On Sat, 27 Jan 2007 21:51:00 -0800, johac <jhachmann@sbcglobal.com>
wrote:
- Refer: <jhachmann-26E480.21510027012007@news.giganews.com>

In article <1i4jr215oa37dpnnb31vrr14oln4moiik5@4ax.com>,
Michael Gray <mikegray@newsguy.com> wrote:

The persistence of the faithful
AC Grayling

January 23, 2007 03:01 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ac_grayling/2007/01/progress_and_the_ro
man
_catholi.html

"Emboldened by its victory over the government in the matter of
keeping faith schools discriminatory and exclusive, the Roman Catholic
church in England is now again flexing its biceps to preserve its
tradition of discrimination and prejudice against gay people. Just as
active in keeping its own paedophile priests safe from the law, it is
determined to secure exemptions from anti-discrimination legislation
too. Evidently, Roman Catholicism thinks of itself as above the law.
Of course it would: it is obedient not to earthly law, but to a higher
law: its own convenience, its own mentally and morally corrupt ways.

As it happens Roman Catholicism is a small sect in Britain, but it
cannot be coincidental that it has one or two significant figures on
its side: Ruth Kelly (of Opus Dei) and Mrs Blair, and almost certainly
the latter's husband, said to be planning to convert to Catholicism on
leaving office.

But there is a more general point than that of the Catholic church's
contemptible and reactionary prejudices and its wrigglings to be
exempt from laws that enjoin fairness and equality in British society.
It is that Angela Merkel and the Pope are planning to revisit the
question of having references to Europe's "Christian traditions"
written into the preamble of a redrafted European constitution. This
holy endeavour was defeated first time round, but the persistence of
the faithful is never to be underestimated. It becomes necessary
therefore to be equally persistent, and to repeat the following
points.

Seven centuries after the beginnings of classical civilisation in the
Greece of Pericles and Socrates, an oriental superstition, consisting
of an amalgam of dying and resurrecting god myths and myths about the
impregnation of mortal maids by deities, captured the Roman Empire.
Such was the beginning of Christianity. By the accident of its being
the myth chosen by Constantine for his purposes, it plunged Europe
into the dark ages for the next thousand years - scarcely any
literature or philosophy, and the forgetting of the arts and crafts of
classical civilisation (quite literally a return to daub and wattle
because the engineering required for towers and domes was lost),
before a struggle to escape the church's narrow ignorance and
oppression saw the rebirth of classical learning, and its ethos of
inquiry and autonomy, in the Renaissance.

From that point to this day every millimetre of progress in liberty
and learning has been bitterly opposed by the organised institutions
of Christianity, which at the outset burned to death anyone who
disagreed with its antique absurdities - none of its officers ever
being arraigned for these vast numbers of murders, or the literally
millions of deaths caused by the wars of religion that plagued Europe,
especially in the 16th and 17th centuries. But bit by bit religion was
forced back into its own shadows by the new learning and the larger
freedoms of mind and action that increasing secularisation brought,
liberating individuals and societies to the extent enjoyed today.

But now that toleration and secularity has allowed the cancers of
organised superstition to regrow, we see the old story repeating
itself: the church battling to stop progress, to return us to the dark
of prejudice and irrationality. How sharply true is the implication of
Bertrand Russell's remark that "Jesus was not as intelligent as
Socrates or as compassionate as the Buddha", for the unintelligent and
uncompassionate ethics of the church in its claim to be exempt from
laws of justice and inclusiveness say everything that needs to be said
about it, whether here in Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor's arrogant
and prejudiced exceptionalism, or in the plan of Angela Merkel and the
Pope to recycle the old lie that the enslavement of the European mind
by the absurdities of Christianity are foundational to what is in
truth our secular, free-thinking, classically rooted inheritance."

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Right on! We need more like Grayling, Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, et al.
to speak out.

Grayling: A little Gray.
Dawkins: A little, oh forget it!

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