Michael Burleigh and Religion

Are communism and Nazism religions? To many of the more intellectually challenged atheists, the answer is yes. After all, they are bad things and all bad things are religious. Usually, they are explaining why atheism has never harmed anyone while religion has killed millions. They will claim that any ideology that demands adherence unto death and makes people behave badly is a religion. Don't believe me? Here's a couple of letters from a recent edition of the Guardian supplied by a correspondent:

Marxist communism is a classic religion. It is structured like the Catholic church, it has schisms and sects (its more devout followers read selected
texts by Trotsky, Mao, Lenin or Stalin), and it is a "holy cause" for which
the true believers have the right to kill the unbelievers (like the kulaks).
Incidentally, Bertrand Russell was the first to point this out.

George Monbiot refers to Stalin as a non-religious man. He forgets
that Stalin was trained as a priest in a seminary for some years. His later
activities fall well within the scope of George's arguments on faith.

Of course, the argument is rather silly and best ignored. But, a slightly different alternative is worth pursuing.

In his book The Third Reich: A New History, Michael Burleigh calls Nazism a "political religion". I think his choice of words is unfortunate but his point is the opposite of the Guardian letter writers. What he meant was that Nazism was a substitute for religion. Burleigh actually thinks traditional religion is generally a good thing. But it is also necessary part of being human and when you get rid of it and replace it with a political ideology, you can get into big trouble. His new book, Earthly Powers, takes the story back to the Enlightenment. He shows how enlightened men, trying to replace old superstition with reason, invariably produced something much worse. Some of the efforts were cringe-worthy and Burleigh is quite happy to treat them with a little contempt. Others were disastrous - especially the cult of reason foisted on the French by the Jacobins who then slaughtered anyone who wouldn't play ball. Today's militant secularists are harmless but they should not be allowed to forget their history. It is not one of science defeating religion or rationalists defeating superstition. It is mainly rather an embarrassing tale of earnest people with absolutely no sense of how stupid they are going to look. The more serious strand of Burleigh's story is about ideologies like communism that have successfully replaced religions and then caused unprecedented death and destruction.

Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.

Animal rights and human duties

One reader has posted an article by Peter Singer onto Bede's dedicated yahoo group and another emailed me on the question of animal suffering. I thought I'd put down some thoughts on the question. Let me say at once that Singer is not someone I would recommend paying much attention to. You can read a huge number of articles by him here, and if they haven't caused your brain to turn to cold custard, you are a stronger person than I.

The basic mistake of the animal rights movement is that animals don't have rights. How could they? Think how silly it would be if the gazelle tried to sue the cheetah for infringement of its right to life. How stupid that the ant might demand to be allowed to form a union with its fellows. The only time that animal rights are invoked is in their relationships with humans. This immediately tells us that it is the human side of the interface that matters, not the animal one. If we do not expect animals to enforce their rights against each other, it is daft to expect us to enforce their rights against ourselves.

Animals have no rights. Speciesism is simply misanthropy spelt differently. Singer is a pretty good case in point - he is in favour of killing the handicapped, the unborn and the old. He is against humans killing animals to eat, which is odd because he doesn't seem to expect lions to become vegetarians. We can dispose of the whole animal rights business.

What we cannot do is treat animals in a way that demeans us. Animals do suffer. They do feel pain and they do not like this. They have no sense of morality but we do. Consequently, as moral people we have a duty to treat animals well, especially the ones who serve us as pets, workers or food. But these duties are a function of our moral stature and nothing to do with the alleged 'rights' of the animal. Most Christians understand this. They know that humans are unique and that we dominate the natural world. But that domination brings with it duties of good husbandry. What we exploit, we must care for. By demanding animal rights, campaigners seek to diminish the value of the human. Don't listen to them, but do buy free range chickens, organically reared meat and local produce that hasn't spent days cramped into a lorry to get to you.

Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.

The Gospel Hoax

I have received (with thanks for the kindness) and read a proof of Stephen Carlson's The Gospel Hoax and thought I should note a few thoughts. If the etiquette is not to comment on books before they are published, then I apologise, but everyone else seems to be doing it.

Stephen has, I believe, proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Secret Gospel of Mark is a modern forgery or hoax. He does this by an analysis of the handwriting of the manuscript using the methods that are applicable for spotting forged signatures and other documents. On the Textual Criticism yahoo group Stephen has also produced expert testimony supporting his conclusion. Secret Mark is written on the flyleaf of a seventeenth century book which was smuggled into the monastic library where Morton Smith found it. This was dead easy to do because all security in libraries is planned against taking books out, not smuggling them in. Only a few months ago, forged documents were found to have been lodged in the UK National Archives (story from the Daily Telegraph). So Secret Mark has no value at all for scholarship and tells us nothing about Jesus or Clement of Alexandria.

Stephen also tries to pin the blame for the hoax on Morton Smith, the man who claimed to have discovered the manuscript. He is certainly the prime suspect and Stephen thinks he has found some clues to confirm the identity of the forger. Here, I am less sure. Yes, I think Smith did the deed. But Stephen's clues appear a little to clever and a little hard to swallow. I'll let you read the book and make your own mind up on this question. For me, the important point is that Secret Mark is now forged Mark. Who was responsible is a secondary issue. If it was Smith, he took the truth to his grave in 1991.

Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.

Lightning Rods and the Church

One of the many stories of the great myth of the conflict between science and religion is that the Christians tried to prevent the use of lightning rods. Whenever I asked for a reference, all I ever got is Andrew Dickson White (extract here) so I knew that there was something fishy going on. However, all serious histories were silent on the subject. I nosed around to see if there was any academic work on the question and dug up an article by IB Cohen called "Popular Prejudice against the Introduction of lightning Rods" (Journal of the Franklin Institute, vol. 253, pp. 393 - 440, 1952). It is rather revealing.

White is correct to say that ringing bells was a popular way to scaring off lightning from church towers. But the it was also known to be dangerous and the Church disliked the practice because it was deemed superstitious (as long ago as the seventeenth century, Cardinal Bellarmine condemned it).

The real problems that caused late adoption were two-fold. Firstly, the working of the rod was not fully understood. It had to be grounded to work, otherwise it just attracted lightning. Abbe Nollet, a French scientist and rival of Franklin, wrote a critique based on this and other misunderstandings that did have some effect on the rods use. But Cohen states that "his objections were grounded in scientific concerns."

Second, ordinary people were not convinced by scientists saying that attracting lightning and sending it into the ground was harmless. After all, lightning was scary stuff and scientists were as arrogant about popular concerns then as they are today. But, Cohen states "slowness in adopting the new invention did not proceed from ecclesiastical ban or dogma." but from local concern about whether the rod worked. In fact, even Pope Benedict XIV had been a supporter of the use of rods. St Mark's in Venice had one as early as 1766. As Cohen summarises: "Even though the ringing of church bells during lightning storms continued in Catholic Countries long after the invention of the lightning rod, it was by no means the case that the Church as an institution was opposed to the new invention."

Another myth bites the dust.

Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.

Possible interruptions to availability of Bede's Library

I am, once again, changing web space provider in an effort to find someone vaguely reliable. You may have noticed various features (feedback form, search facility etc) not working. Fed up with trying to persuade my current provider to fix all the problems, I have scheduled tomorrow (Monday) for the move. This may lead to the web site disappearing for a while and emails not getting through. Hopefully, it won't take too long but if you fail to get a reply to an email within a week or so, don't be afraid to send it again. Those of you with my college email address should be unaffected by this.

Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.

Some good news on the culture of death. The parents who have been trying to lift the court imposed death sentence on their handicapped daughter have finally been successful. One interesting point is that previous reports have always stressed that the parents were committed Christians (and hence, by implication, nuts) but now they have been successful in quashing the order, reference to their religion has quietly been dropped. Of course, the court order should never have been issued and we need a change in the law to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.

Here's the latest on the Holy Blood/Da Vinci Code lawsuit. I am wondering if this might have a big effect on academics. If the HBHG crew win (assuming they don't admit their book is fiction), it means that historians own their hypotheses and can expect compensation if someone else exploits them. That would be a bizarre situation and all of a sudden citation would become a legal and not moral duty. Let's see how it pans out. Personally, I don't give the HBHG crew a hope.

Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.

My wife, fresh from reading the Da Vinci Code, demanded to know why I hadn't written it. After all, she reasoned, I knew a great deal more about religious history than Dan Brown and any vaguely literate human could write better than he does. I'm proud enough to agree with the first point but do think that the thriller writers' craft requires more skill than we often give them credit for. That said, pseudo-history sells. The current master of the genre is Graham Hancock who has had his own TV shows and a shelf of books to his name. His latest goes out as editor's choice in History Book Clubs and finds a comfortable niche in the bestseller lists. Of similar ilk are David Rohl (who actually has a PhD in Egyptology) and Graham Phillips. We could add the dedicated band who insist that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare or aliens visited early man (or aliens wrote Hamlet?!?), the pyrimidiots and our favourite Jesus mythologists. Yes, there is money in these old canards and the latest batch is hot of the presses for Christmas.

Of course, scholars cannot be too smug. Conservative New Testament experts got egg from the ossuary on their faces. Of rather more long term significance was the vast amount that poured from the pens of liberal scholars over the Secret Mark hoax. I'd be surprised if Dom Crossan will ever be able to look in the mirror again.

Would it be morally wrong to write a work of fiction, like the Holy Blood and Holy Grail or Hancock's latest knowing full well that people would take it seriously? I think it is and certainly, if you have to lie during interviews to defend your work, you are on the wrong side of the fence. But in some ways it is tempting. All the boring stuff about sources, evidence and logic can be thrown out for a thrilling story that your readers will enjoy far more. My only hope is that by writing about the way Christianity helped bring about modern science, I can produce a revolutionary narrative that has the added bonus of being true...

Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.

Lord Winston, Robert to his friends, is a clever chap. He is a world renowned surgeon who has since become a presenter of various scientific programmes of varying quality. A year ago he came and talked to us at Cambridge about 'Science and Religion', saying some reasonably sensible things. It seems he has a new TV show and book out soon that investigates why we are religious. He thinks it is a good thing that must have helped man survive. This should be pretty obvious. If religion was as bad as the anti-Christians suggest, they should think that evolution would have got rid of it! I'll be interested in what Lord Winston has to say and how it fits with the book I am reading at the moment, Andrew Newberg's Why God Won't Go Away.

George Monbiot who, unlike Lord Winston, is a nutcase, had an amusing article in the Guardian today. He's picked up on some badly flawed research that claims to show that religion is bad for morality. It claims that the more Christian a country, the higher the incidence of teenage pregnancies and murder. Monbiot, of course, is dancing around with this like a kid with a lollipop because its exactly what he wants to hear. Sadly, it's rubbish and proves that it is easy to lie with statistics. You can read the actual article here. Take the United States out of the equation and there is pratically no correlation. In fact, take the most deprived communities in the US out of the equation, and I expect the correlation disappears as well. So we are trying to make a case from a single example. Why does the US have a high homicide rate, a high abortion rate and a high teenage pregnancy rate? Good questions. Almost as good as why the religious Irish and Italians seem to have lower rates and the secular British have higher rates. I expect you need to look for political and economic answers to these questions rather than try and pin the blame on religion.

Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.

As rare a sight in these parts as the Large Blue butterfly or the Great Awk is the Bishop of Oxford, the Right Reverand Richard Harries, standing up for a traditional moral teaching of the church. But this weekend, teams of dedicated bishop watchers gawped in awe at the appearence in the Observer of a column doing just that. Yes, the leader of the sex-for-all wing of the Church of England has come out against euthanasia. This is doubly surprising because most 'progressive' opinion is firmly in favour of slapping a 'use-by' date on human beings. Indeed, the Guardian's leader column, a text that Harries treats with all the reverence his more traditional colleagues reserve for the teaching of our Savior, is very much in favour. We shouldn't forget that Harries actually signed up to an open letter from Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins on the teaching of creationism. If that is not jumping on anti-Christian bandwagons, I don't know what is.

But heaven rejoiceth and all, so we should be happy for any sign of Christian life in Oxford. Perhaps, now that he has decided against killing the very old and ill, Harries might also come out against killing the unborn too.

Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.