So its been a while.. I blame the festival of christmas, and therefore Christianity, and therefore God, so really, nothing’s changed.

I received the book in the previous post for christmas. Its approximately 700 pages of essays to do with the relationships between theologies and societies and governments. The essays have been amassed by Hent de Vries and Lawrence E Wright. De Vries is a surname that rings through the Philosophical community, with Peter de Vries (an American) having written the popular, “Slouching Towards Kalamazoo”.

There are a fair few essays in this volume that are absolutely perfect for me, so this book will become my Waynflete Bible, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Left the Anglican Church in 1992 over the ordination of female priests.

• Doesn’t really form any kind of coherent argument, instead she almost dismisses the motion
• Talks about the ‘millions of pounds’ donated to charity by the Catholic Church, ‘imagine a world without it’ (..um ok)
• Tells Christopher Hitchens that he ignored the ‘thousands of Jews’ that took refuge in Churches - against his point about anti-semitism and ‘staying quiet’ during Hitler’s final solution

Begins by saying that wrongfully lacking from the Archbishop’s speech was a long list of apologies for:

• The Crusades
• The inquisition
• Jewish persecution
• Brutal conversion of local peoples
• Slave trade
• “Gallileo Gallilei was right!”
• The silence during Hitler’s final soluition
• Treatment of women
• The “institutionalisation of child rape”

He then says that these acts are not to be “laughed off by the occasional act of charity.

• Anti-semitism as an official doctrine of the Catholic Churh until 1964
• AIDS is bad, but not as bad as condoms are..
• The condemnation of homosexuality, (pertinent as Stephen Fry is gay)
• Calls the Church a “clutch of hysterical sinister virgins who’ve already betrayed the charge of their own church”
• Points to the time between Popes, “the only time where no human on earth claims to be infallible”

• Opens by saying that the Catholic Church is an intitution, a ‘community of believers’. This therefore follows that to even equate the motion, one has to look at the Catholics themselves, as they are what the institution is made up of.
• Talks about the image of the Catholic Church. ‘How many batallions has the Pope?’
• Talks about what kind of force the Catholic Church has, calls it a ‘force of values’. Ten commandments, bible teachings blah blah blah
• Committs a pseudo logical fallacy in incluiding the fact that Catholicism has spread around the world. In a sense saying, “look at how many people agree with me…”
• Claims that 26% of the health institutions that are directly involved with the management of HIV and AIDS are run by the Catholic Church.
• Claims that social welfare from the Catholic Church is enacted ‘irrespective of creed’. 

Found an intelligence squared debate on the motion, “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world”. It was ex-Conservative MP Ann Widecombe and Archbishop John Onaiyekan arguing for the motion, against Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens arguing against the motion.

The debate format was a series of speeches, first from the Archbishop, then Hitchens, then Widecombe, then the final atheist. There were then a series of questions from the floor, the a final vote from the floor.

Preliminary title aside (despite nearing due date..), I have been studying various aspects of Christianity and its effects on various spheres of society.

Interesting points:

• Churches in Britain are tax exempt, and this is therefore a physical manifestation of the point that was forming in my mind about the different status that religious belief seems to enjoy in modern society
• I have come across the idea that religion does not only do personal good for those who indulge in it but that its effects on the arts, charity and other aspects of society are widely beneficial.
• The follow-on from this is that that atheism has produced atrocities on a massive scale, (Hitler and Stalin are often vomited up at this stage, something massively criticized by Dawkins and Hitchens alike.)
• Somehow, I also came across the notion that many uphold - that atheism is itself a religion. As many ‘born again atheists’ worship their converters, messirs Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris, the religious tend to take pleasure in the snipe that these men become atheist Gods. However as Don Hirschberg aptly put, “Atheism is a religion like baldness is a hair colour”