For several years, since my last spate of blogging in 2009 – 2010, I have been preparing a collection of essays on Christianity’s role in the rise of Fascism and National Socialism in order to exonerate atheism and secularism, whose names are repeatedly sullied by the faithful in order to deflect attention away from their own gross failings of morality and resistance to radical evil.
American physicist Victor Stenger’s excellent addition to the New Atheism cannon, God, The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist, briefly mentions Christianity’s complicity with Nazism in its chapter discussing human morality. Stenger cites palaeontologist, researcher and author Gregory Scott Paul’s three articles that were published in Free Inquiry magazine about 10 years ago: “The Great Scandal: Christianity’s Role in the Rise of the Nazis.” I have learnt a great deal from Paul’s articles and they have been instrumental in my research for my own essays on the topic.
manicstreetpreacher presents the damning verdict on a pseudo-intellectual by a genuine one.
Further to my recent series of posts on the Intelligent Design creationist propaganda piece Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Mike Godfrey over at God3’s Blog quotes one of the film’s participants, David Berlinski. In his response to the New Atheism, The Devil’s Delusion, Berlinski, a supposedly secular Jew, writes on the crimes of so-called atheist totalitarianisms in the 20th century:
Dawkins is prepared to acknowledge the facts while denying their significance. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists, he affirms, acted because of their atheism. They were simply keen to kill a great many people. Atheism had nothing to do with it. They might well have been Christian Scientists.
In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe, before the possibility of Soviet retribution even entered their untroubled imagination, Nazi extermination squads would sweep into villages, and after forcing the villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion somewhere in Eastern Europe, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.
Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said.
And then he was shot dead.
What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.
And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either.
That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.
I can only assume that Berlinski had forgotten about the events of September 11, 2001 when he was writing this passage. This was an outrage carried out by people who were thinking only too much of what heaven would think of them. Hopefully, the more recent events on the Moscow tube will jog his memory.
Appealing to authority and credential inflation are common tactics of creationists and Intelligent Design proponents. Expelled’s host, Ben Stein, went to great lengths to hold out Berlinski as an example of a smart guy who believed in Intelligent Design in order to give it some credibility. However, all Berlinski succeeded in doing was to be a particularly obnoxious and unlikeable character, saying that Richard Dawkins is “a crummy philosopher” and “a little bit of a reptile”.
In an article reminiscing on an infamous book review for The New York Times in 1989 where he wrote, “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that),” Dawkins had this to say about Berlinski:
Are there, then, any examples of anti-evolution poseurs who are not ignorant, stupid or insane, and who might be genuine candidates for the wicked category? I once shared a platform with someone called David Berlinski, who is certainly not ignorant, stupid or insane. He denies that he is a creationist, but claims strong scientific arguments against evolution (which disappointingly turn out to be the same old creationist arguments). Together with the great John Maynard Smith and others, he and I were guest speakers at a debate organized by a prominent Oxford rabbi. Maynard Smith spoke after Berlinski and, not surprisingly, he soon had the audience roaring with laughter as he lampooned Berlinski’s bad arguments. But what amused me was Berlinski’s tactic for dealing with this mocking laughter. He sprang to his feet, held up a reproachful open palm towards the audience, and said (approximately of course, I can’t remember the exact words): “No no! Don’t laugh. Let Maynard Smith have his say! It’s only fair!” Happily, the Oxford audience saw through this tactic of pretending to think the audience were laughing at Maynard Smith rather than with him. And the rabbi, himself a devout creationist, afterwards told me he had been shocked at Berlinski’s duplicity. By itself, this is too trivial an example to deserve the name wicked. But it did make me wonder about Berlinski’s motives. As I said, he is certainly not ignorant, stupid or insane.
After witnessing his performance in Expelled, Dawkins’ assessment of Berlinski is borne out all too well.
manicstreetpreacher is pleased to present the latest salvo in a friend’s war against fascism in the UK.
My good friend, Edmund Standing, a prolific secular and anti-fascist blogger, has co-researched and authored with Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens a report into the activities of the far right extremist group, Blood & Honour (B&H), for Douglas Murray’s conservative think-tank, The Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC) and There Is Nothing British About The BNP.
The report is entitled “Blood & Honour: Britain’s Far-Right Militants” (download PDF). The News of the World carried a story on the report, Harry’s Place has done a guest post and Standing has also published an executive summary on his blog:
B&H is an international neo-Nazi network that has evolved from its original incarnation as a neo-Nazi music scene into a far-right franchise. Through music CDs and ideological texts, the B&H network reinforces and disseminates a violent ‘white power’ supremacist ideology, encourages terrorism and spreads racial hatred. This ideology derives from Third Reich Nazism and B&H seeks the creation of a ‘Fourth Reich’. While it is not an organisation with official membership, B&H acts as an effective international network through which to spread violent neo-Nazism.
A number of B&H texts glorify and encourage acts of terror against minorities, and also provide followers with detailed information about how to carry out a successful attack…
B&H’s largest source of income is the sale of neo-Nazi rock music CDs, many of which incite racial hatred and violence, and glorify neo-Nazi terrorism. Two key UK B&H merchandising operations are Highlander East Coast and Rune and Sword Productions, both of which sell ‘white power’ music and other neo-Nazi material that contravenes UK legislation on racial and religious hatred.
Standing writes his own blog, regularly contributes to Harry’s Place and has written a number of excellent pieces for Ophelia Benson’s website, Butterflies & Wheels, which can be accessed in the articles section.
Standing’s previous report for the CSC, “The BNP and The Online Fascist Network” (download PDF), published in July 2009, exposed the shambolic attempts by the British National Party to clean up their politics in the public eye while secretly maintaining links with Nazis, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers and all-round nasty racist scum. Make sure you search Google as well as reading the report itself to get a whiff of the stink it kicked up!
manicstreetpreacher unveils the clip that he has replayed the most in this Year of Our Lord.
It has been a great year for the ‘Tube. I have watched many brilliant lectures and debates and even appeared in one of them myself. Certainly, NonStampCollector is the one YouTube user who has provided me with the most joy. I wish I could include them all. However, the clip I have played the most is the this wonderful “re-edit” of BNP leader Nick Griffin’s appearance on BBC One’s Question Time on 22 October 2009 by cassetteboy.
At over a million views, I’m probably not the only one who would class it as the cream of the crop for ‘09.
Many thanks to my friend, the anti-fascist blogger Edmund Standing, for forwarding me the link.
manicstreetpreacher takes a brief respite from all things theocratic and gives his take on how the cunning stunt of getting RATM to Christmas Number One has a less amusing side to it.
I just couldn’t believe it. Returning from the gym on Sunday evening checking out my RSS feeds, I saw the news that Rage Against The Machine’s “Killing in the Name” had beaten X Factor winner, Joe McElderry, to UK Christmas Number One. The shock chart result follows a widely publicised Facebook campaign to get the US-based rap punk group to the top of the charts in order to prevent Simon Cowell from ruining the best chart of the year with yet another insult-to-housewives-choice-idenikit-sugar-manufactured-pop-dreck-famous-for-five-seconds-forgotton-just-as-quickly-waste-of-plastic.
My initial reaction was joy. Although I never got round to downloading the track, I morally supported Rage in beating X Factor. It was joyful slap in the face to Cowell, regardless of the fact that he is a part owner of Sony, the record company of both McElderry and Rage and therefore a share of the profits will find their way into his high trouser pocket eventually. However, that is missing the point. As Charlie Brooker in The Guardianput it writing mid-week before the chart was announced:
But profit isn’t the point – or at least it’s not the reason I downloaded it. For one thing, I happen to think Killing in the Name is an excellent song, so I’ve already got something out of it. Most importantly, it contains genuine emotion. Even if the climactic repeated howls of “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” put you in mind of a teenager loudly refusing to tidy his bedroom – as opposed to a masked anarchist hurling petrol bombs at the riot squad – there is at least an authentic human sentiment being expressed. Zack de la Rocha is audibly pissed off.
Compare this to the pissweak vocal doodle that is Joe McElderry’s X Factor single. For a song whose lyrics ostensibly document an attempt to gather the spiritual strength to overcome adversity and thereby attain enlightenment, The Climb is about as inspiring as a Lion bar. It’s a listless announcement on a service station Tannoy; an advert for buttons; a fart in a clinic; a dot on a spreadsheet. Listening to it from beginning to end is like watching a bored cleaner methodically wiping a smudge from a Formica worksurface.
But then nobody’s buying The Climb in order to actually listen to it. They’re buying it out of sedated confusion, pushing a button they’ve been told will make them feel better. It’s the sound of the assisted suicide clinic, and it doesn’t deserve to be No 1 this Christmas.
Hear, hear.
However, the my joy had cold water thrown on it rather quickly with this post from prolific secular, pro-Israel and anti-fascist blogger Edmund Standing who pointed out that far from being mere rebels without a cause, RATM are:
[T]he musical equivalent of the Socialist Workers Party – i.e. they’re ‘revolutionary’ loons who hate the West and wish we were all living in some Soviet hellhole.
Let’s have a look at some of their views.
Starting with the band’s official website, we immediately find images of books including Che Guevara’s ‘Guerrilla Warfare’, ‘The Anarchist Cookbook’, ‘The Black Panthers Speak’, and ‘Malcolm X Speaks’. So, that’s a book on Communist revolution by a vile totalitarian, a terrorist manual, and race baiting material.
Che Guevara is of course the icon of choice for every rebellious teenager, lefty idiot, and pretentious pseudo-leftist celebrity going. The real Che was a walking nightmare…
The Che worship of people like RATM is particularly ironic, given he wanted to ban rock music.
In an interview with Chomsky, RATM member Tom Morello proudly stated: ‘I want you to know… Noam Chomsky books are the ones most prominently featured on the rage tour bus’.
Zack de la Rocha of RATM considers Chomsky a ‘good friend’ and cited him in an ‘anti-war’ rant at the 2007 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival…
500,000 Britons have ‘rebelled’ against Simon Cowell’s chart dominance by buying the records of an extreme left-wing band of wannabe terrorists. The only thing that gives me hope in this situation is that the majority of those people probably haven’t got a clue about the politics of RATM, which, of course, really makes the whole ‘campaign’ all the more pathetic.
The words, “down”, “Earth” and “bump” spring to mind. Perhaps if Standing had blogged on RATM sooner he may have stopped the campaign and McElderry would have given us the ninth Simon Cowell/ Louis Walsh manufactured for a TV audience Christmas Number One in a row…
Many of the commenters on Standing’s post have concurred with him. However, many have begged to differ, calling him “po-faced” and that the stunt was “just a bit fun”. Who cares about Rage’s politics? They are a rock group who have some dodgy, hypocritical and inconsistent views. What punk rock group does not? Does Standing begrudge The Sex Pistols very nearly successful attempt to hijack the Jubilee Number One in 1977 for their ridiculous cut n paste ethos?
This reminds me of the occasion in 2001 when my favourite band of all time and whose moniker I have purloined for blogging purposes (so far without being slapped with a copyright action, touch wood!), Manic Street Preachers played a live gig in front of 5,000 fans at the Karl Marx theatre in Havana, Cuba in front of Fidel Castro himself. The album they were promoting was Know Your Enemy (overall rather tepid, still containing some of their best work, quite a few guilty pleasures!) was chocked full of references to Cuba, not least of which was “Baby Elian”, regarding the fiasco in the courts over custody of a little Cuban boy called Elian Gonzalez who was found washed up in Florida following a boat disaster his mother did not survive while she was attempting to escape to America.
Everyone at the time knew that Cuba has an appalling record on human rights (although they have a cracking healthcare system if Michael Moore is to be believed, erm…), but it was the principle of the band speaking out against the relentless Americanisation of the planet in spite of the fact that everyone would much prefer to live in a McUSA rather than a Red Cuba! The Manics have always been the biggest load of self-contradictory, ill-thought-out, slogan-ripping-off-without-actually-reading-any-deeper-into-their-heroes tools, but that’s partly why I love them so much.
I have a biography of the band R.E.M. called Fiction, first published in 2002. Guitarist Peter Buck replied rather well to the apparent contradiction of cash-raking, corporate-cock-sucking rock stars speaking out against globalisation and capitalism. I didn’t have my copy to hand at the time of writing, but he said something along the lines of all of us being guilty of it to an extent. Most music magazines have adverts in their back pages that are essentially selling prostitution. What are the chances that the clothes we are wearing now were stitched together in some Taiwanese sweat-shop by an eight-year child being paid $1 a day? (Although on a balance of probabilities Mr Standing is exempt from this piece of rhetoric…) Al Gore obviously hasn’t given up his 4X4 and jet travel as he is shown using them in An Inconvenient Truth!
The realities rendering us all hypocrites shouldn’t prevent people from rebelling against the system on the odd occasion. If Rage Against The Machine’s politics were more influential, I think the joke would turn sour and people would know where to draw the line.
But this episode graphically demonstrates the inexplicable paradox at the heart of the public’s perception of the left-right divide. As Boris Johnson pointed out in a piece first published in The Daily Telegraph in 2005:
Cycling through London, I check out the words on people’s T-shirts, and I was amused the other day to see the letters CCCP on someone’s chest. Yup, folks, that’s what the fashion-conscious British youth is wearing, a celebration of the great doomed Soviet experiment of 1917 – 90.
Remind me: who was the greater mass murderer, Stalin or Hitler? Well, Stalin is thought to have been responsible for about 50 million deaths, and Hitler for a mere 25 million. What Hitler did in his concentration camps was equalled if not exceeded in foulness by the Soviet gulags, forced starvation and pogroms. What makes the achievements of communist Russia so special and different, that you can simper around in a CCCP T-shirt, while anyone demented enough to wear anything commemorating the Third Reich would be speedily banged away under the 1986 Public Order Act?
On that occasion, Johnson was commenting on the death of Melita Norwood, a former Soviet spy whose crimes against the British state were only discovered in 1999 when she was aged 87. As a result of her advanced years, the Labour government decided she was too old to prosecute. Compare that to the way that former Auschwitz guards are (quite rightly) hunted down and thrown in the dock when they have to feed through a tube.
I disagree with my father on many political, philosophical, scientific and above all religious matters. However, the one gem of political insight he imparted to me in my teenage years which I have retained ever since is that that you can quite literally get away with mass murder as long as you are left wing.
Why is it that the figures of the far left are deified while those at the opposite end of the political spectrum like Hitler are remembered as history’s monsters? Instead of all those students wearing t-shirts emblazoned with “CCCP” a few years back, why didn’t they try wearing a garment displaying a swastika? Instead of the monochrome profile of Che Guevara hanging from a million student dorm windows, what about the corpulent features of Herman Goering or his rather more gaunt counterpart in the Wehrmacht Joseph Goebbels?
It’s disgusting how Stalin is being made into a hero now. Earlier this year, a renegade Orthodox priest displayed icons of him alongside Russian saints outside his church in St Petersburg (or Leningrad as it seems to be called again), which the Communist Party rushed to imitate en masse and distribute. The Communist Party in Russia are petitioning the Russian Orthodox Church to have him made a saint. The man was voted third greatest Russian of all time in a poll at the end of 2008. At this year’s worldwide May Protests, Communists were out in force displaying icons of Stalin.
What on Earth were these people protesting against; too much freedom and democracy and a shortage of gulags and slave labour?
I read an article in The Times a few weeks ago that a school history text book has been produced under the loathsome shadow of the Putin administration which airbrushes (literally) Stalin’s crimes against humanity. In some European countries it is a crime to deny or trivialise the Holocaust. Why aren’t there laws against doing the same in respect of all the millions communism has killed?
But then again, aren’t we in the West slaves to commercialisation? Isn’t that the point of Rage Against The Machine and their ilk? Hasn’t our consumer culture left as emotional emaciated as a gulag prisoner? For all the paradoxes, the latent contradictions, the childish political posturing, the ghastly nightmare that would ensue if they had their way, I can’t help feeling some affection for people who want to prevent society degenerating into this:
But I still know which I would prefer. We need hypocrites like Rage Against The Machine and Manic Street Preachers to remind us how lucky we are and how much worse things could be if we had to live under the heel of Stalin, Castro or Mao.
manicstreetpreacher witnesses first-hand a rhetorical massacre of Vatican hench(wo)men by the cream of British intellectualism.
On Monday, 19 October 2009 I attended a debate at Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, London featuring “New Atheist” and author of God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens and actor, writer and broadcaster, Stephen Fry, to argue against the motion “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world” with Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Conservative MP, Ann Widdecombe proposing.
The debate was filmed by BBC TV cameras and the debate moderator, Zeinab Badawi, told us that it would be broadcast to 70 million people throughout the world on 7 and 8 November 2009. The full video of the debate can be viewed below:
Each of the four speakers were allowed 15 minutes for an opening statement, then there was about 30 minutes of the audience’s questions and comments and then the panel were given a final five minutes to sum up. The whole event lasted a shade under two hours from 7:00 – 9:00pm. The only disappointment is that Hitchens wasn’t signing books afterwards, but apart from that it was very well put together by the organisers, Intelligence Squared.
Exactly as I predicted before the event, this was an utterly one-sided affair. Hitch and Fry wiped the floor with their papist opponents. It was an embarrassment for the parties of God. The two men had everything on their side. They had the arguments, they had the historical facts, they had the present day facts, they had the rhetoric, they had the wit and most importantly they had the audience, although it has to be said that most of them were dead against the motion from the start.
Blow-by-blow: Archbishop John Onaiyekan
Archbishop John Onaiyekan opened the motion for the proposition. He seemed an amiable enough fellow; I’m sure you’d like to have him round for dinner. Unfortunately he was encumbered with a thick Nigerian accent, which made it difficult to understand what he was saying. Not that it would have made too much difference. From what I could pick up, his opening statement was a wishy-washy apologia that cited few factual examples and even less ideology.
The Archbishop said that from his Catholic upbringing to the present day as a 65 year old adult, he had no regrets and devoutly believed in the motion, otherwise he would not be a member of the Catholic Church in the first place. The Church has stood the test of time over the last two thousand years ranging from the good ordinary folk of the world to the leaders of the world. He cited the 2008 papal encyclical, Caritas In Veritate, “Charity in Truth”, as a good example of what the Church stood for.
Noises were made about the Church’s syllabus of errors, but the Archbishop stressed the need to keep perspective and be careful when judging others. After all, the late pontiff, John Paul II apologised for many of the Church’s “misjudgements” throughout history.
The Archbishop argued that true good of the Catholic Church can be attested by its 1.2 billion members and we really ought to go and speak to some of them to realise that the world needs more people linking arms and striving for a future of justice. The Archbishop also stated that the Church has a hand in setting up many schools and hospitals and contrary to the public perception of its stance on condom use, had worked closely with the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS.
It was a well-meaning and consolatory opening. The Archbishop finished with plenty of his allotted time to spare and asked with a dash of irony whether there now could be anyone in the audience who didn’t think that the Catholic Church was a force for good. Bless him, he must have hoped that his two opponents would be willing to search for common ground.
What planet has he been living on?
The Hitch
OK, let’s face it. This is why the majority of the audience paid their admissions fee. To witness arguably the world’s most outspoken atheist and opponent of religion take aim at the easiest target he could have wished for. We were not disappointed.
After the usual warm-up quips about the moderator admiring his shirt, Hitch went at the Holy See like a rabid dog.
WHAM! The statement delivered by Pope John Paul II’s spokesmen on 12 March 2000 apologising for everything from the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to the oppression of women (who after all comprise half the human race), to the forced conversion of the indigenous peoples of South America by theConquistadors.
BLAM! The 94 public recognitions of the Church’s crimes against humanity from apologising for the African slave trade in 1995 to the admission in 1992 that Galileo was actually right when he said that the sun was the centre of our solar system and the earth and the other planets were in orbit around it.
KA-ZAAM!!! Hitchens’ demanded that apologies were long overdue for the crimes of the Croatian Utashe lead by Ante Pavelić in the Second World War which received the full blessing of the clergy, to the rape and torture and cover-up of children in Catholic schools and care homes from “Ireland to Australia”, to the hideous preaching of Augustine’s doctrine of limbo which had countless parents in agony over the destination of the souls of their un-baptised children.
BIFF! There were a few more sins for the Holy See to atone for: the 1933 Reich Concordat with Nazi Germany which dissolved the Catholic Centre Party and removed all opposition to the rise of Hitler while ensuring that the Church maintained control of state education. Come to think of it, wasn’t the first treaty that Mussolini put his name to the 1929 Lateran Treaty with the Vatican. Wasn’t Jozef Tiso, the despot who governed Slovakia an ordained priest? Wasn’t every other fascist dictator from Franco to Salazar raised as a Catholic with the public blessing of St Peter’s Basilica? Wasn’t Adolf Hitler’s birthday celebrated from the pulpits every year right up until his death?
NO MORE, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!!!!
Well alright, then perhaps a little bit more. This is getting kinda fun.
THWACK!!! Hitch declared that none of this could be laughed off with gestures to the charitable. After all, didn’t Pope Ratzinger qualify the apology to the South American Indians by saying while on a visit to Brazil in 2007 that they were “silently longing” for the arrival of Christianity? The sex abuse scandal culminating in the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, Massachusetts, only for the same Cardinal to show up at the 2005 conclave to elect the new pontiff doesn’t exactly enhance the Vatican’s claim to moral superiority either. Neither does the doctrine of anti-Semitism for the Jews’ complicity for the death of Christ preached until 1964, nearly 20 years after the judgment of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.
POW!!! Hitch then proceeded to tear the moral relativism that has engulfed the Church in recent years (and would certainly engulf the arguments of its apologists this night) a new one. He stated that the rape and torture of children is something that cannot be relativised. It cannot be shrugged off as something that would not happen if “queers had not been allowed into the Church.” If any “normal” person were accused of child rape, they would want to die. If they were found guilty, they would commit suicide.
ZAP!!! More suggested topics to apologise for? How about the re-inauguration of Holocaust-denying bishop Richard Williamson, who effectively said, “Genocide? No. Deicide? Yes!”? Ratzinger invited Williamson back into the fold because Church unity was more important than moral integrity. And how about the genocide in Rwanda, the most Catholic country in Africa where priests and nuns were guilty of inciting the massacres and indeed, many are now standing trial for taking part in it themselves. No proper apology has ever been issued.
Hitch then stood up for his friend, Stephen Fry, who is “not like other girls” and cannot be a member of the Church for being a “fag”. The Church’s condescending stance to “hate the sin, love the sinner” means that a substantial portion of the world’s population is excluded from the sacraments.
Hitch ended by saying that he did not wish harm on anybody, but he looked forward to the death of Ratzinger for one reason and one reason only. In the intervening weeks and months between one pope dying and another being elected by the College of Cardinals, there is a period when no one on earth claims to be infallible. Our species must be rid of its faith the certainty from above if it is to progress.
The crowd loved every minute of it. Hitch’s address was punctuated by applause and cheers several times. The biggest cheer came when he faced the Archbishop and asked him for a public apology for the Church’s policy of delivering false information about the effectiveness of condom use, effectively saying that “AIDS is bad, but condoms are worse”.
In case you couldn’t tell, Hitchens is a personal hero of mine. I’m well on the way to having read all of his books. I’ve seen him lecture and debate as many times as I’ve been able to find on YouTube. I’ve referenced him more times than I care to remember on this blog and in my appearances on Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable? and I have come in for some stick from commenters and listeners for being a mouthpiece for the Four Horsemen in general and Hitchens in particular. This was the first time that I have seen him speak live and it was worth 10 times the admission price.
It was orgasmic!
Widdecombe
The Conservative MP and Catholic convert was announced to have left the Church of England in 1992 when it decided to ordain women priests. In answer to a question from the audience, she explained that a woman can be an MP because it is a profession, but there is no theological basis for a woman to be a priest because they cannot lead the confession before Christ. Apparently a woman can no more stand in for JC than a man for the Virgin Mary. Right.
Out of the two papists, it has to be said that Widdecombe put up by far the better fight. She raised rapturous applause from the Catholic supporters in the audience (all five of them) by starting off demanding that Hitchens give an apology for the caricature he had presented of the Church’s history, saying that members of the Waffen SS had to renounce their Christianity before entering the organisation, and Ratzinger made Bishop Richard Williamson renounce his views on the Holocaust before once again granting him the sacraments. She also tried to deflect his remarks saying that he had to delve into history and go back to the Crusades and the Inquisition for the core of his arguments.
I was in dire need of a sick bucket at one point when Widdecombe indulged in the worst kind of relativism in defending the Church’s stance on slavery since it was simply in line with the opinions of the rest of the world! Hitchens later pointed out that if slavery had to be considered in context, what could be more relative than that? What happened; did God change his mind?
As if slavery wasn’t bad enough, Widdecombe went on to say that it has only been in recent years that the courts and the Samaritans have tackled the problem of child sex abuse and there has been a Sex Offenders Register.
Special pleading and calls for clemency do not convincing arguments make, Miss Widdecombe.
The worst offence Widdecombe committed was recommending the work of historian Michael Burleigh who, along with Martin Gilbert, has praised the efforts of the wartime pope, Pius XII, in rescuing many thousands of Jews from the Holocaust by giving them refuge in Castel Gandolfo. I wonder how many people realised that in fact Burleigh re-prints a bogus statement purporting to be from Albert Einstein praising the Church’s response to Hitler in his 2006 book Sacred Causes, the questionable authenticity of which Hitchens debunks in God Is Not Great.
While Hitch didn’t nail her for that point in his closing remarks, he did stand by his views on the Church preaching the doctrine of deicide against the Jewish people as likely to have provided a well of anti-Semitism throughout Europe which facilitated the rise of fascism in the 1930s.
It wasn’t all bad, however. Widdecombe at least pointed out that the Church does much in the way of charitable giving and as a politician, she relied on them as much local government.
The address finished off with a call for the Church’s offer of hope and salvation, which the two nasty heretics at the other side of the table simply could not offer. Hitch’s retort in the closing section was to agree whole heartedly that absolution was not forthcoming from him and Fry, but Catholics still had to live with their conscience and good luck to them.
Fry
As good as Hitchens was, the revelation of the evening was Stephen Fry. Here was a man who I previously did not think capable of saying boo to a goose coming out (if you’ll excuse the pun) in full force against the forces of theocratic sexual repression.
Fry started off quoting Gwendolyn in The Importance of Being Earnest, saying that speaking one’s mind was quite often not just a moral duty, but a pleasure! This was a subject he felt strongly about, not because he objected to people being religious, but because he felt passionately about the Enlightenment, which the Church has never tired of attacking. Straightaway, Fry sarcastically rubbished Widdecombe’s dismissal of history, saying that history “quivers down all of us”.
Fry then went on to attack the appalling doctrine of purgatory and the hideous idea that a soul needs to be prayed for by us mortals here on earth in order to “take the first left when getting on the plane and getting a first class seat to heaven.” He lambasted the tradition of people giving money to ensure the safe delivery of the soul and questioned why it should be a privilege that only men could enjoy.
The next target was the Church’s exploitation of poor people, citing Thomas More who burned people at the stake for reading English translations of the Bible during the Reformation yet was made the patron saint of politicians by Pope John Paul II! Then there was the disgraceful joint statement on contraception with Saudi Arabia (!) in 2003 that began, “On behalf of the revealed religions of the world…”
However, the real meat came with Fry’s attacks on the Church’s stance on homosexuality. As a gay man, Fry could not possibly be a member of an institution that thought him evil. On the contrary, Fry announced that he was a man who was full of love and certainly had no need of the pope’s permission to tell him to practise it. Fry compared sex to food. It’s jolly and it’s fun. But frankly, the Catholic Church is anorexic.
Fry has made a series of TV documentaries about HIV in Africa, HIV and Me, and attacked the Church’s stance on preaching misinformation about contraception. “Yes, abstinence and being faithful help prevent the spread of AIDS, BUT SO DO CONDOMS!!!” It was not the last time the mild-mannered British comic would raise his voice.
This wonderful opening speech was topped off by speculation as to what Jesus would think. Fry is clearly one of those atheists who at least think that Christ was a great moral teacher (unlike Hitchens who questions both the man’s existence as well as his morality), and asked what the Nazarene would think of the opulence of St Peters and the male-dominated hierarchy. Of course he would be horrified and would be the last person to become a member of his own church!
In his closing statement, Fry answered Widdecombe’s protests that he just had to bring up condoms and sexuality was rather like a criminal in the dock saying to the judge, “Do you have to bring up that burglary?”! The second time he raised his voice was in reply again to Widdecombe’s relativist defence of the Church not condemning slavery because it was a socially acceptable normal with, “WELL, WHAT ARE YOU FOR?!” Magic.
Democracy in action
After the main speeches, the debate moved to comments and questions from the house. The atheists were in full force in both numbers and words. The moderator eventually had to ask for Catholic supporters to ask questions to balance things out!
Several gay men and women took the mikes and made their feelings known on the Church’s interference with what they do behind their bedroom doors. One man asked the Archbishop what current policy of the Church he was most ashamed of!
Hitchens answered supporters’ objections to the Church’s charitable work and fundraising with his stock reply that Hamas do much of the same in Gaza, but is anyone going to say a word in defence of them for that reason? He also showed his feminist colours by attacking the Ten Commandments as suppressing women and that the one proven way of bringing a society off its knees was to bring about the emancipation and the empowerment of women as opposed to having them as field hands, pack horses and baby producers.
Hitch also quite happily admitted to being sexually obsessed after Widdecombe accused Fry in her closing remarks of saying the evening’s only piece of “unpleasantness” by mocking the Archbishop’s vow of celibacy. Hitch’s retort to this piece of prudishness was that from the day he first discovered that his God-given male member would give him no peace, he decided to give it no rest in return. He also pronounced that homosexuality was not just a form of sex, it was a form of love. Stephen Fry was a good friend of his and he would allow him to baby-sit his children any day of the week. If, on the other hand, a clergyman showed up to look after his children, he would first call a taxi and then call the police!
The audience polls before and after the debate said it all:
Before the debate:
For the motion: 678
Against: 1102
Don’t know: 346
After the debate:
For: 268
Against: 1876
Don’t know: 34
Therefore, the number of people in the audience who opposed the motion increased by 774.
Ouch!
Andrew M Brown, on his Daily Telegraphblog, summed up the problem for the parties of God rather well:
The problem (from the Catholic point of view) was that the speakers arguing for the Church as a force for good were hopelessly outclassed by two hugely popular, professional performers. The archbishop had obviously decided that it would work best if he stuck to facts and figures and presented the Church as a sort of vast charitable or “social welfare” organisation. He emphasised how many Catholics there were in the world, and that even included “heads of state”, he said, as if that was a clincher. But he said virtually nothing of a religious or spiritual nature as far as I could tell, and non-Catholics would have been none the wiser about what you might call the transcendent aspects of the Church. Then later when challenged he became painfully hesitant. In the end he mumbled and spluttered and retreated into embarrassing excuses and evasions. He repeatedly got Ann Widdecombe’s name wrong. The hostility of both the audience and his opponents seemed to have discomfited him…
Even if you didn’t agree with him you’d have to concede Hitchens especially was spectacular and hyper-articulate… Hitchens drank bottled water mostly, and plenty of it, though from time to time when he was sitting down he raised a glass of amber fluid from out of sight, down on the floor somewhere, and took a slug from that. I don’t know why he kept a drink under the table like that, perhaps because the debate was filmed for broadcast. He sweated profusely and dabbed his shiny forehead, eyes and cheeks with a handkerchief. But his diction was clear and he was in control, like a revivalist tent preacher, building the volume to a crescendo at the end, to applause and roars from the audience.
Amen to that, brother.
In conclusion – more and more are wearing their scarlet letter with pride
Aside from the superb showing by Stephen Fry and the utter annihilation of the apologists at the hands of the heretics, the evening was notable for one other reason: the number of people willing to announce their atheist colours with pride and make their feelings known about what they really feel about the most oppressive, hypocritical institution that our mammalian primate species has ever concocted.
The books by the “New Atheists”: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and of course, Christopher Hitchens have instilled the non-believers around the world with the motivation and the confidence to speak out. This is no mere flash in the pan. As Winston Churchill had it, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Sorry to all the bishops, priests, nuns and mullahs, but we are not going away in a hurry. All we need now is the confidence not to pick on such a soft target next time and debate whether Islam is a force for good in the world…
For several years, since my last spate of blogging in 2009 – 2010, I have been preparing a collection of essays on Christianity’s role in the rise of Fascism and National Socialism in order to exonerate atheism and secularism, whose names are repeatedly sullied by the faithful in order to deflect attention away from their own gross failings of morality and resistance to radical evil.
manicstreetpreacher 