Category: The Enchanted Ones

Orthodoxy

On Saturday May 14, 2005, about 100 people arrived outside Calvary Temple, an independent pentecostal church in downtown Winnipeg, to protest against a conference being held held in the church – about 400 people were expected – led by representatives of Focus on the Family. The newspaper story wasn’t clear on it, but it was a “Love Won Out” seminar. The conference animator was quoted as saying that Focus on the Family does not believe in trying to convert gays, accepts gays, but opposes gay marriage and wants to help gay people who want to walk away from the gay lifestyle. Which is not quite a denial of promoting the useless de-gay “therapies” that gay people have identified as harmful and repressive. The protesters wanted to expose what they see as the homophobic agenda of the socially conservative Christian churches, but they said they were defending freedom.

The protest was visible but peaceful, and the conference was private and peaceful. The protesters were against “homophobia” and in favour of same-sex marriage. The picture with the story showed a few of the protesters and heir hand-lettered signs, attacking Christianity (and Islam) for being repressive of sexual freedom in general and the sexual freedom of homosexuals. Staging protests outside churches and challenging right wing Christians to accept the rights of gays and lesbians is probably not useful way of changing right wing Christians. The protest was intended to shock – as the French saying has it, to épater le bourgeios. The act of shocking conventional values implies that the shocker is not only alienated from those values, but has superior values which must be taught by confrontation. The protesters were signalling that they have superior values.

There is an anti-religious sense to the idea of sexual liberation. The advocates of sexual liberation accuse Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and other practitioners of traditional religion of being intolerant and repressive. What is true is that some people disagree with other people’s moral, social, political and religious values. The rhetoric of modern liberalism is that liberal values are more enlightened, progressive, highly evolved. The modern radical is comfortably smug in accusing other people with different values of being comfortable, smug and conventional, which motivates the radical to challenge those values. The intellectual and emotional core of this kind of protest is the Romantic belief that religious beliefs repress people from finding their true sexually liberated selves while they are under the influence of a church. This protest was an act of aggression against Christians, to silence their dissenting views when they disagree with an ideology of secular liberation.

A United Church of Canada Minister (evidently a liberal member of a liberal protestant denomination) who was among the protesters – was quoted as saying “People have a right to their values and their viewpoints but when those values and viewpoints hurt other people, they need to be challenged.” She calls on a principle of social behaviour – no one can talk about other people’s social behaviour if the discussion hurts their feelings. That reasoning inverts the logic of pluralism. She is not claiming tolerance or freedom from discrimination for homosexuals. She is claiming the right to confront Christians in their churches and to challenge their morality. The more specific argument is that the gay rights community says that disagreeing with it about its ideas about gender and sexual orientation is “homophobia”, which is as bad as positive discrimination against their rights.

The protesters implied that homophobia is a psychological problem. The gay rights community is mobilized around the idea of fighting homophobia, and its members are easily motivated to get out and protest or march on that issue. It gives their community direction and cohesion. It gives them a chance to reinforce their beliefs collectively and to talk to the public about their beliefs through the media. The gay rights community has good reasons to view itself as embattled and threatened, to work to entrench its legal rights and to try to secure a less fragile standing in society than uneasy or contemptuous tolerance. Calling Christians repressed or accusing them of trying to harm gays and lesbians is conducive to respecful engagement.

Catholic in America

The title of George Weigel’s The Truth of Catholicism, Ten Controversies Explored, suggests this book will sound like a finger-wagging, lecturing apologetic in defence of Catholic orthodoxy. In fact this 2001 book, like his 2004 book “Letters to a Young Catholic” is an literate and enthusiastic presentation of orthodox Catholic teachings in an American context.

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Atheists, Darwinists

Here are links to two stories about the irony of dogma – specifically about atheist dogmas. Atheists reject religious dogmas and criticize dogmatic reasoning. However celebrity atheists, for instance the scientist and popular writer Richard Dawkins, can present themselves as dogmatic. There are two dimensions of the word dogmatic in popular usage. There is a social and psychological dimension involving the project of presenting one person’s ideas and criticizing other people’s ideas. This involves temperament, attitude and social skills. Conservative religious believers are rigid and intolerant in public discourse. In that way, the word dogmatic starts to apply to anyone who is firm about a belief. In this sense, it applies to atheists who are aggressively anti-religious. Their confidence in their insights into the world extends to serious criticism of religion and the people who have religious systems of belief. The other dimension of the term dogmatic involves a more formally intellectual examination of what a person believes to be true on the basis of confidence in a set of principles and assumptions.

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The Pope is Catholic

The election of Pope Benedict XVI has highlighted several things about the media. The news is presented as entertainment – simple stories, visuals, staged conflict, obsessed with celebrity. What passes for informed commentary is usually an ideological rant complaining that the Pope is conservative. Everyone knows that he wrote a lot of books, few seem to have read them. Everyone knows he wrote that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered”, few realize that this is a restatement of a traditional proposition of orthodox Catholic moral philosophy, not an anthropological or psychological claim. (Unfortunately the new Pope does want to limit the human rights claimed by homosexuals in Western societies).

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Wiccan Myth

An odd find – I was looking for something different when I found this review of a book debunking the feminist/Wiccan/New Age myth that Christians burned 9 million innocent women as witches. In fact a lot of druidic and Wiccan folklore seems to have been invented or re-invented and then plugged into fluffy spirituality in the last decades of the 20th century by people with spiritual feelings and no particular feelings about logic and truth. The review is called “The Invention of Modern Witchcraft”. The reviewer is Irving Hexham, who teaches religion at the University of Calgary, and has strong interest in cults and new religious movements. The book is “The Triumph of the Moon” by Ronald Hutton.

John Paul II

Arts and Letters Daily linked to Michael Valpy’s long article in the Globe and Mail, Saturday April 2, 2005. It seems to be a good overview of the life of Karol Wojtyla and a balanced assessment of his papacy, touching the main issues as they appear to present-day observers. Brendan O’Neill’s article at Spiked makes some ironic points about how the public reaction to the Pope’s death has been predicably similiar to the death of other super-celebrities, which says a lot about how the Pope’s teachings on truth and culture have not taken hold. The CBC Online service has a central microsite for John Paul II with links to much of their other material. The BBC has a microsite of the same kind, perhaps with better material. I don’t know if these are going to be long-term or permanent links.

Projection Theory

Paul C. Vitz published Faith of the Fatherless, The Psychology of Atheism (1999) to question the projection theory of religion. He turns Freud’s version of the theory back on Freud by questioning the relationships of many leading atheist thinkers with their fathers. His book is best viewed as an articulate deconstruction of some of the pretensions of modern philosophy and social theory, although it can be viewed as a fairly sophisticated religious counterattack against one of the common assumptions of modern culture about religion.

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Therapeutic Individualism

A review of a new sociological study about the religious beliefs of American teens- “Moral Therapeutic Deism” – published at The Revealer has a good comment that shows how culture dominates religion, and how religion relates to culture. The basic point is that self-described Christian American teenagers are as materialistic and self-absorbed as their peers.

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Reading – March 30, 2005

A little browsing. First, following up on my summary of Dr. Vitz’s article “Pyschology in Recovery“, the article is now on line here.
I found several other articles that related to things I have been thinking and writing about. The common threads are rationalism & the Enlightenment, religion, and faith. I haven’t worked out what I want to say about them and I wanted to park the links.

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Kill The Buddha

A couple of links. Kill the Buddha started as an Internet project and turned into a book. I have heard the authors interviewed on the radio. Their project sounds different from the conventional posturing of people who want to be “spiritual” without being “religious”, although that seems to be their starting point. One of the KtB writers has gone on to launch The Revealor, an Internet survey of religious writing.

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