Confessing Evangelical

Gary Trudeau goes back to the ol' drawing bo-o-oard following the withdrawal of Harriet Miers (sorry - "Harriet E Miers, a top-50 woman lawyer!").

Here's what Doonesbury fans would have been seeing next week.

Excellent article in today's Guardian from the Rt Revd Dr Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, on the subject of "assisted dying" ("permitted killing" would, of course, be a more accurate term): "We need more rational argument and less polemic on euthanasia".

Dr Harries (of whom I am not normally a fan) is responding to a number of recent Guardian articles, in particular a recent column by Polly Toynbee, which have argued that the only opposition to euthanasia comes from those bent on using oppressive religious dogma to crush the dignity and freedom of vulnerable individuals.

In reply, Dr Harries argues that his opposition to current proposals for euthanasia "depends on no religious presupposition, only an ability to reflect rationally on what it is to be human". He expresses concern over "the lack of rational argument, leading to a genuine meeting of minds, by those who wish to change the law to allow assisted dying".

Almost everyone agrees, he continues, that "human autonomy cannot always be the overriding value" and that, as a consequence, "there is then a proper debate to be had about the circumstances when it might need to be overruled". Dr Harries raises concerns over the effect that euthanasia would have on palliative care, but his key argument relates to this issue of "autonomy":

My own particular concern recently has been the emphasis put on autonomy by the bill's supporters. It would be all too easy to slide from an emphasis on the importance of human choice into a growing assumption that when people are not able to make choices, when they become utterly dependent, their value is diminished.

We are dependent on others for long periods in our lives, and dependence as much as independence and autonomy are part of what it means to be a human being.

Our elder son starts primary school in January, two months before his fifth birthday. One of the innumerable forms we've been given to complete is a "Home School Agreement" by which we agree, as parents, to various basic requirements (try to make sure our son turns up, that he does his homework etc) and the school likewise agrees to do its job properly.

All well and good - though scarcely likely to make much impact on the sort of parents who need to be asked to play a constructive role in their children's education - but then I reached the bottom of the page, where I found this:

THE CHILD

I will try to:

• Keep the school's Golden Rules

Our Golden School Rules - how we behave:

• We are gentle - we don't hurt others;


• We are kind and helpful - we don't hurt anybody's feelings;


• We listen - we don't interrupt;


• We are honest - we don't cover up the truth;


• We work hard - we don't waste our own or other people's time;


• We look after property - we don't waste or damage things.

Child's signature: __________________ Date: ___________

A blameless list of requirements, but what's got me feeling very uncomfortable is this business about having four-year old children signing a form like this.

Various reasons for this. First, I'm a lawyer. So I'm aware that signing things is a serious business - which is precisely why we don't normally let four-year olds do it. By signing an agreement you state irrevocably that you have read, understood and agree to all its terms (even if none of those things is actually true).

Second, what is this "agreement" for? Say our son breaks one of these rules and is facing some disciplinary consequence as a result. Will his signature on the form be used against him ("You've broken your agreement")? If not, then the exercise is pointless. If so, then it's reprehensible.

Third, I'm all in favour of teaching children responsibility and good behaviour, but I'd appreciate it if the school could present me with the peer-reviewed developmental evidence that confirms that this is a constructive and beneficial way to teach this to children. Rather than being, say, an exercise in bureaucratic back-covering combined with Blairite social engineering.

Fourth, aren't children allowed just a few years of their lives without being introduced into the world of form-filling and contractual obligations?

Finally - and here I've got my lawyer's hat on again - what's the benefit to my son in signing this? If we don't make him sign the form, the school will still accept him. If a client came to me with a list of obligations they were being asked to sign, without there being any negative consequences for refusing to do so or any real benefit for doing so, then I'd advise them not to make a rod for their own backs and to decline to sign.

Now I'm not out to make a big scene about this - there'll be no newspaper front pages about "Father's fight against school form reaches the High Court". After all, it's important for our son that we have a positive relationship with his school. My inclination is to amend the form so that it reads, "We will try to ensure our son knows, understands and keeps the school's Golden Rules", and then sign it ourselves as his parents.

So this is where I'd appreciate feedback. Am I being over-scrupulous, making a fuss about nothing ("Just sign the d*** form!"). Would amending the form be a craven cop-out to an intrusive and obnoxious process ("Give me a pointless-form-free school or give me death!")? Or is my proposal the best way to meet the school's reasonable expectations without putting inappropriate expectations on my son? Replies welcomed in the comments.

Far be it from me to perpetuate offensive stereotypes about boorish and foul-mouthed Australians, but I thought I'd pass on this transcript of an edifying exchange from the New South Wales legislative assembly yesterday, between Joseph Tripodi (who seems to be a minister in the NSW state government) and Andrew Fraser, the constituency member for Coffs Harbour, concerning improvements to the Pacific Highway:

Mr JOSEPH TRIPODI: When I visited Bonville, the local parliamentary representative was somewhere in Sydney. He was unable to be found in his own electorate. I was well received by the Mayor of Coffs Harbour and the Mayor of Bellingen.

Mr ANDREW FRASER: Point of order: Sit down, clown! The minister has made an attack on me, which was totally untrue. If he wishes to attack me, it should be by way of substantive motion.

ACTING SPEAKER: Order! There is no point of order.

FRASER: There is. If he wishes to attack me, I suggest you tell him to do it by way of substantive motion.

TRIPODI: Look, mate, the people who live in Sydney think that Coffs Harbour is the place to go for holidays, not for the local member.

FRASER: You are a bloody liar!

TRIPODI: For the people who live in Sydney, Coffs Harbour is a place to go on holidays.

ACTING SPEAKER: Order! The honourable member for Coffs Harbour will resume his seat.

FRASER: Would you like a bloody drink of water, mate? I tell you, I should ask you about the 13 deaths.

ACTING-SPEAKER: Order! I place the honourable member for Coffs Harbour on three calls to order. I ask the deputy sergeant-at-arms to remove him from the chamber.

FRASER: Christ! Thirteen bloody deaths! Thirteen deaths and you want to lie about where I was on parliamentary business in Sydney, you clown! And you stand there and do that? I won't take that, you bloody liar! You are a bloody disgrace to this place and a disgrace to your portfolio and your electorate!

[The honourable member for Coffs Harbour left the chamber, accompanied by the sergeant-at-arms.]

Gotta love that "accompanied by". And the minister addressing the aggrieved MP with the words, "Look, mate..."

HT: The Guardian's Backbencher email.

Well, it's not good for Smurfs, that's for sure.

Various low-quality versions of this have been doing the rounds for a few days now, but here's the best version I've managed to track down so far of the Unicef Smurf ad (800K QuickTime file). Powerful stuff, particularly the crying Baby Smurf. And really, really not suitable for young children, in case any of you have any Smurf fans in the house.

Mark Steyn isn't impressed, though. He has a point about civilian deaths in recent wars having usually occurred through more lo-tech means than air strikes, but it's not exactly his finest hour when he suggests that, compared with the brutalities of the Ugandan army in the Congo:

...having his village strafed in some clinical air strike is about the least worst option for Baby Smurf.

The implication (in the overall context of the article) being that the thousands of children killed, injured or orphaned in Iraq since 2003 should just be grateful they don't live in Rwanda ("You think you've got it bad?"). Which is just ducking the video's message, namely that modern warfare - whether conducted by machete or by "clinical" air strike - has a terrible and disproportionate effect on children and other civilians.

As the Unicef website explains:

The advertisement is part of UNICEF Belgium’s campaign to raise about $150,000 for the rehabilitation of former child soldiers in Burundi. Today, 300,000 children are being used as child soldiers in more than 30 conflicts around the world. The ad is meant to draw greater attention to the issues affecting real children.

[The video's message] focuses on the devastating effects war has on children. Nearly half of the 3.6 million people killed in conflicts since 1990 are children.

The caption at the end of the video translates as: "Don't let war destroy children's worlds".

Yesterday's Guardian (and, I dare say, other British newspapers) carried this striking, not to mention alarming, advertisement, from the "Shoot First Law" campaign.

Guns are of course a subject on which Americans and, well, pretty much everyone else in the western world, really, are never going to see eye to eye. Pro-gun Americans pity us for our weak-willed surrender of the freedom to defend our lives, families and properties with lethal force. The rest of us consider that to be a price worth paying in order to have (for example) 80 deaths per year from firearms in the UK, as opposed to 30,000!!! in the US.

(Sorry for the formatting blip with that figure there - but you must understand how continually startling that figure is for people outside the US. Absolutely staggering.)

Anyway, I'm not here to start what I'm sure would be a pretty futile argument about the pros and cons of the different approaches to gun ownership and control. If you differ from me on this, then we'll probably just have to agree that we differ.

But this new Florida law does seem very worrying, surely even for those who otherwise support gun-ownership. It grants complete civil and criminal immunity to any person who "reasonably believes it is necessary to [shoot another person] to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or to another person or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony".

The shooting needn't be done as a last resort - the express intention of the law is to allow people to "stand their ground" - and the immunity applies even if the shooter could have avoided the threat "by walking away or seeking refuge elsewhere". According to the campaign site:

Nothing in the law would preserve the right of an innocent bystander who was shot in the incident to pursue a civil action against the shooter for negligence in the handling of a firearm. The shooter could receive immunity for shooting recklessly into a crowd, as long as he reasonably believed he was in serious danger.

The law is also being opposed by senior police officers and prosecutors, including Broward County Sheriff Ken Jenne ("it's easy to say after the fact, I felt threatened") and Willie Meggs, President of the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association.

Well, as I say, the reason for posting this is not really to start an argument about differing attitudes towards guns - though don't let me stop you ;-). Just to highlight what a colossal culture-gap there is on this issue between the US and the UK (not to mention the rest of Europe, Canada, Australia...).

In a post last month, I summarised Timothy Garton Ash's categorisation of the six main western responses to Islam, and in particular the acts of violence committed in the name of Islam. The first of these was that "the problem is religion generally, not Islam", and this led to a discussion in the comments as to whether this view needs to be distinguished from what Tom R called "the Karen Armstrong option": namely, that it is not religion generally, but "fundamentalist" religion that is the problem.

This view is often expressed by members of a group identified by Theo Hobson in a Spectator article from October 2001, Piety Trick (subscription required, though if you ask very nicely, I do have a PDF copy available for anyone who's interested). Hobson writes:

There is one attitude to religion especially favoured by the media, even more prevalent than left-wing mockery or rightwing Catholicism. It is pervasive in "religious" broadcasting, and it emerges in force whenever media pundits turn amateur theologians.

One high profile example of this attitude could be seen in the appointment in 2001 of an agnostic, Alan Bookbinder, as head of religion and ethics at the BBC:

Taking an understandably apologetic tone in his initial statement, he insisted that he had nothing against religion; it was just that his life so far had been devoid of any personal experience of a Supreme Being. He was open to it happening; it just hadn’t yet — no one’s fault. The impression that Bookbinder sought to give was, of course, that he was a Devout Sceptic (DS).

Hobson goes on to describe some of the key characteristics of these Devout Sceptics:

Though unbelievers, DSs are sympathetic to faith. In many cases they profess to be "wrestling with faith", often they express a "yearning for faith".

This is in stark contrast to old-fashioned atheists. Whereas atheists have contempt and pity for believers, DSs have respect for and even a sort of envy of them. Or at least they say they that do. There is an inevitable problem of authenticity when someone professes to admire what he refrains from being.

Devout Scepticism tends to "want the social benefits of religion while maintaining personal detachment", approving of "faith communities" and admiring religion's perceived "powers of moral and social cohesion".

Sometimes this admiration for religious "social cohesion" tips over into a desire for religion-based social control, as seen in a Sunday Times column by Melanie Phillips cited by Hobson, in which Phillips deplores "the secular depths to which society has sunk", and the failure of the Church of England to act as "a force for moral order":

Phillips does not state her own religious position, as if it has no bearing at all on her right to preach at the Church. Yet if she’s not herself a believer, then surely she considers religion a tool of social engineering, to be used on other people to keep them in check.

"The purpose of religion", she says, "is to provide a meaning for existence." To provide it for everyone? Or is it mainly to pacify the lower orders, who can’t afford opera and shrinks?

Other prominent DSs include Simon Jenkins, Melvyn Bragg and Roy Hattersley. However, the poster-boy for Devout Scepticism remains AN Wilson, who "has made a sort of career out of his lofty problems with religious belief", and who describes himself as "a sort of devout Anglo-Catholic sceptic". Unlike Melanie Phillips, Wilson's admiration for religion is largely aesthetic rather than authoritarian ("A world without saints would be duller, to say the least"), though like Phillips:

Wilson ... assumes the right to lecture the Church of England on its shallowness, as if he were some firebrand prophet, some old-school believer; except that — would you believe it? — he finds himself, tragically, incapable of faith.

A less "gently reactionary" form of Devout Scepticism than Wilson's is now, Hobson continues, "the conventional pose of the sensitive liberal":

"I would love to believe, if only I was slightly less honest and brave. How I would adore the comforts of faith!"

But what is wrong with these "tortured souls"? "And what on earth," asks Hobson, "do I accuse them of?":

Only this: a certain dishonesty and laziness of mind, and a certain pretentiousness. The Devout Sceptic wants to lay claim to the glamorous depths of religious tradition, without the embarrassment of actually identifying with it. Do not confuse me with a common atheist (he says), like that brash chap Dawkins, who is blatantly ignorant of the controlling passion of Western culture. Consider me to have the integrity and depth of a believer, yet also the searching mind and defiant heart of a Romantic.

This idea that "to refrain from faith is ... a nobler, higher calling" is particularly popular with "the so-called religious media":

Actual believers scare them silly (the things they say!); they much prefer treating DS-ism as if it were a rather more refined form of faith.

Hobson describes seeing a reverential interview with Clive James on the BBC's Heaven and Earth Show, in which James "explained, with rictus pride, what was to him the real stumbling block: the Problem of Evil". As Hobson observes:

Nearly all DSs cite the Problem of Evil. What scuppers their yearnings for faith is this: their exceptional sensitivity to the suffering at large in the world.

Here again is how A. N. Wilson puts it: "Many of us find it very difficult in a suffering universe to believe in a God of love. In fact we find it all but impossible."

The implication is that to subscribe to the massive naivety of faith is a probable failure of moral imagination. How could anyone who really understood the reality of the Holocaust, as I do, subscribe to a system of transcendent affirmation? If believers knew as well as I do the darkness at the heart of existence, they would surely abandon their illusions.

They are too generous-spirited to put it so bluntly, of course, but this is what they are getting at.

And Hobson continues:

The fool, according to the Bible, says in his heart, "There is no God." The contemporary fool says in his weekly column, "Alas! There is no God adequate for such a clever and sensitive chap as me."

Hobson, writing four weeks after 9/11, concludes with the suggestion that "maybe the terrorist atrocity in New York will shake things up a bit, force some greater clarity of thought". The outpourings of Devout (and not-so devout) Scepticism after each of the many disasters of the past year - the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Kashmir earthquake - suggests that this was rather optimistic.

Highly recommended: Mark Steyn's obituary of James Doohan, the "Irishman who fought with the Canadians against the Germans [who] became a Scotsman who fought with the Americans against the Klingons". As Steyn writes:

Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have great catchphrases said to them.

Although, of course, in Doohan's case the "great catchphrase" was never actually said to him, at least until the fourth Star Trek movie. It was certainly never intended to be the catchphrase for the show itself:

[T]hat honor was reserved for Gene Roddenberry’s portentous sonorous orotund grandiosity – the space-the-final-frontier-boldly-going-where-no-man’s-gone-before stuff.

I particularly enjoyed Steyn's insight into why the "beaming" was in there in the first place:

The beaming was neither here nor there: it was a colloquialism for matter-energy transit, or teleportation – or, more to the point, a way of getting from the inside of the space ship to the set of the planet without having to do a lot of expensive exterior shots in which you’ve got to show the USS Enterprise landing and Kirk, Spock et al disembarking.

Instead, the crew positioned themselves in what looked vaguely like a top-of-the-line shower, ordered Scotty to make with the beaming, and next thing you know they were standing next to some polystyrene rocks in front of a backcloth whose colors were the only way of telling this week’s planet from last week's.

"Beaming" was the special effect – the one that saved Star Trek from having to have any others.

For details of how "Beam me up, Scotty" can "help your marriage or destroy it", you'll have to read the obit.

As for Doohan himself, I knew he had lost a finger during the Juno beach landings on D-Day. I didn't know his life had been saved by the silver cigarette case that stopped a bullet that hit him on the chest. Nor did I know that they used a body double for his finger close-ups on Star Trek. ("So what do you do on the show?" "Oh, I'm James Doohan's finger double." Well, you've got to start somewhere, I suppose.)

It's just a shame Doohan won't be around for Star Trek XII: So Very Tired ("It's no use Cap'n! I canna' reach the control panel!"). I'm sure Doohan - who apparently disliked William Shatner intensely, and was in the habit of delighting "Trekkers" by beaming Shatner's toupee on to the stage at Star Trek conventions - would have enjoyed the following entry in Captain Kirk's log:

Captain's Log Stardate 6051: had trouble sleeping last night... my hiatal hernia is acting up again. The ship is drafty and damp; I complain, but nobody listens.

Great photo on the front page of today's Guardian, illustrating a slightly alarming story: "George Bush: 'God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq'".

I'm hoping that Bush has been misquoted or misunderstood here. This is, after all, a hearsay report from a former Palestinian foreign minister, and whatever the truth or otherwise of this report (and the White House is unequivocally denying it), this does highlight the general point of how people from outside the evangelical subculture can misinterpret what Christians with "charismatic" tendencies mean when they talk about how God "told them" to do such-and-such a thing.

Usually (speaking from my own experience of having spent some time in charismatic circles), such Christians don't actually mean they heard a voice in their heads telling them to do this. Rather, they mean they felt a "deep sense of peace" about a proposed course of action, or that some unlikely event occurred (such as being elected President on a minority of the popular vote? [j/k]) that they interpreted as a "sign" of God's favour for what they had in mind, perhaps after they "laid out a fleece" to give God an opportunity to provide the said sign.

Talking of the "deep sense of peace" approach to guidance, there's an amusing story in Alistair Brown's book "Near Christianity" about a theological college at which at least half a dozen men all felt a "deep sense of peace" about the idea that God might want them to marry the same startlingly attractive female student. (None of them did.)

Personally, I'm in the same benighted condition as the Boar's Head Tavern's Bill Mackinnon, who once confessed in an essay on the Internet Monk site that he had "No voices in my head".

In this essay, Mackinnon describes the various forms in which God is alleged to speak to us - "ham radio", "walkie talkie", "Easter bunny", "bull ring" ("I just felt led"), "Paxil" and "back to school" ("you just need to learn how to hear God's voice") - before concluding:

A lousy Christian I may be, for many reasons. But my inability to hear God’s voice isn’t one of them. I have a Bible, and God speaks to me whenever I open it.

Another aspect of this approach of "listening for God's voice" is that the only voice that people seem to expect (or even want?) to hear is that of God's Law: "Do this, don't do that".

The Bible - and, in particular, the proclamation of the Bible's message in the church's ministry of Word and Sacrament, which is truly the living voice of God for us today - gives us something so much better: the promises of the Gospel, promises which are for each and every one of us, regardless of how well we tune the ham radio of our hearts, and without any of us needing to wait for a voice in our heads.

"Sometimes, what we need the most - can be just around the corner..."

Jack Nicholson is Jack Torrance in... Shining (9.8 MB).

HT: Jason.