Post by AuntieSocial on Nov 25, 2003 0:04:40 GMT -5
So the British have become atheists. Thank God for that.
The archbishop is upset that we reject fairytales about life after death[/b]
Click here to read the article on the original site
By: Joan Smith
Published: October 30, 2000
Publication: The Guardian
Terrific news from the Archbishop of Canterbury: we have become a society of atheists. In a startlingly pessimistic analysis of the role of the church in contemporary Britain, Dr George Carey admits that "a tacit atheism prevails" and that people have stopped believing in life after death. Not that he is throwing in the towel; Dr Carey has also appealed to Anglicans to redouble their efforts and reach out to unbelievers. But his sermon, delivered at St German's Cathedral on the Isle of Man at the end of last week, contained a dramatic acknowledgment that a majority of the population no longer accepts the central tenets of Christianity.
This shift has, in terms of church attendance at least, been apparent for some time. In a population of 60m, the number of people who turn up at Anglican services on Sundays has dropped below one million. Other religions are doing better, but we have certainly moved, in the course of a century, from being a Christian society to one that is much more diverse in its beliefs. This is in my view a very good thing, although I am not sure that Dr Carey is accurate in diagnosing a surge in atheism. I am dismayed by how often people express views that resemble deism or even animism, suggesting disillusionment with traditional forms of worship as much as the notion of a supreme being.
The Anglican establishment might well conclude that this is almost as bad as straightforward unbelief, and from a self-interested point of view it would be right. The church's authority has been undermined, perhaps terminally so, with its traditional teachings on sex and marriage widely disregarded. Few of us believe that fornication, as it was once quaintly called, will lead to the torments of hell, no matter how often Dr Carey insists that lifelong heterosexual monogamy is the only acceptable expression of adult sexuality.
But his critique of contemporary society goes further. The idea that death is the end of life is "bleak", he suggested last week, and results in a narrowing-down of human aspiration.
"If we need hope to clutch to our breast at all it will be in such greatly scaled down forms, such as our longings for family happiness, the next holiday or personal fulfilment." If human beings have nothing to strive for or fear in another life, so the argument runs, they will necessarily be diminished in this one.
At its most reductive, the question that is being asked here is why anyone would bother to be altruistic if individual extinction is very nearly certain. Why not just blow your savings on a new car or taking your family to the Bahamas, and let the poor shift for themselves? There are several fallacies here, all of them in need of urgent deconstruction before the archbishop's conflation of godlessness and immorality is seized upon and exaggerated into a full-scale moral panic. (That process has already started, by the way. "Archbishop warns of loss of morality" was the front-page claim in Saturday's Daily Telegraph.)
One fallacy is the notion that religious convictions are the sine qua non of leading a moral existence. Of course it depends how you define morality, and there is no doubt that, according to the church's traditional teaching, many of us are leading flagrantly immoral lives: we enthusiastically (and according to taste) indulge in sex before and after marriage, serial monogamy and so on.
But that is because we have seen through one of the great con tricks of religion, which is an unhealthy obsession with the regulation of private life. This can lead, in its most extreme form, to a situation in which a vegetarian who works for Aids charities can be characterised as immoral, solely because he has sex with other men.
We have, for the most part, outgrown such infantile attitudes in this country. It has also become apparent that, far from having a monopoly on goodness, Christians are no more likely than atheists to behave well to their fellow human beings. On the contrary, the Roman Catholic church had a deplorable record of colluding with fascism throughout the 20th century, from the congratulations it bestowed on General Franco after the Spanish civil war, to its recent efforts on behalf of General Pinochet. Hitler was not a Catholic but the wartime pontiff, Pius XII, was happy enough to come to an arrangement with him and steer clear of potential embarrassments like denouncing the Holocaust.
It is perfectly clear that you can be committed to equality and justice without being told to subscribe to them by a higher authority. The movement towards establishing universal human rights, in the form of international conventions and domestic law, is being driven as much by atheists and agnostics as believers. On the contrary, if you are not distracted by the prospect of an afterlife, it is all the more important to change the society we live in now and that we will hand on to future generations.
Some of the world's most inspiring thinkers, such as the poet Shelley, were atheists long before it was safe to declare themselves so. Lord Byron, stopping in 1816 at an inn in Switzerland where Shelley had stayed, was dismayed to discover that his friend had inscribed the word "atheist" in Greek after his name in the register. Byron swiftly crossed it out but Shelley made a habit of the declaration and was subsequently denounced by other English tourists, including the devout (and inferior) poet Robert Southey.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Dr Carey's sermon, however, was his contention that people who used to seek help from their parish priest when depressed are now more likely to ask their GP for pills. They are behaving, he said, "as if doctors can cure all ills and even postpone death forever". That postponing death is a reasonable ambition seems obvious, whether or not you believe in an after-life; far from hurrying to meet her maker, even Mother Teresa flew to Los Angeles in her later years for state-of-the-art medical treatment.
But the archbishop's remarks are a timely reminder of the function of religion, in pre-Darwinian societies, as a means of mediating the terror of death. In that sense, believing in God was not so much altruistic as consolatory, and the bishops' quid pro quo was the power they gained over their congregation. Indeed Dr Carey's sermon last week may have been franker than he realised, acknowledging not just the loss of that power but the poverty of the church's contemporary vision. Clerics may disapprove of Prozac, but fairy stories are all they have to offer as an antidote to the human condition.
The archbishop is upset that we reject fairytales about life after death[/b]
Click here to read the article on the original site
By: Joan Smith
Published: October 30, 2000
Publication: The Guardian
Terrific news from the Archbishop of Canterbury: we have become a society of atheists. In a startlingly pessimistic analysis of the role of the church in contemporary Britain, Dr George Carey admits that "a tacit atheism prevails" and that people have stopped believing in life after death. Not that he is throwing in the towel; Dr Carey has also appealed to Anglicans to redouble their efforts and reach out to unbelievers. But his sermon, delivered at St German's Cathedral on the Isle of Man at the end of last week, contained a dramatic acknowledgment that a majority of the population no longer accepts the central tenets of Christianity.
This shift has, in terms of church attendance at least, been apparent for some time. In a population of 60m, the number of people who turn up at Anglican services on Sundays has dropped below one million. Other religions are doing better, but we have certainly moved, in the course of a century, from being a Christian society to one that is much more diverse in its beliefs. This is in my view a very good thing, although I am not sure that Dr Carey is accurate in diagnosing a surge in atheism. I am dismayed by how often people express views that resemble deism or even animism, suggesting disillusionment with traditional forms of worship as much as the notion of a supreme being.
The Anglican establishment might well conclude that this is almost as bad as straightforward unbelief, and from a self-interested point of view it would be right. The church's authority has been undermined, perhaps terminally so, with its traditional teachings on sex and marriage widely disregarded. Few of us believe that fornication, as it was once quaintly called, will lead to the torments of hell, no matter how often Dr Carey insists that lifelong heterosexual monogamy is the only acceptable expression of adult sexuality.
But his critique of contemporary society goes further. The idea that death is the end of life is "bleak", he suggested last week, and results in a narrowing-down of human aspiration.
"If we need hope to clutch to our breast at all it will be in such greatly scaled down forms, such as our longings for family happiness, the next holiday or personal fulfilment." If human beings have nothing to strive for or fear in another life, so the argument runs, they will necessarily be diminished in this one.
At its most reductive, the question that is being asked here is why anyone would bother to be altruistic if individual extinction is very nearly certain. Why not just blow your savings on a new car or taking your family to the Bahamas, and let the poor shift for themselves? There are several fallacies here, all of them in need of urgent deconstruction before the archbishop's conflation of godlessness and immorality is seized upon and exaggerated into a full-scale moral panic. (That process has already started, by the way. "Archbishop warns of loss of morality" was the front-page claim in Saturday's Daily Telegraph.)
One fallacy is the notion that religious convictions are the sine qua non of leading a moral existence. Of course it depends how you define morality, and there is no doubt that, according to the church's traditional teaching, many of us are leading flagrantly immoral lives: we enthusiastically (and according to taste) indulge in sex before and after marriage, serial monogamy and so on.
But that is because we have seen through one of the great con tricks of religion, which is an unhealthy obsession with the regulation of private life. This can lead, in its most extreme form, to a situation in which a vegetarian who works for Aids charities can be characterised as immoral, solely because he has sex with other men.
We have, for the most part, outgrown such infantile attitudes in this country. It has also become apparent that, far from having a monopoly on goodness, Christians are no more likely than atheists to behave well to their fellow human beings. On the contrary, the Roman Catholic church had a deplorable record of colluding with fascism throughout the 20th century, from the congratulations it bestowed on General Franco after the Spanish civil war, to its recent efforts on behalf of General Pinochet. Hitler was not a Catholic but the wartime pontiff, Pius XII, was happy enough to come to an arrangement with him and steer clear of potential embarrassments like denouncing the Holocaust.
It is perfectly clear that you can be committed to equality and justice without being told to subscribe to them by a higher authority. The movement towards establishing universal human rights, in the form of international conventions and domestic law, is being driven as much by atheists and agnostics as believers. On the contrary, if you are not distracted by the prospect of an afterlife, it is all the more important to change the society we live in now and that we will hand on to future generations.
Some of the world's most inspiring thinkers, such as the poet Shelley, were atheists long before it was safe to declare themselves so. Lord Byron, stopping in 1816 at an inn in Switzerland where Shelley had stayed, was dismayed to discover that his friend had inscribed the word "atheist" in Greek after his name in the register. Byron swiftly crossed it out but Shelley made a habit of the declaration and was subsequently denounced by other English tourists, including the devout (and inferior) poet Robert Southey.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Dr Carey's sermon, however, was his contention that people who used to seek help from their parish priest when depressed are now more likely to ask their GP for pills. They are behaving, he said, "as if doctors can cure all ills and even postpone death forever". That postponing death is a reasonable ambition seems obvious, whether or not you believe in an after-life; far from hurrying to meet her maker, even Mother Teresa flew to Los Angeles in her later years for state-of-the-art medical treatment.
But the archbishop's remarks are a timely reminder of the function of religion, in pre-Darwinian societies, as a means of mediating the terror of death. In that sense, believing in God was not so much altruistic as consolatory, and the bishops' quid pro quo was the power they gained over their congregation. Indeed Dr Carey's sermon last week may have been franker than he realised, acknowledging not just the loss of that power but the poverty of the church's contemporary vision. Clerics may disapprove of Prozac, but fairy stories are all they have to offer as an antidote to the human condition.
