Human Beings do not just make killer apps. We are killer apes. We are nasty, aggressive, violent, rapacious hominids, what John Gray calls in his widely read 2002 book, Straw Dogs, homo rapiens. But wait, it gets worse. We are a killer species with a metaphysical longing, ceaselessly trying to find some meaning to life, which invariably drives us into the arms of religion. Today’s metaphysics is called “liberal humanism,” with a quasi-religious faith in progress, the power of reason and the perfectibility of humankind. The quintessential contemporary liberal humanists are those Obamaists, with their grotesque endless conversations about engagement in the world and their conviction that history has two sides, right and wrong, and they are naturally on the right side of it.

Gray’s most acute loathing is for the idea of progress, which has been his target in a number of books, and which is continued in the rather uneventful first 80 pages or so of The Silence of Animals. He allows that progress in the realm of science is a fact. (And also a good: as Thomas De Quincey remarked, a quarter of human misery results from toothache, so the discovery of anesthetic dentistry is a fine thing.) But faith in progress, Gray argues, is a superstition we should do without. He cites, among others, Conrad on colonialism in the Congo and Koestler on Soviet Communism (the Cold War continues to cast a long shadow over Gray’s writing) as evidence of the sheer perniciousness of a belief in progress. He contends, contra Descartes, that human irrationality is the thing most evenly shared in the world. To deny reality in order to sustain faith in a delusion is properly human. For Gray, the liberal humanist’s assurance in the reality of progress is a barely secularized version of the Christian belief in Providence.

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As the Prime Minister knows, I am very suspicious that behind the plans to change the nature of marriage, which will be debated in the House of Lords within the next two months there lurks an aggressive secularist and relativist approach towards an institution that has glued society together for time immemorial. By dividing marriage into religious and civil the government threatens the church and state link which they purport to support. But they also threaten to empty marriage of its fundamental religious and civil meaning as an institution orientated towards the upbringing of children.

If this is not enough, the legislation fails to provide any protection for religious believers in employment who cannot subscribe in conscience to the new meaning of marriage. There will be no exemptions for believers who are registrars who can expect to be sacked if theycannot, in all conscience, support same-sex marriage. Strong legal opinion also suggests that Christian teachers, who are required to teach about marriage, may face disciplinary action if they cannot express agreement with the new politically-correct orthodoxy.

The danger I believe that the government is courting with its approach both to marriage and religious freedom, is the alienation of a large minority of people who only a few years ago would have been considered pillars of the community.

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We are becoming a society in which “choice” and self-defined identities trump once-common values and traditional beliefs. But contrary to the rhetoric of its defenders, this shift is not a simple advance for freedom. The privileging of “choice” above all else in fact requires re-engineering the human person and society as a whole, and this will inevitably involve a great deal of coercion.

Wesley J. SmithThis shift, if it didn’t begin with Roe v. Wade, could be said to have been dramatically accelerated by it. Despite continuing opposition by over 50 percent of the American people, abortion is now universally available, in some places through the ninth month. Two states have legalized assisted suicide for the terminally ill””once strictly prohibited by the Hippocratic Oath. Now, some doctors actively collaborate in lethally overdosing their patients.

Advocacy for legalizing “after birth” abortion””e.g., infanticide””as a natural extension of the abortion right is growing more prominent, and not just among acolytes of Princeton’s Peter Singer. A Florida Planned Parenthood representative, opposing a bill that would require medical treatment for an infant who survives abortion, said the choice to care for the child should be a private one made between a mother and her doctor.

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“Last week’s article on falling patterns of membership and church attendance in Scotland’s churches gave the other side of other story. Secularisation is merciless in its effect on churches. It will erode to vanishing point churches which operate in traditional ways and cannot adapt. It challenges the mindset of ”˜as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be.’ But I believe that secularisation also presents a positive challenge for churches. It encourages us to develop church communities of new quality – disciples who are deeply engaged with their faith and not just of members who belong. It will be good for churches and good for faith.

“Let me surprise you first by saying that I am a supporter of secular society. My family roots are in the beginnings of what has become the Irish Republic. In the early years of the last century, Ireland was what some have called a confessional or theocratic state. The Catholic Church exercised an undue influence on the way in which government approached matters of social and moral legislation. The modern secular state is a safer place – it allows space for a proper separation of legislature, judiciary and church. In my view, there is then room for a proper relationship between church and state. The state should be the guardian and protector of religious freedom but it should not defer to religion.

“Last week’s article treated secularisation as if it was a single phenomenon. But it’s much more subtle and complex than that. It is actually a sort of ”˜double whammy’ – let me explain what I mean.

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It is more reasonable to me, as it is to any atheist, to believe in things that are in accord with what we know are natural laws, than to believe in things that contradict them….[but] unless you’re raised atheist, people become atheists just as I did, by thinking about the same things Augustine thought about. Certainly one of the first things I thought about as a maturing child was “Why is there polio? Why are there diseases?” If there is a good God why are there these things? The answer of the religious person is “God has a plan we don’t understand.” That wasn’t enough for me. There are people who don’t know anything about science. One of the reasons I recommend Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion, is that basically he explains the relationship between science and atheism. But I don’t think people are really persuaded into atheism by books or by debates or anything like that. I think people become atheists because they think about the world around them. They start to search out books because they ask questions. In general, people don’t become atheists at a late age, in their 50s. All of the atheists I know became atheists fairly early on. They became atheists in their adolescence or in their 20s because these are the ages at which you’re maturing, your brain is maturing, and you’re beginning to ask questions. If religion doesn’t do it for you, if, in fact, religion, as it does for me, contradicts any rational idea of how to live, then you become an atheist, or whatever you want to call it ”“ an agnostic, a freethinker.

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(Please note the article to which this responds was posted here on the blog last week–KSH).

The ’60s secularizing and “modernizing” that orders went through, discarding habits, common prayer life and so on, were a strategic error for which many orders today have paid the price: drastically shrinking numbers and remaining members who are in their 70s and older.

But some traditional Dominican communities, male and female, are seeing a significant uptick in their applications from younger people. The same can be said for some branches of Franciscan friars and sisters. I don’t think that this is an accident.

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In Marseille, on the southern coast, “conversions have increased at an incredible pace in the last three years,” said Abderrahmane Ghoul, the imam of the major mosque of Marseille and the president of the local branch of the French Council of the Muslim Faith. Mr. Ghoul signed about 130 conversion certificates in 2012.

Hassen Chalghoumi, the moderate imam of Drancy, another suburb near Paris, says he thinks conversions have also been propelled by France’s official secularism, which he says breeds spiritual emptiness.

“Secularism has become antireligious,” Mr. Chalghoumi said. “Therefore, it has created an opposite phenomenon. It has allowed people to discover Islam.”

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Every year in America, 2.5 million people die. In 2011, the last year for which numbers are available, 42 percent were cremated, according to the funeral directors association. That’s double the rate of just 15 years ago. In some states, largely in the West, the cremation rate tops 70 percent. In Washington, it’s 72 percent; in Nevada, almost 74 percent. (The lowest rate of cremation… is Mississippi’s, at 15.7 percent.)

So why the big jump in cremations? There are lots of reasons. One is the softening of the Catholic church’s views of the practice. For centuries – until 1963, in fact – the church outlawed it. The church’s laws still express a preference for burial. But the outright ban is a thing of the past and now, under some circumstances, bishops can permit a funeral mass with cremated remains present.

Another reason for the rise in cremations is the decline in nuclear families. As more and more Americans live far from hometowns and parents, and as family burial plots have waned in popularity and accessibility, millions have turned to cremation as a practical and cost-effective way to care for a loved one’s remains.

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The Secretary for Relations with States of the Secretariat of State of the Holy See, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti gave an interview to Vatican Radio on Wednesday, in which he discussed the Church’s freedom and institutional autonomy, with reference to four cases decided by the European Court of Human Rights on the 15th of January, and two others still before the Court. With regard to the four cases decided by the Court ”“ only one of which was decided in favour of the complainant ”“ Archbishop Mamberti spoke of the complexity of questions relating to freedom of conscience and religion, in particular in European society marked by the increase of religious diversity and the corresponding hardening of secularism. He discussed the danger posed by a moral relativism that imposes itself as a social norm, and explained that the Church seeks to defend individual freedoms of conscience and religion in all circumstances, especially in the face of such danger.

Archbishop Mamberti addressed the need of respect for freedom of conscience regarding morally controversial subjects, such as abortion or homosexuality, saying that respect for freedom of conscience and religion is a condition for the establishment of a tolerant society in its pluralism. He warned that the erosion of freedom of conscience is symptomatic of a form of pessimism with regard to the capacity of the human conscience to recognize the good and the true. The Archbishop went on to say that it is the Church’s role to remind people that the true source of human freedom is found in the ability of each and every person to distinguish good from evil, and an obligation to act in accord with those determinations.

Read and listen to it all and I see that RNS has an article out on this as well.

…for the past 24 years I have edited Image, a journal that publishes literature and art concerned with the faith traditions of the West. Our instinct when launching the publication was that the narrative of decline was misguided, but we honestly didn’t know if we could fill more than a few issues.

Sometimes when you look, you find. Over the years Image has featured many believing writers, including Annie Dillard, Elie Wiesel, Christian Wiman, Marilynne Robinson and Mark Helprin. But these writers of religious faith and others are not hard to find elsewhere. Several prominent American authors””Franz Wright, Mary Karr and Robert Clark””are Catholic converts. Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer last year published “New American Haggadah,” a contemporary take on the ritual book used by Jews on Passover.

In short, the myth of secularism triumphant in the literary arts is just that””a myth. Yet making lists of counterexamples does not get at a deeper matter. It has to do with the way that faith takes on different tones and dimensions depending on the culture surrounding it.

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Darrel W. Ray, a psychologist in the Kansas City area who runs the Web site The Secular Therapist Project, made a similar point in a recent interview. As someone who was raised as a believing Christian and who holds a master’s degree in theology, he was uniquely able to identify what humanism needs to provide in a time of crisis.

“When people are in a terrible kind of pain ”” a death that is unexpected, the natural order is taken out of order ”” you would do anything to take away the pain,” Dr. Ray, 62, said. “And I’m not going to deny that religion does help deal with that first week or two of pain.

“The best we can do as humanists,” he continued, “is to talk about that pain in rational terms with the people who are suffering. We have humanist celebrants, as we call them, but they’re focused on doing weddings. It takes a lot more training to learn how to deal with grief and loss. I don’t see celebrants working in hospice or in hospitals, for example. There are secular people who need pastoral care, but we abdicate it to clergy.”

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In Ghana, where deeply held religious beliefs unite much of the population, a new group has formed around a shared disbelief in religion.

The Humanist Association of Ghana practices a philosophy that is mostly unheard-of in Ghana, which a recent survey ranked as the most religious country in the world. Nonetheless, the group has already made waves in West Africa.

Last weekend, the association hosted humanists from across the region for a conference in the capital of Accra, where attendees listened as speakers discussed the impact humanists could make on West African society. Lecturers talked about how humanists can stand up for gay and lesbian rights and against traditional practices like witch hunts. One talk dealt with whether humanism is compatible with belief in God.

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As the assistant humanist chaplain at Harvard University, Chris Stedman coordinates its “Values in Action” program. In his recent book, “Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious,” he tells how he went from a closeted gay evangelical Christian to an “out” atheist, and, eventually, a Humanist.

On the blog NonProphet Status, and now in the book, Stedman calls for atheists and the religious to come together around interfaith work. It is a position that has earned him both strident — even violent — condemnation and high praise. Stedman talked with RNS about how and why the religious and atheists should work together.

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An atheist group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison seems on track to receive nearly $70,000 in student fees for staffing and programming next year, in what appears to be a first for the university and student atheist groups nationally.

The Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics, or AHA as it’s called, said it will provide support services for students struggling with doubts about their faiths and offer a safe place where they can discuss religious issues without fear of recrimination.

“Religious groups have been receiving this type of funding for years,” said Chris Calvey, president of the organization, which helped stage a three-day Freethought Festival that drew hundreds of nonbelievers and skeptics from around the country to Madison this year.

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Sharing an obligation to spread the good news of salvation in Christ, all Christian communities are challenged by the fact that many people today do not think they need God, Pope Benedict XVI said.

“The spiritual poverty of many of our contemporaries, who no longer perceive the absence of God in their lives as a privation, represents a challenge for all Christians,” the pope said Nov. 15 in a meeting with members of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

Pope Benedict said authentic ecumenical prayer, dialogue and cooperation cannot ignore “the crisis of faith that vast regions of the planet are experiencing,” nor can Christians ignore signs that many modern people still feel a need for some kind of spirituality.

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Six students at Cornell University, one at the University of Pennsylvania, and one at Yale took their own lives during the past academic year. One was a noted football player, almost certain to be elected captain. Another was a jokester, great student and kind soul. Two others were from notably affluent communities, Chevy Chase, MD and Boca Raton, FL. So, is this the end result of an academic culture that encourages a nihilistic questioning of all values, a rejection of God, and a moral permissiveness that leads to despair?

Since our [Saint Michael’s, Charleston] parish focus this year on “the hurting coast” (from Richmond to Maine) it’s worth pondering the great influence that our well-known public and private academic institutions in the northeast have upon our culture. We will soon have an “All-Ivy Supreme Court”, with seven of the nine justices having degrees from Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, and Princeton. And guess how many U.S. presidents have had degrees from these same institutions in the 20th century? If you exclude Nixon and Carter, Warren Harding and William Howard Taft, nearly every president of the past century had a degree from one of them ”“ or in a couple of cases from other similar colleges like Amherst and Stanford.

That is both impressive ”“ and troubling. It’s impressive because it signals the ability of these colleges to attract some of the best students. It’s troubling because of the disproportionate influence these institutions have upon the nation….

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The latest numbers suggest that an amazingly high percentage of women today””18.8 percent””complete their childbearing years having had no children. Another 18.5 percent of women finish having had only one child. Together, that’s nearly 40 percent of Americans who go their entire lives having either one child or no children at all.

And it’s a big change in behavior from the recent past. There have always been people who lived without having children””either by happenstance or by choice. But for all of American history, the numbers of this cohort were fairly small. In 1970, for instance, just about 8 percent of women completed their childbearing years with no children. (And only about 11 percent of women finished with only one child.) Over the next 40 years, those numbers rose almost without interruption. (The numbers ticked backward only once, in 2002.) This dramatic increase in childlessness””the number more than doubled””took place in just two generations and came at a time when medical advances were drastically improving the odds of infertile couples conceiving.

So what happened?

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Mallon: The greatest thing that I can hope for from this Synod is this pastoral conversion, which means we have to change the very culture of our Churches. The predominant culture of the Churches where I come from and my experience doing this work, is that we have a maintenance culture within our parishes. In the past we had strong Catholic cultures that helped people go to Church and to believe. Usually the only growth we had in parishes was from demographic shifts. We didn’t really have to do anything: we just had to schedule Masses and pay the light bills. And for the culture of the time that worked. There was no sense of being missional. Today the culture is toxic, not just neutral. If you do nothing you will be stripped of faith.

We have got to apply new methodology, which means we must move from a maintenance culture to a missional culture. That means addressing the values that we ”“ perhaps even unconsciously ”“ hold as local Churches within parishes. We can be very quick to say “I value this, this, and this.” But, it’s one thing to say what you value; it’s another thing to actually look at how you function as a Church, and what you put your money and resources and time into. By analyzing those, we find out what we truly value.

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According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, American Protestants recently became a minority of the country (48%) for the first time””not just since the American Revolution, but since the establishment of the first English colonies on American soil. Even more notably, the same Pew research revealed that 20% of all Americans now say they are not affiliated with any religion.

At one level, this is a victory for religious pluralism””or, to use the politically correct term, diversity. At another, when one in five Americans has no religious affiliation, it is a commentary on the diminished importance of the moral underpinnings that characterized the United States for most of its existence.

At the country’s founding, even skeptics and Deists like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin paid great respect to the morality and values that the vast majority of Americans accepted as God-given standards by which to live. These were standards rooted in Christian belief and teachings. Jefferson, as is well known, was a man of the Enlightenment who was genuinely skeptical about the supernatural claims of Christianity. Even he, however, believed in the need for virtue in national life as an essential ingredient for the safe continuation of the republic.

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Several recent incidents in Berlin have escalated tensions between Muslims, Jews, and the city’s secular majority. Over a month ago, a rabbi wearing a kippa, or yarmulke, was beaten by four “Arab-looking” youths after being asked if he and his daughter were Jewish. Public outcry led to a large demonstration in support of Berlin’s Jews, including a flash mob of Jews and non-Jews wearing kippot. Tensions escalated days later when a second incident, in which Jewish school girls were harassed by a group of youths that included a girl wearing a head scarf, led to an exchange of harsh words between Jewish and Muslim leaders, though in neither case were the attackers caught or identified definitively. After being advised to urge greater religious tolerance, Muslim leaders denied responsibility for the attacks and pointed out their own experiences of intolerance in the city.

Then on Yom Kippur, two more anti-Semitic incidents took place””the first when a young white man threatened a local Jewish leader and told him to go back where he came from, and the second when a mother and her daughter were forced out of a taxi after telling the “German” driver they were going to synagogue. Diedre Berger of the Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee has now intervened, asking the German government to develop an action plan to combat anti-Semitism.

Meanwhile, a contrasting alliance between Jews and Muslims has formed in the aftermath of a regional court ruling against circumcision.

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Traditional family life in Canada is declining, according to data recently published from the 2011 census.

Census data show that married couples declined as a proportion of all census families between 2006 and 2011. Nevertheless, they still formed the predominant family structure in Canada, accounting for two-thirds of all families, Statistics Canada reported Sept. 19.

The proportion of cohabitating couples and lone-parent families both increased. For the first time, cohabitating couples outnumbered lone-parent families in 2011.

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It is harder than ever to claim, as the Prime Minister does, that Britain is still a Christian country. It was at the time when Baroness Thatcher stood outside No 10 and recited the prayer of St Francis of Assisi, to offer reassurance about her intentions. Two thirds of Brits were Christian then, and phrases such as “where there is discord, may we bring harmony” had wide resonance. Those were the days where friends parted using phrases like “God bless” and hedged future plans with “God willing”. But over the past three decades Britain has been losing its religion at a precipitous rate ”“ as Ed Miliband has worked out.

There was almost no comment, let alone fuss, about the section of the Labour leader’s speech where he proclaimed that he had no religion. This, in itself, is something of a milestone. When Neil Kinnock spoke about his atheism, he was monstered, as if this were evidence of his otherness. In fact, he was at the vanguard of a growing secularist trend. Today religion has become, if anything, a handicap to those governing modern Britain. Tony Blair judged it best to keep quiet about his faith. David Cameron has declared a Christianity-lite, one that comes and goes like “Magic FM in the Chilterns”.

But this week, Ed Miliband wanted to tell the world about his creed. He is not a man for synagogues or churches, he said, but is emphatically a man of faith. “Not a religious faith,” he said, “but a faith none the less. A faith, I believe, many religious people would recognise….”

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The reason given by Christiane Taubira, France’s justice minister: ”Who is to say that a heterosexual couple will bring a child up better than a homosexual couple, that they will guarantee the best conditions for the child’s development?” She then reassured critics of the proposed law, “What is certain is that the interest of the child is a major preoccupation for the government.”

If the law goes through, then all references to “mother” and “father” will be erased from the civil code and replaced with the more abstract, cover-all, cover-anything term “parents.”

Let’s focus on that shift to abstraction. It’s more important than you might think, because, as France is now demonstrating, he (or she) who controls the language controls the fundamentally human ability to speak about reality.

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Perhaps it is understandable angry Muslims in the Middle East or Africa would demonstrate outside American diplomatic missions against the apparent circulation of a YouTube video mocking the Prophet Muhammad by a person based in the US. There is no such excuse for Australian Muslims.

Citizens and residents of Australia know we live in a democratic society in which the government does not, and mostly cannot, engage in acts of political and religious censorship. That’s why Americans have not been able to get the cheap film deleted from the web. And that’s why footage of beheadings of non-believers by Islamist extremists remain on the web.

Some Muslim leaders in Australia have condemned Saturday’s violent demonstration in which several members of the NSW Police were injured. Others have not. Whatever the response of Muslims, the incident provides yet more evidence that multiculturalism – after a promising start – has failed. If some Australian Muslims do not understand how democracy works, it’s time for a rethink.

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I sat there pondering. I couldn’t help but feel I was caught up in a moment that could be somewhat farcical. If she had said she wanted to leave an area because she didn’t like that there were a group of Asian or Middle Eastern people, it would have been met with shock.

If she had said she was miserable because there were so many homosexual people she would have been heatedly challenged. If she had singled out any other group, even any other religious group, I think it would be seen as being narrow minded and intolerant, and she would have been put in her place.
In contrast, it seemed it was socially acceptable to isolate and attach negative stigma to people involved in the Christian faith. In essence, it was stereotyping and placing prejudice on a group of people without knowing or experiencing them as individuals.

Without getting into the nuts and bolts of whether the area is in fact a bible belt, I have felt uncomfortable about that conversation. It seemed to reinforce a trend, where people with a Christian faith in Australia are free game to be joked about or spoken of negatively in the paper, on the radio and in comic sketches.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury, as he prepares to leave Lambeth Palace, has sought to quell any claims that Christians in this country are suffering persecution. “We have been hearing quite a lot about the dangers of ‘aggressive secularism’,” he wrote in the introduction to his new book, “But our problem ”¦ is not simply loud voices attacking faith (and certainly not ‘persecution’, as some of the more highly coloured apologetic claims)”.

Well, “persecution” is a powerful word, and few would dispute that genuine persecution is happening to Christian minorities in other countries, a plight that Dr Williams has done much to publicise. It seems ludicrous to compare the appalling treatment of the Christian minority in Pakistan or Iraq to slights suffered by Christians in Britain, where Christianity remains the Establishment religion, albeit one with weakening links to the Establishment.

There is, however, something curious and faintly unpleasant happening in Britain: Christianity seems tacitly understood to be the one faith that can safely be ridiculed or denied expression in the workplace. The complexity of that situation has been highlighted by the four British Christians who last week took their cases to the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that they have been discriminated against at work because of their religion.

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One of Europe’s highest courts is considering a landmark decision on the employment rights of Christians, including two British women who were disciplined for wearing crucifix necklaces at work.

They were among four Christians who this week took their cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg claiming workplace discrimination that a former Archbishop of Canterbury says has turned them into victims of a new secular orthodoxy.

The four, all Britons who claim national laws failed to protect them, argue that their employers contravened European human rights legislation that bans religious discrimination and allows “freedom of thought, conscience and religion.”

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Christians should leave their religious beliefs at home or accept that a personal expression of faith at work, such as wearing a cross, means they might have to resign and get another job, government lawyers have said.

Landmark cases, brought by four British Christians, including two workers forced out of their jobs after visibly wearing crosses, have been heard today at the European Court of Human Rights
David Cameron, the Prime Minister, has previously pledged to change the law to protect religious expression at work but official legal submissions on Tuesday to Strasbourg human rights judges made a clear “difference between the professional and private sphere”.

James Eadie QC, acting for the government, told the European court that the refusal to allow an NHS nurse and a British Airways worker to visibly wear a crucifix at work “did not prevent either of them practicing religion in private”, which would be protected by human rights law.

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”¦[Idolatry] has not disappeared; far from it. If there is no need to withdraw the word “God” from idolatrous confusion there is a need to give the word “God” meaning, by denunciation, challenge, and accusation against the veiled, hidden, and secret gods, who besiege and seduce all the more effectively because they do not openly declare themselves as gods.

It is clear that the task facing Christians and the church differs entirely according to whether we think of ourselves as being in a secularised, social, lay, and grown-up world which is ready to hear a demythologised, rationalised, explicated, and humanised gospel – the world and the gospel being in full and spontaneous harmony because both want to be religionless – or whether we think of ourselves as being in a world inhabited by hidden gods, a world haunted by myths and dreams, throbbing with irrational impulses, swaying from mystique to mystique, a world to which the Christian revelation has once again to play the role of liberator and destroyer of the sacred obsessions in order to liberate man and bring him, not to the self his demons are making him want to be, but to the self his Father wills him to be.’

[Yet] at the mention of a struggle of faith against the modern idols, which are the real ones, I immediately hear indignant protests…

–Jacques Ellul, The New Demons (New York: Seabury Press, 1975 E.T. of the 1973 French original), pp. 227-228 (my emphasis)