petermullen – Page 36 – All Things Considered

22 Mar

Prophets To Tickle Our Ears

Christians with traditional beliefs about issues such as homosexuality should be given “reasonable accommodation” in law, Britain’s most senior woman judge has said. Lady Hale, deputy president of the Supreme Court, said the UK is “less respectful” towards people with religious views than other countries, despite its long Christian traditions. She questioned whether the current “hard line” approach to discrimination claims, based on EU law, could be sustained in the long term. Her comments, in a lecture at Yale law School in the US, follow a series of cases in which British Christians claimed to be suffering religious discrimination but lost their cases. They include Shirley Chaplin, a nurse from Exeter, who was banned from wearing a cross at work as well as Gary McFarlane, a former Relate counsellor, and Lillian Ladele, a marriage registrar, who both lost their jobs after resisted performing tasks they said went against their religious beliefs.

Well said, Baroness Hale!

We should compare and contrast her words with those of Archbishop Justin Welby, the man who ought to be in the forefront of the promoting of Christian values – and indeed the truth of the Christian gospel. But given friends like Welby, Christians have no need of enemies. He says, “It is absurd and impossible to ignore overwhelming changes in social attitudes.” This echoes Rowan Williams’ remarks last year to the effect that Christians “…have a lot of catching up to do with secular mores.” Thus we might phrase the Welby-Williams revised gospel as “Repent not, but be ye indeed conformed to this world.”

So here we see those who were appointed to defend the Christian faith and its moral teachings instead undermining both faith and teachings. It’s as if they should have declared, “And the Lord said unto his disciples, ‘Go ye into all the land and set up focus groups that ye might understand and know what it is that is desired of the people: that give unto them.”

Can you imagine Isaiah the prophet or Jeremiah the seer preaching to King Ahab or to the apostate Jeroboam, son of Nebat, “Keep not the Law of the Lord but what seemeth pleasurable unto the crowd, that do. And behold, I give unto thee a new commandment: Thou shalt do as thou bloody well likest”?

There are words to describe the Welby-Williams axis: “Beware of false prophets which come to thee in sheep’s clothing but underneath they are ravening wolves…white sepulchres which indeed appear beautiful outward but within are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”

20 Mar

Benn Will Lie Overnight

Following a suggestion from John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons, Black Rod is to seek permission from the Queen for the body of Tony Benn to lie overnight in the chapel of St Mary Undercoft on the eve of his funeral. Baroness Thatcher is the only other politician to have been accorded this honour. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Of course. But still we might ask whether such an honour is appropriate in Benn’s case. And, since Baroness Thatcher was the only other recipient of the honour, comparisons are both fair and inevitable.

Margaret Thatcher cleared up the mess which the socialist policies advocated by Tony Benn had made of the country. She defeated the destructive and illegitimate miners’ strike of 1984-85. Benn publicly and vigorously supported the miners’ leader, the Communist Arthur Scargill whose intention was to bring down the Tory government – aided and abetted by money in brown envelopes from the Soviet Union. (This is not an urban myth but its truth is testified by Peter Walker, the then energy secretary and closely concerned). Mrs Thatcher defeated the Argentinian aggression in the Falklands. Benn opposed that defensive war. She was a patriot with a strong belief in private property and political liberties. Benn presented himself as a democratic socialist but his extreme ideological commitment would, if ever we had suffered the catastrophic misfortune to see him in power, have reduced Britain to the sort of state tyranny and economic failure of East Germany under the Communists.

John Bercow said last week: “Tony Benn’s time as an MP spanned more than fifty years and he is one of only two MPs to be awarded the Freedom of the House – the other being Edward Heath – in recognition of his very long and distinguished service as an MP.”

Says it all really

Tony Benn will only lie overnight. Edward Heath lied all the time.

13 Mar

Alas, I Shall never Be Queen!

Suddenly I find my career options have disastrously narrowed.

The Government now realises that same-sex “marriage” will require a massive re-write of legislation dating back to AD 1285 – including the permanent abolition of the terms “husband” and “wife” from many of our laws. Crucial safeguards will also have to be introduced to safeguard the Monarchy.

The Government is scurrying to introduce all these changes through ministerial orders.

Among other atrocities, the proposals specifically include changing the law:

To prevent a man from becoming Queen in the event a King ‘marries’ another man
To prevent a man from becoming the Princess of Wales in the event that the heir to the throne enters a same-sex marriage
To stop the ‘husband’ of a male Peer being referred to as Duchess, Lady or Countess
To replace the terms “husband” and “wife” with “partner” or “spouse” in a huge raft of English law

NB: My today’s ‘blog is not a piece of satire

And it’s not just my ambitions which have been so cruelly curtailed. We are all diminished. Destroy a language and you destroy a world, irretrievably, irreversibly. By these revolutionary innovations, 1500 years of Christian civilisation are officially repudiated. This is the nightmare out of which it is impossible to wake up. Our old world is dead. Welcome to brave new world that hath such people in it.

12 Mar

My Bust of Lenin

We read in today’s paper that the late Bob Crow’s office was “…stuffed with working class memorabilia, including a bust of Lenin.” This news has filled me with an irresistible desire to have a statue of Lenin too. It’s usually said that, while Stalin was a genocidal monster, Lenin was much more idealistic in his communism, altogether softer. This is not true. Lenin instituted his own genocides and persecutions, concentration camps and the whole apparatus of totalitarian control. Men as diverse as Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell wrote of his extreme ruthlessness and cruelty. So why do I have this craving for a statue of Lenin? Well, you see, it’s like this…

The winter’s heavy rains caused our birdbath in the garden to sink and the basin has come off. It will have to be chucked out and I’d like to replace it with something suitable. I think I will get a statue of Lenin so that at garden parties in the summer my friends can come and throw stones at it. This is in the fine Victorian tradition when householders used to put pictures of those they couldn’t abide in strategic places in the lavatory.

What I object to though is this report which puts busts of Lenin among “working class memorabilia.” For the British working people were never communists. There was a fine tradition of British socialism which loathed the communist dictatorships. This was the socialism of the Workers’ Educational Association, night schools, self-improvement, apprenticeships, chapel-singing, friendly societies and charitable works. This is the world we have lost. It has been replaced by two hideous developments. One is the radical chic nomenclature in the BBC and much of the rest of the mass media, the Champagne socialists of Hampstead and Primrose Hill and the nauseating, fawning hypocrisy of the theatrical luvvies, the movie crowd and what are fatuously referred to as “the arts.” The other development is generational institutionalised lethargy promoted by the dependency culture which has been enthusiastically promoted and maintained by the Labour Party in order to buy votes in the general elections.

We used to have socialist patricians with a moral conscience and millions of ordinary folk possessed by the protestant work ethic. Now we have Socialist Estates of the Realm incarnated in the all-powerful corporate bureaucracies of the NHS and the useless state schools which do not exist to provide the services for which they were set up but for the benefit of their highly-unionised employees.

And we no longer have the working class: we have the underclass.

I wonder if Bob Crow’s executors have put his statue of Lenin on E-bay yet?

11 Mar

Hurrah for Thought for the Day!

Three cheers for Thought for the Day! You never thought you’d hear me say that, did you? Naturally, I’m not extending to the programme a universal enconium, but today’s talk, given by the former Chief Rabbit Jonathan Sachs was a model of what such things should be and a flash of light in the encircling gloom. Dr Sachs reported new findings to the effect that male birds do not, as Darwin preached, sing only as part of a show of sexual advertisement – in the attempt to find a lady bird and get their genes passed on – but to announce their presence and tell anyone listening they’re glad to be alive. And the lady birds do the singing too.

This is so refreshing for it pulls the rug from under the satanic hypothesis of genetic determinism, that reductionist notion that our whole sense of beauty, truth, value and love is nothing but the accidental and meaningless spin-off from ineluctable evolutionary theory.

While we’re at it, we should apply Dr Sachs’ antidote to those other two deterministic, reductionist monsters Freud and Marx. For Freud, we are little more than our unconscious motivation which we are powerless to influence – short of turning up on his couch for seven years’ worth of narcissistic blather and, of course, paying the psychoanalyst’s fees. For Marx, the motivations for all our human and political relationships are mere economics. The fact that Darwin, Marx and Freud have been for so long worshipped as our true – and perhaps only – teachers and prophets is the supreme intellectual tragedy of our time.

Satanic indeed. There is no better word to describe the dirt that these deterministic ideologists have done on human beings. For we are not entirely in the grip of unconscious motives, economic laws or selfish genes. There are first-order experiences of which we are all acutely and continuously conscious, and which are real: self-sacrifice, wit, humour, self-mockery, the power of music, poetry, fine painting. Beauty, Truth and Love – these three. And the greatest of these is love

Darwin, Freud, Marx? Aw shucks, they’re just for the birds…

10 Mar

More Gorm, Please, Professor Wilkinson

God help those being taught theology at St John’s College, Durham where the principal is Rev’d Professor David Wilkinson. He came on Radio Four’s Thoughtless Today at a quarter to eight this morning to tell us that we’ve learned more about the brain in the last fifteen years than in all previous history. A pity we haven’t at the same time learned to use the brain a bit better than Wilkinson did. I suppose it was rather early in the day. First he caricatured Greek philosophy to a degree that would have Plato and Aristotle suing for misrepresentation, for neither of those gentlemen believed what was attributed to them by Wilkinson: “Body evil, mind good.”

We were then treated to Wilkinson’s own view on the subject. He reckons that the body, the mind and the soul are three different parts of the human person which interact. Now forgive me if I comment on this opinion with the use of some technical jargon. Wilkinson’s view is what we philosophers call gormless. For body, mind and soul are not three things; they are three aspects of one and the same thing. The mind and the soul do not inhabit the body like ghosts in a machine. For the body is material, and the only things that can exist inside a material thing are other material things. Thus the body is the material aspect of the person, the mind is the mental aspect of the same person, and the soul (if there is such a thing) is the person’s spiritual aspect.

Wittgenstein warned us against first forming a picture of something and then becoming enslaved by that picture. For the picture may be a false picture – just like the one drawn by Wilkinson, in fact.

08 Mar

How We Live Now (part 94)

Yesterday 360 members of the House of Lords voted to replace long-standing terms such as “widow” with phrases such as “woman whose deceased spouse was a man” or “that person’s surviving spouse”. Terms such as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ will become redundant. Many centuries-old Statutes were amended in anticipation of the Same-Sex Marriage laws which come into effect later this month.

Wittgenstein wrote, “Change a language and you change a world.” To which we might add, “Destroy a language and you destroy a world.” The very best that can be said about the changes is that they are excessively cumbersome. We know instinctively that something has gone profoundly wrong – it’s sick actually – when it now takes seven words to say what was ever before said by one word.

We might as well have some fun before the whole house burns down. So, for a moment, consider some of the dafter consequences of this syntactical genocide. The posters advertising the pantomime will have to be much bigger as Widow Twanky will henceforth be billed as, The Twanky Woman Whose Deceased Spouse Was A Man. (But how long before the terms “man” and “woman” become victims of the same genocide?) The changes will make our common language impenetrable. I mean for instance, how will the biblical translators render the sentence, “A man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife”? I know: “A person will leave his or her parents and shack up with their spouse person.” Or perhaps something even more convoluted.

I don’t care what our leaders say in their promotion of this scandalous destruction not only of our language but of everything which forever before we regarded as our way of life. The new definitions of human relationships are a satanic invention. They are not trivial. Words are never trivial, for the choice of words determines what is being said.

What these new configurations of devilish babel really mean is the end of the natural covenant between a man and a woman with its connection to the procreation of children. It entails the abolition of the family. It proclaims that there is no longer anything right or wrong except that our atheistic, nihilistic society thinks it so. Anything Goes – though the devil’s bureaucrats could never put it so succinctly.

The consequences will be catastrophic. The customs and society which have defined and preserved us for millennia are dead. And ourselves with them. This is the Judgement. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

07 Mar

Thoughtless Every Day

I never imagined I would one day disagree with Bishop Michael Nazir Ali, the best (the only?) bishop we have. But he has just said that Dawn French – the Vicar of Dibley – should not be allowed to present Thought for the Day on 29^th March, Red Nose Day, because “this would detract from the programme’s seriousness.” At times like this, I’m tempted to echo John McEnroe’s admonishing of the referee: “You cain’t be serious, Michael!” TFTD serious? Don’t make me laugh.

The genial Today presenter Evan Davis says he would like to hear “serious and spiritually-minded secularists” on Thought for the Day. But, with one or two distinguished exceptions, these are the only sort of speakers we ever hear in that slot. There is nothing authentically religious about TFTD. It is an anodyne, multi-faith political pep-talk from the soft Left and so bum-clenchingly politically-correct as to be beyond satire. It is the social gospel – only without the gospel.

The presenters always trendily try to link their “thought” to an item in the day’s news:

“Jesus didn’t go in for binge-drinking but, after a long day chastising the money-changers and the greedy City bankers, there was nothing he liked better than to chill out over a few beers with his disciples – though he was careful not to exceed the recommended daily alcohol units…”

“Guru Nanak did not stigmatise obese people but showed his love for them by distributing low calorie curry dinners…”

“In one of his many speeches about global warming, the Buddha…”

The array of TFTD presenters is like Grand Guignol. There is Anne Atkins, formerly the terrifically scary bible-basher, now mutated into a terrifically scary agony aunt and post-modern novelist. And the faux-proletarian Dr Giles Fraser, fully paid-up member of the Church Militant Tendency.

Lord Harries, the retired Bishop of Oxford, comes on every few weeks to support embryo research and always justifies the killing of embryos by saying that many of them die anyway – a vivid demonstration of TFTD’s non-sequiturial style: like arguing that because some people fall under buses, it’s OK to push them.

There is a tremendously progressive Muslim with a name and an intonation that sounds like Moaner Cyd Eekie. They still nostalgically wheel out Rabbi Lionel Blue now and again to tell us that he’s not very well, Gay and trying his best to exorcise his Woody Allenish obsession with the Grim Reaper. I haven’t heard Bishop “Tom” Butler for a while. It was always nice to hear him reminisce about how, returning soberly from a reception at the Irish Embassy, he was discovered lying down in the back seat of someone else’s car, throwing toys out of the window: “I’m a bishop. It’s what I do!”

Hardly any of the contributors to TFTD are what you might call religious. Rather they translate traditional biblical stories into secular metaphors. For example, the feeding of the 5000 was no miracle but only a lesson in “sharing.” No more than a socialist picnic. Jesus did not rise physically from the tomb: it was just a case of the disciples’ subjective experience of “new life” – though how they gained this experience if Jesus remained dead they don’t explain.

There is no need for a religious slot these days. The BBC relentlessly preaches its own syncretistic secular religion, ecumenically combining anti-Americanism, hatred of Israel, addiction to pop-music, multiculturalism, the adulation of tawdry celebs and left wing playwrights and an obsession with climate change. Amen.

Good morning, John, good morning Sarah and good morning Jim… On the other hand what really would be a turn up is if a traditional, full-believing Christian were ever allowed on the programme. No chance. He wouldn’t get closer than a Sabbath day’s journey.

07 Mar

Not Architect but Maker

Nihil ex nihilo fit – nothing comes out of nothing. This is the starting point for the “debate” or slanging-match between the creationists and the new atheists. It is a very old argument and it is not very enlightening, despite its venerable credentials. It is in essence the same argument as that between the 18th century deists such as William Paley and their positivistic opponents such as David Hume. It goes even further back, to Aquinas and the scholastics and eventually to Aristotle. David Bentley Hart comments acerbically that the two sides in this dispute are so fatuous that they deserve each other.

For God is not the Great Architect, as the freemasons vainly believe. God is not the supreme technologist and fabricator, the one who made all the bits: he is the Creator. God was regarded by Augustine and Aquinas as the First Cause, but they didn’t mean that God set some mechanical sequence in motion and then, as it were, retired. By “First Cause” they were not talking about some aspect of thermodynamics: they meant that God is the One who gives reality to what otherwise would remain forever only potential.

This is what the Creed means when, quoting the first chapter of St John’s Gospel, it says by whom all things were made.

God does not therefore fabricate the world: rather he bestows upon the natural order its being. Something of this can be seen in the very first verses of Genesis where in the beginning there was not nothingness, but the earth was without form and void. It is God who gives form – being – to the formless void.

Those, like Richard Dawkins and indeed all materialists, who argue that the material order requires no Creator and that it is self-generating and self-sufficient – that there is nothing but the material order – fail to understand that, if that were the case, there is no way we could ever know that it is the case. Because knowledge implies thoughts, and thoughts are not material.

Perhaps there is an analogy between God’s creativity and ours – which we should in any case expect since we are made in God’s image. So the novelist when he creates his novel does not make the pen and paper with which he writes it though, of course, without the pen and paper, the novelist would not be able to present to us the characters he invents for us. These characters are not the ink marks on the page: they are the production of the mind of the novelist.

Similarly, we are creatures created by the mind of God. Specifically, as Augustine says, by the love of God. And God’s act of creation is not like the big bang. It is continuous and everlasting. Augustine says that if God were to stop loving us even for a moment, we should immediately cease to exist. Fortunately for us, God cannot do this. For God is love and he is bound to act in accordance with his nature. Augustine goes further and says, God is love and nothing else. Thus if God were to cease loving, he would cease to be God. (To express this anthropomorphically, God would cease to exist)

Incidentally, that old chestnut objection to the existence of God expressed by the question, Who made God? can be applied more pertinently to the big bang: if the big bang were really the first cause, what caused the big bang? In other words, how could a purely natural order naturally generate itself?

Dante underscores this truth at the end of The Divine Comedy when he speaks of the love that moves the sun and the other stars

Thus our existence is not our material features, but it is our being, our reality, bestowed upon us by the gift of God.

Once we understand this, the familiar difficulties with the idea of life after death entirely disappear.

06 Mar

Dumber Still and Dumber the Church’s Bounds are Set

Love Life: Live Lent.

The Archbishop of York is taking seriously his responsibility for the spiritual life of the nation. He has written the Foreword to three booklets to guide us through Lent: one for “The Family”; one for “Adults and Youth” and the other for “Kids.” Or is that last one for nanny goats?

These glossy booklets feature Mr Men style cartoon pictures whom we must suppose are meant to represent the general public. Achingly politically-correct with all races represented – but no fat people or smokers. Dumbing-down beyond the farthest reaches of infantilisation, the booklets urge us to “Do fun things together. Create a space in your home…a corner of a room…an understairs cupboard… a shelf…make a prayer den using furniture and blankets…gather some objects that are fun to touch, feel and smell: a piece of velvet, feathers, a tray of sand, lavender bags or pine cones.” These should be enough to satisfy at least some of the more mentionable fetishists among us.

And what are we supposed to do in the prayer space? “Take in some pebbles, shells or feathers” – presumably to demonstrate impeccable ecumenical relations with primitive animists and tree-huggers. And prayers are supplied: “Dear God, make wrong things right…” But this is not God; only the sentimental wish-fulfilment of Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy We are even educated into the correct manual acts to perform while praying this desolate prayer: “Shake your finger from side to side for ‘wrong’ and then do thumbs up for ‘right’.”

You feel there should be a caution not to do this near a window in case the neighbours see you and phone for the men in white coats.

Lent involves us in acts of practical devotion too. So, “Give a lollipop to your lollipop person.”

Of course, as always in the Church of England these days, the sheer blithering inanities only faintly disguise the right-on political hard sell:

“Email or write to your MP about a global poverty issue… Buy a fair Trade Easter egg” But what, if you follow the advice of many leading economists who claim so called Fair Trade does nothing to help the poor, and recommend free trade instead?

The only orthodoxy we find in these booklets is environmentalist demagoguery and the pagan superstition of global warming: “Help lighten our load on the planet… defrost your fridge and find out how climate change affects poorer people…help stop global climate change: recycle your rubbish save trees, use both sides of the paper…”

(When doing what, by the way?)

Lent is supposed to be a time when we repent of our sins. But the only sins found here are those of not subscribing to the Christian socialist manifesto and global warming denial.

No wonder the pews are emptying faster than ever, when these booklets represent the mind of the Church of England. Lent is for deepening our understanding of the faith and for growing nearer to God. These booklets contain no nourishment for those tasks.

What might the Archbishop have offered, if he had been in his right mind? That we should all begin and end the day by saying the Lord’s Prayer. Read the Collect, Epistle and Gospel written in the matchless English of The Book of Common Prayer for each of the six weeks of Lent. Perhaps say the Psalms set for every day. Try to attend an early morning or lunchtime weekday service of Holy Communion. Competent shepherds of their sheep would also have recommended some spiritual reading.

These patronising booklets are worse than a joke, worse than useless. They ape the trite and gaudy language and images of a debased advertising culture, babyfied and debauched, and apply it to the Christian Gospel. But faith cannot be taught in this way. It cannot be communicated by the thing it is not, the thing that is actually anathema to it. People have to be taught. These booklets only insult the intelligence of the public. There is no Christianity in “Live Life: Love Lent” – only a blasphemous parody of the faith.

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

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