of other religions, including the Qur'an, in order to demonstrate that their faith is compatible with many of the truths contained in these religions.

Meanwhile, people are sending books for the bonfire. Some of these books may be genuine copies of the Qur'an, but I expect that a few tricksters will be sending in disguised copies of the Bible and the American Constitution to be burned as well. Ha!

Purpose of Denial 3

The more the American mainstream media deny that President Obama is a Moslem, the more Americans choose to believe that he is.

Apparently this belief is more prevalent among college-educated Republicans than the rest of the population. How Republicans Learn That Obama Is Muslim (New Republic, 27 August 2010) This raises some intriguing questions about the relationship between education and knowledge.

Jeff Poor suggests that the media are to blame. "By consistently using questions about Obama's faith and his citizenship as fodder to demean conservatives, specifically the Tea Party movement and thereby creating a general mistrust by saying vile things, have the mainstream media perpetuated the very allegations they are abhorred by (sic)?" (Newsbusters, 19 August 2010) At least on this point, Charlie Brooker seems to agree. "Seriously, broadcasters, journalists: just give up now. Because either you're making things worse, or no one's paying attention anyway."  'Ground Zero mosque'? The reality is less provocative (Guardian 23 August 2010). Brooker complains that the terms of the debate are grossly misleading, and grudgingly admires right-wingers for their ability to create snappy-but-misleading nicknames – like fun-size chocolate bars and the Ground Zero mosque. Buzzwords for blowhards (Guardian 30 August 2010).

Jeff Poor quotes CNN political analyst James Carville, who describes himself as "flummoxed" by this result, and claims that "the quality of information to people today is exponentially higher than it was in 19th century England". Now I wouldn't necessarily expect a political journalist to know what the word "exponential" meant, but I wonder whether the quality is higher at all.

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Once upon a time, some people were bothered whether Disraeli was Christian or Jew, and some people were uncomfortable about electing Kennedy as a Catholic president. But they are now mainly remembered for what they achieved while in office, not their religious affiliation. Meanwhile, Mrs Thatcher's legacy is not feminism but Thatcherism. Obama will not be remembered for his birthplace, or the religion of his forefathers, nor even for being the first black president; he will be remembered for the successes and failures of his presidency. And perhaps one day, people will wonder why anyone cared whether he was a Moslem or not, and moderate Moslems will be as accepted in mainstream American politics as Catholics are now. (Let it not be forgotten that large sums of money were once raised from American Catholics to support Irish terrorism.)

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John T. McGreevy and R. Scott Appleby Catholics, Muslims, and the Mosque Controversy (New York Review, 27 August 2010)

Adam Serwer, Build More Mosques (American Prospect, August 26, 2010)

Religious Exchange

A complaint has been lodged against Cherie Booth QC by the National Secular Society for giving someone a suspended sentence "because he was a religious person" [BBC News 4 Feb 2010, Independent 4 Feb 2010]

According to most news reports, Shamso Miah (25) was in court for breaking another man's jaw in a fight about queue-jumping in an Essex bank. Is there something particularly British or God-fearing about this crime?

Not to be confused with Shamsu Miah (52) who killed and ate a swan while fasting during Ramadan [The Times, 23 Nov 2006, Sky News, 27 Feb 2008]. The Telegraph has the best headline: Muslim does bird for eating swan. He was jailed for two months because, according to District Judge Andrew Shaw, killing a swan at night with a knife "is a taboo act". The concept of "taboo" comes from Polynesian religion, and in Māori society the concept was often used to protect resources from over-exploitation [Wikipedia: Tapu], but I didn't know it had been incorporated into English law.

(Was it the night-time or the knife that made it taboo? What if he had killed the swan with a coil of rope at midday, say in the billiard room?)

If Cherie Booth allows her judgements to be influenced by a generic category of "religious person", this appears to be consistent with a wishy-washy view of religion that some people have associated with The  Tony Blair Faith Foundation. The Catholic Church has been particularly unenthusiastic about the Faith Foundation, and Professor Michel Schooyans of the Catholic University of Louvain has accused Blair and his wife of wishing to reduce all religions "to the same common denominator, which means stripping them of their identity" [Guardian, 13 May 2009].

I wonder where Polynesian religions belong in the Blairs' worldview. Would a noble savage with an ancestor cult be let off lightly in the Booth court? How about a devout cannibal? Or do only certain religions count?



Meanwhile, Booth's decision has prompted some more general questions about religion. On BBC Radio Four, Eddie Mair asks Are religious people more likely to be honest? Is it a coincidence that the Chilcot enquiry has just put Tony Blair's own honesty under the spotlight, while sparing others? [The media's tall tales over Iraq]


Finally, Andrew Brown of the Guardian complains that "everything we know about the case of Shamso Miah seems to come from one agency report of the court case" [Cherie Booth unfair to atheists]. As if this is unusual.

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Update: How about the case of Lorraine Mbulawa? 'Possessed' teenager who stabbed her own mother five times is allowed to walk free after judge accepts she 'has strong spiritual beliefs'. (Daily Mail, 24 May 2011)

Update: Here's another curious one. A teenage mugger has been spared a possible seven-year-jail term after telling a crown court judge he found God in prison (Daily Mail 20 Feb 2012). Surely if he had really found God in prison, he would want to return to prison to be closer to God? I wonder what sentence he would have received had he found the Devil in prison?

John Rock's Error

What the inventor of the birth control pill didn't know about women's health

Two or three of my Christmas presents this year were recommended to my friends and family by our local bookseller (who probably knows my taste in books better than most) including Malcolm Gladwell's latest book "What the Dog Saw, and Other Adventures".

I expect several of the chapters of this book will inspire blogposts, but I wanted to start with the chapter on the Birth Control Pill, because it echoes some of the themes I've been talking about recently.

Partly for religious reasons (he was a devout Catholic), John Rock designed the birth control pill to be a "natural" method of contraception. He believed that the pill was merely reinforcing the established rhythm method, and he was bitterly disappointed when Pope Paul VI banned the Pill along with all other "artificial" contraceptives.

Rock and his colleagues had designed a pill with a twenty-eight day cycle, because they thought that this was the proper menstrual cycle for women, and they wanted to replicate and regulate this cycle in order to make the rhythm method (which only worked effectively for women with a regular menstrual cycle) more effective.

As Gladwell puts it, the Pill was

"shaped by the dictates of the Catholic Church - - by John Rock's desire to make this new method of birth control seem as natural as possible. ... But what he thought was natural wasn't so natural after all, and the Pill he ushered into the world turned out to be something other than what he thought it was".

For when female scientists look at patterns of menstruation, they typically find that the twenty-eight day cycle is not "natural" at all - it is a product of urban modern life. Furthermore, the artificially induced cycle has both short-term side-effects (period pains) and longer-term health risks (cancer).

So here is how Gladwell describes the consequences of John Rock's desire to please his Church.

"In the past forty years, millions of women around the world have been given the Pill in such a way as to maximize their pain and suffering. And to what end? To pretend that the Pill was no more than a pharmaceutical version of the rhythm method."

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I've been exploring different kinds of problem-solving recently, including a common preference for solutions that seem to preserve the structure of the problem. But such structure-preservation often turns out to rely on hidden assumptions - in this case, assumptions as to what counts as "natural".

Describing a solution as "natural" implies that it is safe and unobjectionable and somehow innocent. But when we unpack what counts as "natural", we may find a hidden agenda buried within the allegedly "natural". The Pope refused to see the Pill as an innocent technology, and perceived it as a source of disruption to traditional family values.

So what is interesting here is that Rock and the Pope, two men with very similar religious beliefs and values, both Catholics, should interpret the POSIWID of the Pill in such completely different ways. Meanwhile, Gladwell's interpretation is different again. The purpose of the Pill depends who is telling the story.

Back into the Fold

It is a time for reconciliation and return. Old political rivals welcomed back (Hillary Clinton, Peter Mandelson, Ken Clarke). And the Vatican has restored relations with the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), a traditionalist Catholic organization, founded in 1970 by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Most controversially, the Vatican is cancelling the excommunication of four SSPX bishops, including Holocaust denier Richard Williamson.

I don't know whether this is bad luck or bad judgement on the part of the Holy Father, but Bishop Williamson appeared this week on Swedish television, denying the existence of the gas chambers. So much for Jewish-Catholic relations then.

The Holy Father appears to have a precise legalistic mind, in which there is no logical connection between the original reasons for Bishop Williamson's excommunication and his extreme views on the second world war. If the excommunication no longer serves a valid purpose, it must be cancelled; you cannot keep someone in a state of mortal peril just because you disagree with, or even disapprove of, his opinions.

Many will be offended by the pardon for Bishop Williamson and his SSPX friends, interpreting it as a further sign of an anti-Semitic turn at the Vatican. However, His Holiness doesn't seem to worry much about offending people.

Meanwhile, the Society of St. Pius V (SSPV), an organization that split from SSPX in 1983, holds that the papal seat is currently vacant ("sedevacantism"), as all the popes since 1958 (or perhaps 1963) are excessively modernist and therefore heretical. Perhaps Benedict XVI is trying to win their approval and acceptance.

 

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Update 2022

Following more recent controversy concerning Bishop Williamson, I found a more detailed account of the history of SSPX, including the role of Cardinal Ratzinger. 

Michael Warren Davis, SSPX: Back to the Bad Old Days? (Crisis Magazine, 22 October 2019)

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Sources 2009

• Pope 'to lift SSPX excommunications' just as Bishop Williamson denies Nazi gas chambers (Telegraph, 22 January 2009)
• Pope could welcome Holocaust denier back into the fold (Times Online, 23 January 2009)
• Bishop faces probe for Holocaust outburst (Independent Online South Africa, 23 January 2009)
• Pope move ignites Holocaust row (BBC News, 24 January 2009)
• Bishop Richard Williamson, Holocaust Denier, Reinstated By Pope (Huffington Post, 24 January 2009)
• Pope lifts SSPX excommunications (Ruth Gledhill, 24 January 2009)
• Benedict and the SSPX: the backlash begins (Telegraph, 22 January 2009)
• Pope admits Holocaust row errors (BBC News, 12 March 2009)
  

Related posts

 

Not Yet Quite Back (February 2009), The Symbolism of the Empty Chair (March 2015)

Purpose of the Cross

A large sculpture of Christ on the cross has been removed from outside a church in West Sussex after its vicar said it was "scaring young children". The Reverend Ewen Souter said the 10ft crucifix was "a horrifying depiction of pain and suffering". [Daily Telegraph, 6 January 2009, BBC News, 7 January 2009]

Actually, I thought that was the whole point of the crucifix - to serve as a permanent reminder of the suffering of Jesus on the cross. If Christians prefer an abstract cross rather than a graphic rendering of a man in agony, then perhaps they should convert to a religion that avoids all graven images of God and prefers geometric figures instead.

The sculpture was the work of Edward Bainbridge Copnall, who had lived locally. Some of the debate has focused on the aesthetic quality of the sculpture, but that's a problematic notion as well. Not all religious art can be world-class, can it, and not every church can be lucky enough to have pieces by famous artists. Meanwhile, Copnall is better-known than he was last week, and pilgrims will doubtless be planning an extra stop at Horsham Museum (where the sculpture now resides) on their way to Canterbury.

See also comments by Damian Thompson and George Pitcher.

Papa Ratzi 7

Only a theological hypothesis ...

explained Cardinal Ratzinger when opposing the concept of limbo in 1984.

After the Cardinal was elevated to the Papacy, it was not long before the concept of limbo was officially dropped as Catholic doctrine [Times, November 2005].

The New Scientist asked what other doctrines might be dismissed as mere theological hypotheses.

"[Are] ... the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Kingdom of Heaven, and, indeed, the very notion of the soul ... more than theological hypotheses? How can they be?"

Now that limbo has been consigned to limbo, does this mean that no other doctrine can now be consigned to limbo? If only Bertrand Russell were alive today!

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Discussing the nature of hypotheses in the Ratzinger Report, published in 1988, the Cardinal wrote:

"Faith has become enclosed in the glass case of an intellectual world which has built itself up and, in the same way, can fall to pieces." [Cardinal Ratzinger: Defender of the Faith (Andrew Greenwich)]

Quite so. So what then is the purpose of a theological hypothesis?

Papa Ratzi 6

There is some scientific evidence to support the popular view that outward hostility to homosexuality is sometimes a form of overcompensation. [Cornell University, August 2005. See also News Medical Net and Science NetLinks.]

However, even if this is not true, it is a belief commonly enough held that those who take strong positions against homosexuality may expect questions to be asked to their sexuality.

So consider the case of an unmarried elderly man who wears red Gucci shoes [Associated Press] and has a very good-looking male secretary [Daily Dish]. When this elderly man takes a strong position on homosexuality [BBC News, New Scientist], gossips around the world are not slow to see a possible connection [Olly's Onions].

Over and over again we have observed public figures taking up positions that turn out later to be jinxed. Politicians who rashly boast of their happy family lives, or celebrities who invoke the Curse of Hello [DailyMail, Guardian, Independent]. It sometimes seems as if they are unconsciously inviting attention to their secret vulnerabilities.

So shall we assume that all public statements have a secondary purpose?