The RC church and the Ouija board crowd have a lot in common: They both want to be above and to dictate the law
Okay, I admit to being majorly pissed off. England’s RC Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has been at it again, claiming special status for his church and complaining about Godless governments, aggressive atheists etcetera, etcetera.
First this, though. It’s not the freshest of news but the words of the cardinal reminded me of a much happier and a much more welcome development in the mostly dusty chambers of the law:
Mediums and spiritualists fear changes to laws regulating the industry could leave them open to malicious civil action by sceptics. The union representing spiritual workers is to lobby the government over changes to the industry’s regulation. The Fraudulent Mediums Act is due to be repealed next month and replaced by new EU consumer protection regulations. The British Humanist Association said the change offered vulnerable people greater protection against fraud.
Under the 1951 Fraudulent Mediums Act, prosecutors have to prove the medium or healer had intended to be fraudulent in order to secure a conviction. But under the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, which comes into force in the UK on 26 May, it will be the medium’s responsibility to prove they did not mislead or coerce vulnerable consumers. The Spiritual Workers’ Association says making mediums subject to the consumer-protection regulations does not recognise spiritualism is a religion. Its founder Carole McEntee-Taylor, told BBC News: “The problem is that it’s turning spiritualism the religion into a consumer product, which it is not.”
This, of course, would be a slightly more valid argument if spiritualists didn’t ask their believers to pay for their services in the hard coin of Caesar. While it is true that other religions, like Christianity, ask the believers to give alms and can be quite creative when it comes to collecting money for the church, they don’t really bill for their services. Neither do they claim to carry messages from the dearly departed to grieving relatives like a wireless instant messager service, nor do they offer to find lost property and/or people or heal corporeal and/or spiritual wounds, as long as the believer can pay for these things.
In other words, it’s all well and good to claim that you’re a religion but if you then promise to deliver services for money, along the lines of a commercial business, then it’s only reasonable that people - and the law - can demand a certain legal satisfaction. Selling stuff in the name of some spiritual principle is still selling stuff and should be governed by a more material principle than a mere spiritless shrug if the results are not as advertised.
This, of course, is the problem with these people: they wish to operate in the real world and demand what they see as a proper worldly status and its just rewards, while wearing the clothes of holiness and hiding behind some invisible and unverifiable Principle. In other words, they want power and privileges without accountability - and they demand both our reverence and respect in the process.
Which brings me back to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor - a man I truly cannot stand. Here he is, allowing his words yet again to appear in the online Guardian; and yet again, he’s feeling very aggrieved and sorry for himself and his Church:
British public life cannot be a “God-free zone”, the head of the Catholic church in England and Wales warned last night. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor said he was unhappy about attempts to “eliminate the Christian voice” from the public forum. He suggested, however, that Christians were partly to blame for the prevalence of modern atheism, which was a product of a “distorted kind of Christianity.”
“What did we do to generate unbelief? We need to examine what we might have done to give people a misleading idea of God.”
He also called for a better dialogue between believers and non-believers based on mutual esteem, rather than a rejection of difference, in order to address the split between the Gospels and culture. Murphy-O’Connor has been outspoken in his attempt to secure the place of Christianity in society. Last month, in an interview with the Guardian, he argued that Christian leaders should hold a privileged position over the leaders of other faiths when it came to their input into public policy in Britain.
One last quote from yet another newspaper but concerning the same speech:
However the Archbishop also urged the faithful to treat those who do not believe in God with “deep esteem”, and said believers needed to recognise that the “hidden God” was active in the lives of non-believers as well as those who believe.
That, to be honest, more than anything else, truly made me seethe. Oh, how I loathe this man and this particular attitude.
Now, let me first state that I am not one of the Cardinal’s militant atheists. I really can’t stand people like Richard Dawkins or any other fundamentalist believers, be they of the militant Christian, Muslim or Atheist variety. So, I don’t care what people choose to believe, or what spirit or non-spirit they pray to in their hearts, their schools and their churches - as long as they accept that what they believe is their business and what others believe is theirs.
I’m very decidedly not talking about ‘tolerance’ here. Tolerance is one of the most patronising and demeaning principles humans have ever come up with. It’s saying, ‘Of course I know you’re an idiot for thinking/doing/believing such and so and so on, but since I’m an awfully good sport I’ll let you go on with your silly little business.’ Tolerance is the antithesis of mutual respect: It’s how certain very annoying grown-ups always treat their children, and that’s as charming but inherently inferior creatures whose whims and little fantasies & hobbies may be indulged up to a certain point.
So, when the Cardinal calls for a dialogue between Christians and non-believers, based on ‘mutual esteem’ and almost in the same breath demands that Christian leaders should hold a privileged position over the leaders of other faiths (let alone the godless heathen!) then I must regretfully tell the Cardinal to fuck off. I am an agnostic and as such I obviously and of necessity claim no superior spiritual knowledge, nor do I hold my own views in these matters as true or important. Since I don’t know whether there is a God and if so, which colour underwear He or She prefers, it would be a nonsense for me to tell anyone else what (or what not) to believe - but I will not tolerate to be spoken to in the ‘tolerant’ way that the Cardinal Murphy-O’Connors of this world think they have a God-given right to.
As to the Cardinal’s question what the church might have done to generate disbelief, well, I’ve taken enough of your time already - and it would be churlish and childish to go through the whole bloody history of the church again, from the Crusades and the pogroms and the witch burnings, to the modern day issues of child abuse, the stance on contraceptives, marriage, homosexuality and more of these things. All these arguments are based in some truth but we all know them and I don’t even think they are necessarily the biggest reason why people in the West at least aren’t that willing to follow the Church’s rule as they were in the past centuries.
I think there are many complicated reasons why people in the West have turned away from the Mother Church - and some have to do with what the Cardinal stated. I think I even agree with him that many people these days see the church as a kind of shop where they go to select only the handful of items that please them. In a me-me-me culture there’s less room for a communal approach to life’s issues and values.
There is another thing though - and that’s why I started with that article about the spiritualists. I think another reason, and maybe the major reason why people have become less enchanted with and less willing to obey the Church is that people in the West have come to see the Church as inherently hypocritical and unwilling to change. The Church claims to be the arbiter of truth; the Pope even claims infallibility - but time and again the Church has been forced to make its excuses to this historically ill-treated group or for this or that historical failure or crime. As I said earlier, I don’t think it’s these mistakes and crimes that have made people turn away from the church but its pride and arrogance and its insistence that it is and must be the only one that has all the answers. In other words, it refuses to be held accountable for its actions, even if at times it admits to having erred.
Like those spiritualists the church wants all the good stuff: respect, belief - and the power to do as it pleases, without ever being held accountable. Worse, while the spiritualists merely want to be left alone by the law, in order to practice their ‘belief’ and to profit from it as much as they want, the Church wants much more than the freedom to worship. They do not merely refuse to be held accountable for what they do within the Church, they also demand a place at the lawmaker’s table - and this, more than anything else, may be what’s made so many turn away from the Church.
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