Human rights are becoming a new form of totalitarianism, being used to drive Christians out of public life and even their jobs, European judges will be warned next week.

Laws originally designed to protect basic freedoms are instead being used to strip British society of its Christian foundations while upholding the rights of minorities, they will hear.

The warning, from a prominent Church of England bishop, comes as part of a landmark case on religious freedom in Britain to be heard at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg next week.

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In the national spotlight Thursday night introducing Mitt Romney as the GOP nominee for president, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) showed all of America why the country’s national motto ”“ In God We Trust ”“ must be abandoned. Exhibiting stunning insensitivity to the millions of Americans who do not profess a belief in any deities, Rubio declared: “Our national motto is In God we Trust, reminding us that faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all.”

Thus, Rubio was brazenly shouting out what many proponents of the religious motto have pubicly denied: the religious wording of the motto validates the idea that only believers are first-class citizens. Nonbelievers, while tolerated by the true believers (sometimes begrudgingly), clearly hold a second-class status.

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The Clergy Project is a magnet for charlatans and cowards who, by their own admission, openly lie to their congregations, hide behind beliefs they do not hold, make common cause with atheists, and still retain their positions and salaries. Is this how atheists and secularists groups intend to further their cause? They are getting publicity from the media to be sure, but do they think it will win them friends?

Ministers struggling honestly with doubts and struggles are in a different category altogether. Doubt will lead to one of two inevitable consequences. Faithful doubt leads to a deeper embrace of the truth, with doubt serving to point us into a deeper knowledge, trust, and understanding of the truth. Pernicious doubt leads to unfaithfulness, unbelief, skepticism, cynicism, and despair. Christians ”” ministers or otherwise ”” who are struggling with doubt, need to seek help from the faithful, not the faithless.

Christianity has little to fear from the Clergy Project. Its website reveals it to be a toothless tiger that will attract media attention, and that is about all. The greater danger to the church is a reduction in doctrine that leaves atheism hard to distinguish from belief. And the real forces to fear are those who would counsel such a reduction.

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The Higgs boson has been dubbed the “god particle” much to the dismay of many physicists, including Peter Higgs and Lawrence Krauss. Yet the latter, perhaps unintentionally, gives a new twist to the “god particle” epithet in his Newsweek article: “Humans, with their remarkable tools and their remarkable brains, may have just taken a giant step towards replacing metaphysical speculation with empirically verifiable knowledge. The Higgs particle is now arguably more relevant than God.” Krauss has not taken that giant step himself, since his statement, far from being a statement of science, is another metaphysical speculation ”” a mixture of hubris and an inadequate concept of God.

What does Krauss mean by “more relevant than God?” Relevant to what? Clearly the Higgs particle is more relevant than God to the question of how the universe works. But not to the question why there is a universe in which particle physics can be done. The internal combustion engine is arguably more relevant than Henry Ford to the question of how a car works, but not for why it exists in the first place. Confusing mechanism and/or law on the one hand and agency on the other, as Krauss does here, is a category mistake easily made by ignoring metaphysics.

Krauss does not seem to realise that his concept of God is one that no intelligent monotheist would accept. His “God” is the soft-target “God of the gaps” of the “I can’t understand it, therefore God did it” variety. As a result, Krauss, like Dawkins and Hawking, regards God as an explanation in competition with scientific explanation. That is as wrong-headed as thinking that an explanation of a Ford car in terms of Henry Ford as inventor and designer competes with an explanation in terms of mechanism and law. God is not a “God of the gaps”, he is God of the whole show.

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In a more rational light, [Jennifer] Aniston’s marriage news is great news for her. If she’s happy, and presumably she is, that’s wonderful. But the reaction to this news, and her life before it, is bad news for us as a group.

What the treatment of the film star reveals is our determination to stick to old-school ideas about sex and gender. The worth of a woman has long been judged by her ability to keep a man. Aniston was supposedly diminished by her failure to keep Pitt and further damaged by her inability to replace him with a shiny new man.

Because she’s female, the idea that she might be content being single, dating and living on her own wasn’t taken seriously.

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The CofE has refused to countenance any form of official liturgical recognition for civil partnerships; has sought special exemptions from human rights and equalities legislation in order to continue discriminating against openly gay clergy or gay employees; has repeatedly restated its condemnation of all sexual relations outside heterosexual marriage; and has formally debarred even celibate gay clergy from becoming bishops.

Most recently, the bishops of the CofE have set themselves against government proposals to extend civil marriage to include same-sex couples. Their opposition is above all a public and political stance which is intended to maintain ecclesiastical unity, particularly within the Anglican communion. About half the world’s Anglicans are African, and the majority of them are in violently homophobic countries whose churches back harsh punishments against homosexuals, right up to the death penalty.

These are the Anglican provinces which the current policy is seeking to appease and keep on board, while the American and Canadian Anglican churches that now openly bless gay unions and consecrate gay bishops are condemned for daring to treat gay people equally.

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Please keep comments on this thread focused on the content of the preface; thank you–KSH.

When psychology academic Bronwyn Harman, from Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, set out to uncover the truth about childlessness in Australia, she did what many researchers do to get a sample these days. She hit social media in a big way….

Harman’s initial results were released last week – she thinks we are seeing explicit trends that society may not have accepted decades ago.

Of the 330 respondents, a little more than three-quarters said they were childless by choice. About one-third of that number (about 70 of those surveyed) said they might have children later. Another third declared they did not feel parental – not maternal, not paternal (men were invited to respond to the survey, too). Of the remaining 70-odd participants, 40 thought children would ruin their lifestyle.

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Faith, in the Christian life, has nothing to do with a subjective belief that does not admit rational justification (not even Kierkegaard quite said that), because faith begins not with the subject of faith but its object””the Trinitarian life of God. It consists not of assent to some proposition but the entrustment of one’s being to God’s providence. Faith does not originate in the individual believer’s own efforts, but is rather a gift of grace to the believer, usually received in baptism, as one means among many of participating in God’s own life.

Far from posing a threat to one’s faith, knowledge reinforces it: the more reason one has to believe in God’s providence, the more readily the believer entrusts himself to God. Faith likewise facilitates a more intimate knowledge of the plans God has set in store for the believer. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, “faith” in the Bible is often better rendered “faithfulness”; one has faith, therefore, less by belief than by piety. Faith is””at least in the order of time””primarily performative and only secondarily reflective. Recall St. Irenaeus’ dictum: “to believe in God is to do his will.”

The naive concept of faith as blind assent arose from an equally naive and philosophically disreputable theory of knowledge, according to which one knows a thing best by detaching oneself from its use and setting aside personal biases in order to form an idea that corresponds to the thing.

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An Episcopal clergyman told me recently that in his 6 years in office, he had never seen the pall used in his parish church. What does that mean? It means that the traditional Anglican funeral, with the coffin present and covered by the pall, has almost ceased to exist. How has this happened? The “new” (1979) Book of Common Prayer clearly calls for the body to be present in the church — the rubrics (italicized instructions) assume it, with instructions such as “The coffin is to be closed before the service.” There is even a special set of prayers to be said (p. 466) as the body is brought into the church to repose before the service.

What has happened in the 30+ intervening years to cause this to change so totally? We now have the ubiquitous memorial service, which as far as I know scarcely existed at all thirty years ago….

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Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the UK’s most senior Roman Catholic, has said secularism seeks to wipe out Christianity as religious intolerance increases.

The cardinal mounted a critical attack on atheism and its attitude to those with religious beliefs, warning: “In the name of tolerance it seems to me tolerance is being abolished.”

In an address at Leicester’s Anglican Cathedral, he spoke of a “deep unease” in western society.

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[Richard] Holloway’s powerful account [in His book Leaving Alexandria] mirrors the progressive loss of belief which we see across Britain and Europe today, and it comes hard on the heels of Alain de Botton’s latest book Religion for Atheists, which advertises itself with the question “Even if religion isn’t true, can’t we enjoy the best bits?” It assumes that the supernatural claims of religion are false, but suggests that we hang on to the communal ritual and cultural elements. Holloway makes a similar plea when he says “I don’t any longer believe in religion but I want it around, less sure of itself and purged of everything except the miracle of pity”.

These books leave me with the question: Does this work? Can you have the gilt without the gingerbread? Isn’t there something fundamentally dishonest about those wistful atheists who have taken leave of God and who yet continue to use theological concepts and cling on to religious practices?

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The National Day of Reason ”” or “NDR” in the shorthand of the nontheist community ”” will also be held May 3, part protest, part celebration and totally godless.

“In times of great conflict and worry, people want to look to a higher power, and I am sympathetic to that,” said Paul Fidalgo, communications director at the Center for Inquiry. “But our day puts the focus back on people and what we can do for ourselves. We are trying to make a better world on our own by emphasizing good works and good deeds on the day.”

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Tim Sims recently shared some statistics on the lostness of Australia at a recent conference there. Scott Sanders provided these highlights of that research which I’d like to share with you:

“Church” has a negative perception among Aussies due to: church abuse, religious wars, hypocrisy, judgmentalism, and issues around money, as well as being seen as outdated, authoritarian and exclusive. Those not attending church have issues– real or perceived– which need to be addressed. The great news is Jesus is still viewed positively by the average Australian.

There have been little change in ‘Christian’ beliefs during the last 50 years: 74% of Australians still believe in God, 53% in heaven, 45% in life after death and interestingly 43% in the resurrection of Jesus. Yet as a church we tend to agree with the media’s perception that there is widespread disbelief. The reality is “Australians are very concerned about religion, just not sure that the religion we promote in our churches is the religion of Jesus.”

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Thousands of people are expect to descend on the Mall in Washington, D.C., on Saturday to celebrate not believing in God. It’s being called a sort of “Woodstock for Atheists,” a chance for atheists to show their power in numbers and change their image.

The “Reason Rally” could attract up to 30,000 people; organizer David Silverman says it marks a coming-of-age for nonbelievers.

“We’ll look back at the Reason Rally as one of the game-changing events when people started to look at atheism and look at atheists in a different light,” Silverman says.

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The head of Perth’s Anglican Church has dismissed civil marriage ceremonies as “sentimental fuzz” as new figures reveal more than 70 per cent of WA couples opt for civil celebrants over religious ministers to conduct their nuptials.

The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show just 27 per cent of weddings in WA were conducted by a religious official in 2010 – down more than 2 per cent on the previous year – while 78.2 per cent were overseen by a civil celebrant.

Anglican Archbishop of Perth Roger Herft said the statistics were a sign of the times but true commitment could only be forged in the house of God.

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Alain de Botton, the British pop philosopher whose new book Religion for Atheists has made him the friendly face of modern godlessness….said if you walked into a modern university and asked to study the humanities in order to find meaning in life, “the people in charge would immediately dial the number of the insane asylum, and you would be taken away.”

He said the message of the secular world is that life is simple, and the only people who need help are stupid people who read self-help books.

He set his own views against the “virulent strain” of atheism that sees religion as “not just false but wrong, ridiculous, malign and corrupt,” epitomized by Christopher Hitchens’ claim that “religion poisons everything.”

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A Roman Catholic Bishop in Ireland is being investigated under ”˜hate crime’ laws for delivering a homily that upset a humanist.

The Bishop’s unremarkable comments warned of “the arrows of a secular and godless culture” and that only believers “know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness”.

Humanist John Colgan complained about the remarks to the police. Now prosecutors are investigating the Bishop of Raphoe, Dr Philip Boyce, under Ireland’s ”˜incitement to hatred’ laws.

Read it all (another from the long queue of should-have-already-been-posted material).

Over the last hundred years or so, however,…[the] hopeful vision [that secularism promises a neutral public and peaceful space] has not materialized. Rather than seeing greater harmony in secular societies, we have witnessed more community breakdown. We also notice that the greatest losses of life in the twentieth century (Mao Tse-tung: 70 million deaths; Stalin: 20-40 million deaths; Hitler: 11-12 million deaths; Pol Pot: 1-2 million deaths”¦) have been inspired by secular ideologies, not religious ones. The atrocities that human beings commit against each other continue apace, and secularism is at a loss to know what to say about them. “It is the work of a few rogues” sounds less plausible every time we hear it. The incoherence of secularism also means that it cannot withstand determined pressure groups or totalitarian ideologies.

I believe secularism in the West is really a combination of Christianity and paganism, with the proportions shifting over the years from the former to the latter. Secularism does not supply values of its own but borrows them from Christianity (human rights, care for minorities, freedom of speech, toleration of differences, etc.) or paganism (fascination with astrology and ever more extreme forms of entertainment, lower views of marriage, higher views of other relationships, openness to abortion/infanticide, euthanasia, etc.). Credit is rarely given to these sources, and it is only as the proportion of paganism has increased that the true nature of secularism is becoming more apparent.

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The march of secularism means Britain may no longer be a Christian country in just 20 years, a report said yesterday.
If trends continue, the number of non-believers is set to overtake the number of Christians by 2030.
Christianity is losing more than half a million believers every year, while the count of atheists and agnostics is going up by almost 750,000 annually.

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When the central heating broke down at a North London church midway through a snap of icy weather the other day, the vicar offered the faithful a choice: Attend another church for a cozier celebration, or display what he wryly called “muscular Christianity” by worshiping in a side chapel in their own, unheated church.

Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, the muscular, if shivery, Christians seemed to outnumber those who headed for warmer pews ”” an indication, some might argue, that Britain’s established state religion can draw on doughty reserves in the face of adversity.

It might need to….

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(This is the poll mentioned in the preceding post–KSH).

When asked why they think of themselves as Christian, the research found that fewer than three in ten (28%) say one of the reasons is that they believe in the teachings of Christianity. People are much more likely to consider themselves to be Christian because they were christened or baptised into the religion (72%) or because their parents were members of the religion (38%) than because of personal belief.

The research sought to measure a number of Christian practices, including regular reading of the Bible and prayer outside church services, to see how prevalent these were amongst respondents self-identifying as Christian. Among the results, we find that:

The majority (60%) have not read any part of the Bible, independently and from choice, for at least a year….

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Many people who describe themselves as Christian have low levels of belief and little or no practice, according to new research.
They identify as Christian because they were Baptised or because their parents were Christian rather than because they believe in the teachings of the Church, according to a poll carried out by Ipsos MORI for the Richard Dawkins Foundation.
The poll, published today, comes the week before Dr Dawkins debates the question of human origins with the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams in Oxford.

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In France, an elderly man is fighting to make a formal break with the Catholic Church. He’s taken the church to court over its refusal to let him nullify his baptism, in a case that could have far-reaching effects.

Seventy-one-year-old Rene LeBouvier’s parents and his brother are buried in a churchyard in the tiny village of Fleury in northwest France. He himself was baptized in the Romanesque stone church and attended mass here as a boy.

LeBouvier says this rural area is still conservative and very Catholic, but nothing like it used to be. Back then, he says, you couldn’t even get credit at the bakery if you didn’t go to mass every Sunday….

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(Please note–the content of this article may not be suitable for some blog readers–KSH).

The invention of sex addiction reflects the culture’s deep-rooted fear that too much sex without commitment is bad for you.

Interestingly, there’s no proof of that. In fact, sex addiction isn’t even an accepted disease among most psychiatric and psychological organizations in the world. The American Psychiatric Association no longer includes it as a pathology in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. This is largely because there is no consensus even among researchers of exactly what an addiction is ”“ there are as many definitions of addiction as there are treatment centres….

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As a younger man Jobs had visited Japan and become a Zen Buddhist. By contrast with Martin Luther King who “just wanted to do God’s will”, he never did. There was no God in Steve Jobs vision of the universe, just the overwhelming mandate to “become yourself” untrammeled by dogma, or other people’s thinking. To Stanford students in 2005 he said: “Your time is limited”¦follow your heart and intuition”¦know what you want to become.” Of course, if this life is all there is, then that will pass about as much muster as any other earth-bound philosophy. “Death doesn’t happen to life,” as a former classmate of mine once said. “Death happens in life.” But all such
att empts to romanticize the hard reality of the grave still cause one to ask: “Is that all there is?”

Read it all (page 5).

To be a serious Christian in modern Western culture is to be the favoured easy target of every progressive thinker and every half-witted comedian. It is to have your sensibilities and your deepest beliefs on perpetual call for taunts, mockery and desecration. At a time when all progressives preach full volume for inclusivity and sensitivity, for the utmost care in speech when speaking of others with differing views or hues, Christians, as Christians, are under a constant hail of abuse and disregard. There is nothing too low or too vulgar.

Something as inconsequential as a Christmas special, for example, will have ”” almost as an essential element, it being “Christ’s” birthday after all ”” something determinedly offensive to Christians. Russell Peters, the Canadian joker, for his special this year has invited Pamela Anderson, pinup queen and soft porn actress, to play the Virgin Mary.

Pamela Anderson as Mary the Immaculate: I know ”” the wit, the daring, the originality ”” hell, the bravery of it all….

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Christian faith, but not secular faith, now effectively banned from schools, colleges, and universities, has been relegated to the private and subjective arena. The result is the growing popularity of any who eliminate from Christian faith all that secular trust finds incompatible: miracles, the radical nature of sin and the consequent radical nature of grace, transcendence, holiness, and our human desperate need for God’s initiative action in Jesus.

The consequence of this secular replacement of Christianity over the years is that otherwise educated people can be bereft of any substantial grasp of scripture. One glaring example is Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori who tells us that Marcus Borg “opened the Bible to me.” (Acknowledgements A Wing and a Prayer). The Christian creed’s affirmation, to which she has repeatedly sworn, (but Borg negates) is that Jesus Christ is:

“the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made . . .”

Borg has not opened the scripture for Bishop Jefferts Schori but closed its revelation of Jesus’ divinity.

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… it [does not] seem appropriate to call “premodern” one of the most intellectually engaged bishops in Europe in the years before and after Vatican II. Karol Wojtyla was a man who deliberately sought the intellectual companionship of philosophers, theologians, historians, scientists and artists from a wide range of intellectual perspectives; a man who, as both pastor and scholar, displayed a deep human sympathy for those caught in the modern crisis of belief; a man who was an avid reader of contemporary philosophy for more than a half century.

Then there is the record of the pontificate itself. Would a pope with a “premodern” intellectual perspective have written the first papal encyclical on Christian anthropology, making the renovation of Christian humanism the leitmotif and program of his pontificate? It seems unlikely.

Would a “premodern” pope have defended the universality of human rights before the United Nations in 1979 and 1995, while transforming the Catholic Church into perhaps the world’s foremost institutional promoter of the democratic project? It seems unlikely.

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There’s something very primitive, and distinctly human about Halloween. For all the modern world’s enlightened thinking and secular commitments, we spend a day tramping around in costumes and decorating our homes, stores, and neighborhoods with trappings of physical death and afterlife.

But what strikes me most is how distinctly earthbound these images of death are. Zombies, ghosts, vampires, wiggling gravestones, animated skeletons, and haunted mirrors all display an afterlife which is, in it’s own way, very understandable. We have turned the dead into extensions of our earthly existence. We are frightened of them, sort of, but only enough to think it’s fun to talk about them and display them, which, I think, means we’re not actually scared at all.

Death, on the other hand, is truly unknowable and beyond our comprehension….

Read it all.