Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

Pope John Paul II - not a well man

According to a new book, Pope John Paul II regularly whipped himself. At other times, and in spite of illness, he slept on a bare floor. This, apparently, makes him eligible for sainthood.

To the faithful, the self-flagellation and hardship, in emulation of Christ’s suffering, are heroic. But outside the warped logic of faith, is there any other context in which this kind of behaviour wouldn’t be regarded as unbalanced?

The details of the late Pope’s masochism come in a new book, Why He Is a Saint: the Real John Paul II. It’s by Vatican official Monsignor Slawomir Oder who will be in charge of the process that will probably end in John Paul II’s canonisation (so it’s probably not a very balanced view of the erstwhile Pontiff).

There could be no clearer illustration of how religious and real-world perspectives do not align.

To the faithful Roman Catholic, John Paul II’s actions demonstrate devotion and courage.

To the ordinary human being, such behaviour seems suspiciously deviant. Indulging in such masochism suggests mental disorder, perhaps with sexual overtones. Masochism, after all, frequently has sexual implications, and in a sect that imposes lifelong celibacy (in theory) on its priests, one might expect many different manifestations of aberrant psychosexual pathology.

Even without such dark overtones, this behaviour still seems odd. To deliberately hurt oneself in emulation of a character in a fictional story is hardly normal, is it? What would we make, for example, of a teenager who chose to live in a wardrobe to honour the story of Narnia? That’s right – we’d get them help. And that’s without them self-harming – a sure sign of psychological issues.

This wouldn’t be the first time that behaviour which would seem odd or unacceptable to society at large is excused by religious adherence. There is a broad spectrum ranging from violent jihad to the Church of England’s recent fight to protect its ‘right’ to discriminate against homosexuals. Right now, in Kansas, a man is claiming that his religious beliefs left him no choice but to murder a doctor.

It’s also worth remembering that, when he wasn’t enjoying a sound self-whipping, Pope John Paul II lived in an environment of fantastic wealth and privilege.

Still, the Roman Catholic church has elevated people to sainthood on any number of feeble premises. It’s a form of marketing. By making people saints, you’re saying, ‘See how our church contains so many good and righteous people’. It helps counter the bad press the church gets for its paedophile priests and its effective genocide-by-AIDS in Africa.

Most organised religions are fundamentally bizarre. They involve a wholesale acceptance of strange and improbable ideas. Most of the time, we let this slide, because many of these ideas have become entrenched as part of the whole patchwork that is our mythological and historical landscape.

But occasionally, something crops up that makes you step back and think, “wow, now that’s weird”. This is one of those occasions, and it’s the clearest sign you could ask for of the gulf between faith and the real world.

I readily admit that I’m not an expert on Christian theology. It’s a tricky subject. There’s so much that is vague, bizarre and self-contradictory in the Bible that making sense of it – if sense is the right word – takes a certain kind of mind and a lot of training.

Take, for instance, Jesus and the manner of his conception.

Mary was ‘visited’ by the Holy Spirit. That’s a polite term for it, as in ‘I gave her a damn good visiting’. The result was that Mary became pregnant without any of that sordid rolling in the hay malarky.

Catholics would have you believe she remained a virgin (let’s leave aside the small matter of Jesus’ brother, James, and other siblings). Not just that, Mary herself had to be free of sin, including original sin, so Catholics had to invent all that silliness about Mary’s immaculate conception. Nor could she die, but instead had to be assumed up to heaven.

It’s all man-made nonsense, of course, but it’s not the particular piece of nonsense I want to deal with here.

Fun-loving trio

No, my problem is with that Holy Spirit fella. He’s one part of that fun-loving trio, the Holy Trinity. The other members, of course, are God and Jesus. Oh, wait…

Presumably, before the Holy Spirit had his night of passion with Mary, the Holy Trinity was merely the Dynamic Duo. There’s not much I can find in the Bible or on Wikipedia about that, but in any case there’s a more pressing problem.

You see, Christianity has long anguished over this Trinity business. I mean, it markets itself as one of the leading monotheistic faiths (of which there are three key brands, but let’s not get into that coincidence). In fact, God is very emphatic about the mono bit – ‘Thou shalt have no other gods but me’ and all that.

And so theologians have had to come up with some very convoluted, clever, indeed downright devious ways of getting around the problem of there being three versions of the one God. Yes, they say, there are three entities or manifestations, but they are simply different facets of the same thing – God the father, God the son and God the Holy Ghost.

In the Credo (or Nicene Creed, if you prefer), this is made explicit. In the original version of the creed, formulated in Nicea in 325CE, believers simply state that they believe in the Holy Ghost. But in the Constantinople version of 381CE, the creed was expanded to avoid any unpleasant misunderstanding. The Holy Ghost, it says, “proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified”. In both versions, Jesus is, “begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father”.

One substance. Hmm.

And so it seems that, in effect, Mary spent the night with God. And given that Jesus is part of God … well that raises some difficult questions, doesn’t it? One assumes that the Holy Ghost is nothing but a convenient invention of members of the early Christian church to get around the problem of Jesus begetting himself, and having sex with his mother into the bargain.

Anyone who has written a novel or screenplay will recognise the huge plot problems in the Christian story. And most will have little time for how poorly these have been resolved by later contortions and rewrites. We humans have made up this story but can’t seem to make it work at any logical level. Of course, that doesn’t always worry believers: most just throw up their hands and declare it a mystery and not for us to know.

Some Christian sects have avoided the problem by simplifying the story of Christ and what interpretations they make from it. For example, many do not insist on Mary’s virginity. In any case, this was only ever the product of a mistranslation of the alleged prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, where the Hebrew word almah, which carries no connotation of virginity, became the Greek word parthenos, which means ‘maiden’ and might imply purity.

But some powerful sects, most notably Roman Catholicism, take a hardline, one might say fundamentalist, view. In the process, their excuses and explanations take on ever more bizarre forms.

I think Uta Ranke-Heinemann expressed it best. She is a theologian who holds the chair of History of Religion at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She was, for a while, Professor of Catholic Theology at Essen, until fired by Pope John Paul II for daring to insist on a theological, rather than biological, interpretation of the Virgin Birth. Still a Christian, she departed from mainstream faith, insisting that the Bible and the Trinity are the products of mankind, not God, that Jesus was human, that hell, the devil and original sin are all fabrications and that the crucifixion was, in effect, a form of pagan human sacrifice. She said:

Catholic moral theology has lost much of its prestige … It is a folly that poses as religion and invokes the name of God, but has distorted the consciences of countless people. It has burdened them with hair-splitting nonsense and has tried to train them to be moral acrobats, instead of making them more human and kinder to their fellow men and women … Its theology is no theology and its morality is no morality. It has come to grief on its own stupidity.

Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s book, Eunuchs for Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church, is available from:  Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

Not long after the laws of England & Wales were finally cleansed of the archaic offense of blasphemy, there are forces in Ireland that want to actually introduce such a law there.

While most of us have made it into the 21st Century, there are people who would prefer to drag us back into the Middle Ages.

Dermot Ahern, Minister for Justice, is one of the main agitators for a clause in the Defamation Bill, currently before the Irish Parliament, that would make blasphemy illegal.

With fines of up to €100,000, the law would punish “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter” which is defined as “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion; and he or she intends, by the publication of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage”.

One might assume that the clause is intended primarily to protect the Roman Catholic faith, and that the “any religion” definition is there to make it appear more reasonable.

But let’s say I invent a new religion (and why not? All religions are invented) – perhaps a faith that sanctifies the abuse of little children (no, wait, the Catholics have done that one), or maybe a religion that claims the moon is made of cheese and that the Queen is a shape-shifting alien. Presumably I could use that law in Ireland to prevent anyone taking the piss. After all, as the only follower of the faith, I would easily represent “a substantial number of the adherents”.

I present this reductio ad absurdum scenario to make a point. Even a casual examination of most faiths reveals them to be full of bizarre, outlandish, indefensible and often dangerous claims. Religions are used all too frequently to repress and oppress, to close minds and hold back progress. Far from being protected, they must be open to criticism.

I find many of religion’s ideas and precepts outrageous and offensive: there are, for example, people who genuinely believe they regularly eat the flesh and drink the blood of a man who’s been dead for 2,000 years, and that those of us who fail to engage in this necrophiliac cannibalism must suffer eternal torture. Any law that restricts my ability to say that such beliefs are idiotic piffle is an unwarranted attack on free speech.

Ireland has made great strides in the past few years in loosening the manacles of the Catholic church. It would be a shame to see the country slide back into superstitious intolerance.

A Brazilian archbishop has provoked a storm of protest through an act of excommunication. He expelled a woman from the faith – and condemned her to eternal torture – for failing to prevent her nine year-old daughter from having an abortion.

This heartless behaviour by Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho has itself been roundly condemned by politicians and even some theologians.

The girl was repeatedly raped by her stepfather over a period of at least three years. The stepfather has not been excommunicated. That retribution was saved for those who displayed compassion and understanding towards the girl – her mother and the doctor who performed the procedure.

What is surprising, though, is that people are surprised.

Sobrinho acted correctly – at least within the strictly limited boundaries of his world.

A religion is defined (and differentiated from others) by its belief system – its rules, its doctrine. The particulars of any one religion lie at the root of its claim to be the only true religion. They are what falsify all other faiths.

These rules and boundaries exist because they are the means by which the specific faith declares “this is who we are and what we stand for”. They are claimed as truths before which we must all yield. They are also the framework for the faith’s claim to morality.

This raises a problem. Although religious believers often lay claim to a moral superiority, the fact is that this doctrine represents a straitjacket. It denies the believer many avenues of moral, ethical, empathetic and humanitarian action.

Adherents must act according to these rules, otherwise they are not true believers. In that context, Sobrinho not doubt understood that excommunication, however immoral and uncaring it may seem to the rest of us, was unequivocally demanded. The basic tenets of the faith trump all humanity.

Now, it’s entirely possible that some bigwig in the Roman Catholic church – the Pope himself, perhaps – might override this decision. It’s happened before when such an act of faith has resulted in a PR nightmare for the church. What what would that mean for the religion?

If matters of doctrine become flexible, they also become meaningless. These matters are not defined and guided by reason. They are deemed to be eternal ‘truths’. As soon as they are seen to be alterable, in the interests of good publicity or other less spiritual motives, then they reveal the entire faith as hollow.

This might go some way to explain the diminishing of religions like Roman Catholocism. Either they remain rigid, true to their core beliefs – and thus reveal themselves as uncaring, inhuman and irrelevant to modern life. Or they adapt, and thus admit that the ‘eternal truths’ at the heart of the faith are nothing of the sort.

It’s a stark choice – to be irrelevant or meaningless.

A blanket lifting of excommunications by the Pope has had the effect of bringing back into the Roman Catholic church a bishop who also happens to be a notorious Holocaust denier.

Richard Williamson, from Britain, was one of four bishops appointed more than 20 years ago by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who was himself ousted from the Roman Catholic church for his refusal to accept ‘liberal’ reforms such as the abandoning of the Latin Mass.

Now Williamson is back in the club, in spite of the fact that he is a forthright Nazi apologist. According to the BBC:

Bishop Richard Williamson recently told Swedish TV: “I believe there were no gas chambers. I think that two to three hundred thousand Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers.”

The Vatican has said that the four bishops – who also include two Frenchmen and one Argentinian – have agreed to accept current Catholic teachings and papal authority. And that’s enough to save them from everlasting torment. Aligning themselves with some of the greatest mass murderers in history isn’t a problem, it seems.

Clearly the Roman Catholic church will take anyone these days. Maybe it’s a reaction to their dwindling numbers.

One has to wonder about the morality and ethics of a sect where a willingness to accept dogma and the word of the boss is deemed far more important than, say, the truth. Or simple decency. Or, for that matter, morals.

The Roman Catholic church was always far too cozy with the Nazis. During the war, the Pope liked to send Hitler birthday greetings and there is plenty of evidence of colusion. After the war, the Vatican was implicated in helping leading Nazis to escape. But one would have hoped that they’d have got over their infatuation with (other) vicious totalitarian regimes. Not entirely, it seems.