The Church of Scotland - A Presbyterian Protestant church often referred to as simply 'The Kirk' - is facing the same problem as the Church of England - what to do with all the redundant churches as congregations dwindle and buildings fall into disuse and dereliction.
Many of these old churches are also listed building of historical or architectural importance, so the church must maintain them.
An additional problem is that most of them are surrounded by grave which must also be conserved and may not be built on.
So, in an attempt to shore up its finances, the Church of Scotland has placed hundreds of its properties, including apartment blocks, manses and churches on the property market.
In an unguarded moment, for which he has had to apologize, Pope 'Mr. Nice Guy' Francis, revealed the hypocritical difference between his private and public declarations.
Trying to give the Catholic Church a more tolerant and understanding face, in place of the bigoted and judgmental church of his predecessors, that had been driving decent people away, and aware that many Catholic Priests are practicing homosexuals, Pope Francus has previously advocated tolerance and understanding, whilst falling short of allowing same-sex marriages in Catholic churches and ordaining openly gay priests.
But that mask of kindly affability and tolerance was revealed to be a lie intended to deceive when Francis let slip his true feelings when asked if he would allow gay men to enter seminary to be trained and eventually ordained as Catholic priests.
He replied (in Italian):
Seminaries are already too full of “frociaggine”.
This translates as 'faggotiness' and is an especially abusive term for gay people in Italy.
Attempts to give legal protection to religious people to practice their religion without fear of discrimination in Australia have run up against a predictable problem - Christians demanding the right to victimise, exclude and bully LGBTQ+ people and claiming it as their right under the anti-discrimination law.
We had a similar problem in UK some years ago when the ECHR was incorporated into UK law as the Human Rights Act, which, amongst other things, gave people the protection to practice their religion, free from discrimination as a basic human right. It also gave people freedom from discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexual orientation.
The two rights quickly came into conflict when Christians began demanding the right to carry on their tradition of bullying, victimizing and excluding gays, or denying them goods and services, on the grounds that denying them that right, deprived them of their privileged right to deprive other people of their human rights and decide to whom the law of the land applied.
This was clarified by the European Court which ruled that freedom from discrimination did not include the freedom to discriminate against others of your choosing on the grounds that your religion entitled you to do so. Human right applied to all and did not grant special privileges or exemptions to any group, no matter how entitled they felt to them.
Nevertheless, the argument rumbles on and Christian extremists are still lobbying for changes to the Human Rights Act or its abolition, to restore their right to bully and victimise minorities of their choice and decide who is entitled to what in society. The same bigots would react with outraged indignation if Muslims were demanding the right to impose Sharia on society or Jewish groups were lobbying for the right to impose Halakhah on the rest of us
In Australia, where this issue has recently emerged, it has done so against a growing distrust for organized religion, at least partly because of their record of bullying and discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community, and also because of the recent child sex-abuse scandals that have engulfed the Christian churches in Australia. It is these routine abuses of children and their subsequent cover ups by church authorities who often acted to facilitate them, that has probably cost the churches the trust of, especially, women in Australia.
A recent report found one in three Australian women had no trust at all in organised religion, a figure which rose to one in two for women between the ages of 18-29. Even one in ten religious women had no trust at all in organized religion and two in three LGBTQ+ women have no trust at all in organized religions.
The fact that so many Australian women are concerned about the treatment of LGBTQ+ by organized religion illustrates how far Australian cultural ethics have moved on, leaving Medieval Christian ethics struggling to keep up and faced with the familiar old dilemma of abandoning the old dogmas (and so in the eyes of purists, ceasing to be the religion they recognise) but retaining the support of the more enlightened elements in society or retaining their 'purity' and so keeping the die-hards but losing popular support in the process. Their problem is exacerbated by the fact that, as more and more moderate and progressive members leave in despair at the bigotry of the purists, so the purists become a larger proportion of the remaining members, and so the more powerful voices within the churches.
This quickly sets up the exponential declines we have seen in Europe, especially recently in Ireland and Spain where the decline in the power and influence of the Catholic Church has been in freefall since the child sexual abuse scandals broke and the Church tried to maintain its opposition to basic human rights such as same-sex marriages, family planning services and a woman's right to choose.
Incidentally, this illustrates how society doesn't get its morals from God and the church; they evolve as society evolves and the churches act as a break on progress trying to hold society back in order to retain control and its 'entitled' privileges. The Christian churches are anchored in the past and try to keep society there too. Eventually, religion is left so far behind that it becomes an irrelevance to the majority of the population. History shows this is the eventual fate of all religions and will be that of Christianity too.
This catastrophic decline in Australia, from the point of view of the churches, is illustrated in this chart which shows how net trust (i.e., the balance of those who trust the churches minus those who don't, fell from +3% in 1991 to -49% in 2018.
Gleeson, K. & Ashton, L. (2024). Trust in Religion among Women in Australia: A Quantitative Analysis. https://doi.org/10.60836/5jz3-t630
The authors of the report, Kate Gleeson, Associate Professor of Law, Macquarie University and Luke Ashton, Research Assistant, Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney have written about their findings in an open access article in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic purposes:
Crisis of faith: why Australian women have so little trust in religious institutions
The Albanese government is weighing up the costs of delivering an election promise to protect religious people from discrimination in Commonwealth law. Such protections were relatively uncontroversial when included in state anti-discrimination laws. However, the religious discrimination debate became toxic under former prime minister Scott Morrison when it became tied to
the rights of religious schools to discriminate against LGBTIQ+ staff and students.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said the government has draft legislation ready to go. However, it won’t introduce it without bipartisan support because, “now is not the time to have a divisive debate, especially with the rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia”.
Religious discrimination might not be addressed by the Australian parliament any time soon. Albanese must first persuade Opposition Leader Peter Dutton to support legislation to protect both religious people and LGBTIQ+ staff and students at religious schools.
Our new research report, Trust in Religion among Women in Australia, highlights some electoral realities relevant to legislating to protect religion in Australia today. The report analyses data from the nationally representative Australian Cooperative Election Survey, taken from May 2–18 2022. We surveyed 1,044 voters, of whom 531 were women. While we analysed the data for both men and women, we found that women are significantly more likely than men to express distrust in religion, and so our report focussed on them.
Our findings present a bleak picture for religious organisations hoping to gain political traction based on trust in their ability to act ethically and responsibly.
Child abuse scandals have played a big part in eroding the trust of women in particular.
When compared internationally, Australians – particularly women – have very low trust in organised religion. This gendered outcome makes Australia an outlier in the Western world and is likely related to women’s concerns for children in the care of religious organisations. Key findings include:
about one-third of Australian women have no trust in organised religion and religious leaders
distrust is highest among younger women: almost half of all women aged 18-29 have no trust in religious leaders
among religious women, around 10% have no trust in organised religion and religious leaders, while around half have “not very much trust” in either
LGBTIQ+ women have some of the lowest levels of trust in Australia. Almost two-thirds have no trust in religious leaders
Women living in outer regional and remote Australia are significantly more likely to distrust religion than women living in cities and inner regional areas.
Child abuse scandals have eroded trust
Consistent with international studies, our research indicates religious child abuse scandals have greatly affected trust. Australian women are highly sceptical about the capacity of religious leaders to protect the children in their care. In fact, almost half report low, or no, trust.
They also doubt the ability of religious leaders to respond to the findings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Over half report low, or no, trust in this. Concern for children is highest among LGBTIQ+ women, likely reflecting concerns about discrimination against LGBTIQ+ school children, as well as child abuse.
Trust affects how women view the role of religion in the public sphere. We found that about four in five women who have no trust in religion believe religious organisations should no longer be granted tax-exempt status by the government. Around two-thirds of this group also believe the government should stop funding religious schools.
Similarly, two-thirds of women with no trust in religion think religious organisations should play a smaller role, or no role at all, in counselling in schools. Around 60% of this group also think religious organisations should play a smaller role, or no role at all, in primary and high school education.
Can trust be regained?
The report concludes that organised religion is facing a profound crisis of trust, particularly among women. Concerns for children are paramount in shaping women’s opinions about religious organisations and the services they offer. The high level of distrust among younger women suggests the crisis is generational and cannot be corrected without dedicated interventions on the part of religious organisations and governments.
If left unchecked, this crisis has the potential to undermine the social and economic fabric of Australia, given the prominence of religious organisations in the provision of education, healthcare, and social services.
Religious organisations must work to establish or regain the trust of the electorate, especially among regional and remote communities. The current national emergency of violence against women perhaps provides one opportunity for religious organisations to build this trust. This is especially so given the pivotal role they now play in the outsourced domestic violence services sector, which was once community-run.
Politically, this crisis of trust does not bode well for governments seeking support for any legislation that might appear to offer greater protections to organised religion.
In particular, any protections that are perceived to encroach on children’s rights will almost certainly be rejected by those large sections of the Australian electorate reporting low or no trust in religion. Albanese will need to get the balance right.
Kate Gleeson, Associate Professor of Law, Macquarie University and Luke Ashton, Research Assistant, Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
Although this article is about Australia and deals with the Australian legislature's difficulty in reconciling the opposing forces of social progress and Christian reactionary bigotry, it reflects the situation throughout much of the Christian world, and which will eventually be faced in the Islamic world too.
As religious superstition loses its grip on society, society will either drags it kicking and screaming into the future, or consign it to the dustbin of history along with all the other irrelevant and unwanted religions that failed to keep up, also held back, no doubt by their increasingly internally powerful but externally despised, die-hard fundamentalists and dogmatic purists.
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In a stunning, if incidental and unintentional, rebuttal of creationist mythology, a team of palaeontologists led by scientists from Grifith University' Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), have uncovered evidence of human occupation of caves in Saudia Arabia about 10,000 - 3,500 years ago.
This, of course, as any creationist will pretend isn’t significant, means that humans were living in these caves from before 'Creation Week' right through the mythical global genocidal flood, and beyond, and were completely undisturbed by any of it.
It's axiomatic that people who can believe absurdities can be persuaded to commit atrocities.
One only need look at the history of just about every world religion to know that is especially true of people who hold to religious beliefs, yet most religious people will look at other religions and wonder how on Earth they can believe that nonsense, while having no understanding why others who look at their beliefs have the same thoughts.
How many devout Christians, for example, would find nothing strange in the belief that the sun was swallowed each evening by the goddess Isis, who then gave birth to it every morning or that ancient Celtic chiefs physically mated with the Earth goddess at Tara to unite the Irish people with the land they lived on?
Yet those same Christians have no difficulty believing that the blood sacrifice of an innocent person can atone for collective 'sins' inherited from ancient ancestors or that the dismembered bodies of ancient holy men can somehow persuade a god to change his perfect plans for their better one, or an omniscient, omnibenevolent god needs to be told about a wrong and why if should be righted, or a mind-reading god needs to be told their thoughts.
And a Moslem who believes the founder of their religion split the moon in half and flew to Heaven on a magic flying creature finds it incomprehensible that saying prayers to a painting of an ancient holy man or priest can change the direction of the universe, or that the prohibition on 'graven images' doesn't apply to gold-covered icons or depictions of a god nailed to a stick, worn by people who believe tiny images of a blood sacrifice or miniature instrument of torture worn around their neck protects them from evil spirits?
There are even people who believe the sun can be made to perform strange maneuvers in the sky while no-one else on Earth noticed it and without Earth itself needing to suddenly change its speed and direction of rotation or orbital path round the sun. Even the leaders of a major branch of Christianity, with a whole panel of expert scientific advisors, believe that really happened and continue to send people to Fatima where it is alleged to have happened - just one of the many equally implausible and evidence-free beliefs orthodox Catholics needs to hold.
Even coeliac suffering Catholics can believe a piece of wafer, when the right spells are cast over it, miraculously becomes the body of a dead god to be consumed in a cannibalistic ritual, while knowing they need to avoid eating it to avoid the consequences of gluten intolerance! That's a condition of belonging to a cultural group called 'Catholics'.
Last year, MPs in the House of Commons voted overwhelmingly to back an amendment to the Public Order Act which would have established 'safe zones' around clinics offering pregnancy termination services to women who need them.
This would have made it unlawful for anyone to harass or approach women entering the clinics in an attempt to prevent their access or to influence their choice by publicly shaming them.
Those routinely harassing women in this way are invariably Christians using various underhand tactics and disinformation and even threatening to photograph the women and post their picture on the social media. Women are routinely subjected to abuse and shouts of 'murderer' by sanctimonious bigots exercising what they claim is a God-given right to impose their views on others and deny others basic human rights.
The traditional passive-aggressive threat of 'praying' for the women and the foetus was used routinely with ostentations 'silent' prayer, clearly intended to shame and embarrass women. Only a Christian could weaponise 'prayer' while ignoring what Jesus allegedly told them about casting the first stone and not judging others.
The routine sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests is back in the news after an independent commission, led by Spain's national Ombudsman, former education minister, Ángel Gabilondo, has discovered that more than 200,000 minors have been sexually abused by Catholic priests since 1940.
This figure is an estimate based on extrapolating the figure of 0.8% of 8,000 Spanish adults in a survey who reported being sexually abused by Catholic priests before the age of 18 - a figure which rose to 1.13% (360,000 of Spain's 32 million adult population) if lay members of the church were included. Lay members of the church perform some of the duties of priests but are not ordained or under holy orders. As such, they come under the authority and control of senior church figured, usually the bishops, archbishops and cardinals in charge of diocese.
For most of the period, the Spanish Catholic Church was a privileged and protected institution that considered itself largely above the law - a position that derived from its active support and cooperation with General Frano's Fascist regime. During this period, the Catholic Church was given control of most of the influential and welfare aspects of Spanish life, including education, health and institutions such as orphanages, mother and baby homes and homes for single mothers, many of whom were themselves victims of sexual abuse.
UD anthropology professor Sarah Lacy has proposed a new theory that challenges the familiar story that labor roles during ancient times were divided by sex and that men evolved to be hunters and women to be gatherers.
Sarah Lacey, an anthropologist with Delaware University, USA, believes she has found evidence that, in hunter-gatherer societies, in contradiction to the traditional view which has men as the hunters and women as the gatherers, in fact, women played their part as hunters too.
This was before their assumed gender roles became formalised by religions which provided men with the excuses they needed to control women by declaring that 'God' had assigned them roles as man's 'help meet' and so subservient to men. Women were instructed that they should be obedient to a man's demands and fill the role of sex-slave, housekeeper and cook, because God said so:
And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
Genesis 2: 21-24
GENE 3.15. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. GENE 3.16. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
Genesis 3: 15-16
As I related in my book, A History of Ireland: How Religion Poisoned Everything, in pre-Christian Gaelic society, under the 'Brehon Law' women had equal rights to men and could adopt leadership roles, own property and divorce abusive or unfaithful husbands - rights that were systematically stripped from them under the influence of Patricus (St Patrick, first bishop of Armagh), when he called an all-male meeting of Gaelic tribal petty kings and declared those rights to be contrary to God's Law in the Bible, and women should henceforth be subservient and obedient to men and never be in a position of leadership over them.
St. Patrick is reputedly responsible for abolishing the Brehon law or rather with integrating it with Christian Law by going through it line by line with a convention of tribal chiefs called for the purpose and striking out anything which did not accord with the Bible. Brehon law, from the Irish ‘breithim’ meaning ‘a judge’ was the system of law in use in Gaelic Ireland since ancient times – a Celtic Common Law, necessary to settle disputes between residents of different petty kingdoms or different tribal traditions. One effect of this was to reduce the status of women; depriving them of many of the rights they held under Brehon law, such as the right to divorce their husband, to own property and to occupy positions of leadership. St. Patrick’s brand of Christianity was to be strictly hierarchical, patriarchal and misogynistic, in line with the Bible and the teachings of St. Paul, although there were deviations from strict cannon law. Divorce, for example, though no longer available on demand, could still be granted for a wide variety of reasons (4).
Sarah Lacy, with her colleague, anthropologist Cara Ocobock, from the University of Notre Dame, have published their research in two papers in the journal American Anthropologist and an article in Scientific American. A news release from Delaware University explains their work:
Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His!
Abbot Arnaud Amalric of Citeaux
Papal legate in charge of the Cathar genocide.
Citing 2 Timothy 2:19
Burning the Cathars at Béziers
Another reminder of the brutal, blood-soaked history of Christianity is to be found in the history of the French town of Béziers on the banks of the River Orb, in the Languedoc region, southeast of Montpellier, on the edge of the Camargue.
It has been, in turn, along with much of the area south of Toulouse, under the control of Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Moorish Moslems from Andalucia, Catholic Spain and latterly, Catholic France. Until recent times, the local language was a dialect of French, Occitan, which has close links with Catalan. This gave it a sense of a separate identity from that of France - something that concerned King Philip II, keen to exert the same control over the southern provinces as he had over the North.
Béziers is now a peaceful, quite little market town and cultural centre but it was not always so. It was, until 1209, a stronghold of the Cathars, a religious sect which rejected Roman Catholicism and the authority of the Pope, which was brutally suppressed in the 'Albigensian Crusade' on the orders of Pope Innocent III in alliance with King Philip II of France.
For more information on the Albigensian Crusade and Pope Innocent III's and King Philip II of France's reasons for launching it, see:
Fresh from their success in laying siege to and then massacring the inhabitants of the Carcassonne, the crusaders moved on to other towns in the area, including Béziers.
Street below the Cité De Carcassonne with the Citadel on the Hill
We've just spent a day in Carcassonne, in southern France, just north of the Spanish border. It's a place every Christian should visit as a reminder of the blood-soaked history of their religion because Carcassonne was the site of one of the most brutal periods of Catholic history until the conquest of the Americas, the Albigensian Crusade.
The Albigensian crusade was conducted on the orders of Pope Innocent III, surely one of the most misnamed Popes in history; a crusade with the objective of nothing less than a total genocide of the Cathars and their religion.
The technique put into practice many of the methods used to terrorize populations and force them into submission that had been developed in the Crusades against the Moslems of the Eastern Mediterranean, where the method was to promise land to the barons and noblemen who led the armies, and the spoils of looting and pillage to the mobs of mercenaries that comprised to soldiery. There were no provisions for feeding and supplying the rag-taggle mobs as they raged through the countryside, so they had to take wheat they needed from the local populations. Towns and villages were ransacked, and the inhabitants slaughtered as a matter of routine.
And bloodletting was encouraged and glorified, to the extent that one observer recorded enthusiastically how the streets of Jerusalem were ankle-deep in blood when the Christian mob over-ran it.
The origins of Catharism are somewhat obscure, as it contained several different ideas fused into a loose system of beliefs with no central authority, so it tended to vary in different communities. A central idea was the essentially Gnostic belief in two gods - a good god of the spiritual domain and an evil god (Satan) who created the physical world and trapped angels inside human bodies. The creator (evil) god was the god of the Old Testament and the good god was the god of the New Testament, who Jesus was sent to tell us about. Escape from the physical world was through death and a special form of baptism to enable reunion with the god of the spiritual realm.
Like Catholicism does today, Catharism was obsessed with sex and saw sexual intercourse as sinful unless performed in the prescribed manner and pre-blessed by a priest in a special ceremony.
A consequence of their belief that the physical world was the domain of Satan and created by him to keep people away from God, was that everything to do with sexual intercourse was to be avoided because it produces more physical reality and more angels trapped in human bodies, so they were Pescatarians, believing that meat, cheese, milk and eggs were the result of sexual intercourse, but fish spontaneously generated and thus were safe to eat. The general disapproval of sexual intercourse caused some obvious problems for some Cathar communities, but others had found a way round it in a legend that the origins of the battle between good and evil in Heaven was because Satan had seduced one of God's wives (he has two, apparently), or maybe it was God who seduced one of Satan's two wives. This was sufficient evidence that God has sexual intercourse, so doesn't prohibit it.
Burning witches alive was common in Germany and other parts of Europe, but in Scotland the convicted were usually strangled before their bodies were burned.
News that there is now a museum to the Scottish witch hysteria, prompted me to do a little bit of research into witchcraft and societies changed attitude toward the idea of witches casting evil spells and suspending the laws of nature with their thoughts.
Our modern-day attitude toward the whole idea of witches and witchcraft, compared to what it was when the atrocities of witch-finding and witch burning were being committed, mostly but not exclusively, by the Catholic Church at the behest of the Pope, shows how our morals are evolving and consigning religious 'morals' to the dustbin of history where they belong.
On of the main driving forces behind witch hysteria in Europe was a book, "Malleus Maleficarum" (Hammer of Witches) written by a sex-obsessed and misogynistic German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer (under his Latinized name Henricus Institor). This classified witchcraft as heresy and thus punishable by burning alive, and recommended torture as the best way to discover the truth. Kramer's hatred for women whom he blamed for tempting him to 'sin', could scarcely be disguised, and on that faith-based misogyny, the witch burnings were based.
Although it was rejected by the Catholic Church at the time, "Malleus Maleficarum" was later revived by insecure royal courts during the renaissance for the same reason witch hysteria has been promoted since - to unite a frightened population behind a 'war' against an internal threat. The same way America's Republicans are waging a 'culture war' against the 'evil of liberalism' today.
Protestant Christianity also did its share of the persecution and murder of (mostly) unmarried or widowed women, of course, as the Pendle witch trials in England, the Salam witch trial in the Puritanical Massachusetts Bay Colony in Colonial America and the witch trials in Presbyterian Scotland attest.
The change in attitude towards the idea of witchcraft between then and now illustrates how societies do not get their morals from religion but religions get their morals, such as they are, from society. No organized church ever spoke out against the witch trials and demanded they cease or preached that they were immoral. But the churches, inspired by the Bible (Exodus 22:18) were very much the instigators of the atrocities, as they still are in some parts of Africa, where children are regularly targeted by preachers and accused of witchcraft in order to spread fear and distrust amongst their followers to keep them dependent on the church for 'protection against evil'.
What brought about the changes was an injection of a large dose of enlightened Humanism into western culture, with its sense of fairness, justice and evidence-based decision-making in place of faith-based superstition and reactionary dogma.
If anyone should be looking forward to the next life where he will spend eternity with God, according to the teachings of the church he heads, it's Pope Francis.
And yet we see him tonight in Hospital desperately trying to put off that day as long as possible. Like so many evangelicals preachers who told us we could look forward to a blissful after-life if only we obeyed all the rules, paid the tythes and did what they told us, Pope Francis is in hospital in Rome where medical science will be used to delay his meeting with God as long as possible.
Prayer having failed to cure his chest infection, or at least been recognised as ineffective, the pontiff has turned to science for help.
Having supposedly been chosen personally by God, who inspired the cardinals in conclave to vote for him, to be his personal representative and mouthpiece on Earth, like all his predecessors, Pope Francis should be confident of his place in Heaven.
Unless he knows something we don't know, of course.
Reading this account of the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the first 'radical' feminists, by Bridget Cotter, Lecturer in Social Sciences, University of Westminster, UK, one of the things that stands out most vividly is the religious inspiration for the repression and subjugation of women in Victorian England, and how much of that religion is now seen as wrong and antisocial by the vast majority of decent people.
Far from providing society with a fixed moral framework, religion has served to hold back moral development as society evolves, only to have to reluctantly acceded to the new standards when the tension becomes irresistible.
One of the great crimes of religion, or rather the clerics who control it, is the theft of control of social ethics by a clique who knew they would lose control if they allowed the people too much freedom to think for themselves.
If we give all men the vote, where will it all end? Women demanding the same?!"
"If we give way on feminism, where will it all end? Women priests?!"
"If we give way on contraception, where will it all end? Sexually liberated women?!"
“If we give way on same-sex marriage, or allow gays to become priests, Where will it all end?
… Etc, etc, etc.
Because she challenged these imposed social norms and questioned the authority of those who sought to impose them on us, Mary Wollstonecraft was considered a dangerous revolutionary. Ironically she was opposed most vigorously by the same church that proudly, but wrongly, proclaims its founder as a dangerous revolutionary who challenged authority and the prevailing social norms and cultural ethics.
And today, much of what Mary Wollstonecraft campaigned for is taken for granted as right and proper in most civilised countries.
Bridget Cotter's article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license. The original can be read here.
The more we look at the Universe and the more detail we see, the more majestic it becomes. In the words of the late, great carl Sagan:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
And another quote from Carl Sagan, referring to the famous photo of Earth seen as a tiny pale blue dot from beyond Pluto, because one is never enough:
Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.
What would Carl Sagan have made of the images now coming from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)? The final one in the following article is of a segment of sky a fraction the size of a full moon. Tens of thousands of points of light in it each represent a single galaxy. Each of those will contain upwards of half a trillion stars, around each of which there is a good chance of a planetary system and possibly an Earth-like planet orbiting.
Are we so arrogant as to assume this was all made just for us and that a mind-reading creator god scrutinises this one small pixel, watching to see if anyone touches their genitalia, loves the wrong person, works on a Sunday, gets pleasure from sex or has the temerity to question what the priests tell us and to think for ourselves?
The article is by Colin Jacobs, Postdoctoral Researcher in Astrophysics, and Karl Glazebrook, ARC Laureate Fellow & Distinguished Professor, Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing, both of Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, lookt at how the JWST images have blown us away over the past year, revealing a Universe never before seen in this stunning detail. It is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be seen here.
Bishop of Oxford, Stephen Croft (left) and Andrea Williams, CEO of Christian Concern (right)
Like the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, or Church of England (CofE) in Britain is struggling to come to terms with the fact that society has moved on and no longer accepts the primitive Bronze Age moral code in the Bible. In order to stem the haemorrhage of members which has now left Anglicanism a minority cult in the UK with empty pews and derelict churches and not enough vicars to fill all the vacancies, reformers such as the Bishop of Oxford, Stephen Crofts, are trying to distance the church from that primitive barbarism, division, exclusion and hate that the Bible encourages. They are trying to make the CofE become more inclusive, embracing the humanist ethics that now form the basis of UK society, with same-sex marriages, sexual freedom, contraception and a woman's right to chose.
The problem for the CofE, like the Catholic church ,is that to catch up with modern society it has to abandon the fundamentals of the Early Medieval religion, yet, as its membership dwindles, the fanatical fundamentalists become proportionately more powerful within it. To those fundamentalists who are used to using the Bible to justify their smug bigotry and persecution of those who don't agree with them, to abandon the fundamentals is to abandon the faith altogether.
To these bigots the 'faith' is how they define it and they are not easily going to give up the basis for their entitled demand for the right to dictate to the rest of us.
This can be seen in a response by arch bigot, Andrea Williams, of Christian Concern, which represents the fundamentalist wing of Anglicanism, to proposed reforms in the CofE's attitude to same-sex marriage, with is dripping with condescension and the dogmatic assumption that their interpretation of their Bible is the definitive word of a god who empowered them to dictate to the rest of us.
Figures released today show that, like elsewhere in the civilised, advanced world, Australians are abandoning religion in droves. The percentage of Australians who described themselves as 'Christian' in the 2021 census fell below 50% to 44% for the first time in Australia's history.
This figure has fallen from 52% in just 5 years. In 2011 it stood at 61%. When a census was first conducted in Australia in 1911, 96% of Australians identified themselves as Christian.
These figures are revealed in the first tranche of data to be released from last years census. The percentage who ticked the 'no religion' box stood at 39%, up from 30% just 5 years ago, and almost double what it was in 2011. Those who identified as Catholic fell 3 percentage points to 20% and Anglican fell 3 percentage points to 10%. Falls in other minor Christian denominations brought the total figure for Christians as a whole down to 44% from the 52% recorded just 5 years ago.
The percentage of Australians self-identifying as 'non-religious' is highly significant because it shows the extent to which 'non-religious' has become acceptable in Australia. In the mid-1960s only 1% of Australians so self-identified. What we are seeing in Australia is what we saw in the UK, where the social stigma of having no religion, so being perceived wrongly as immoral and untrustworthy, has gone, to be replaced by a more realistic perception of intelligence, compassion and integrity, so more and more people are coming out of the closet.
To the great discomfort of Creationists and religious apologists, who claim human morality is God-given, researchers at Osaka University, Japan, in collaboration with Otsuma Women’s University, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, and the University of Tokyo, have shown that human morality is almost certainly an evolved trait because preverbal infants can make moral judgements on behalf of others.
Christian fundamentalists often tie themselves in knots trying to prove that they are the moral superior of others by claiming their faith gives them objective morals, without seeming to realise that trying to put yourself above others and exercise judgement over them without knowing them, is itself a deeply immoral act.
Paradoxically though, Christians (and Moslems) also claim the 'Ten Commandments' are the basis of their morality, yet the 'Ten Commandments' contains the invocation to do unto others that which you would they do unto you - the 'Golden Rule' common to just about all human groups. And Jesus reputedly told his followers to 'Love one another' (John 13: 34) (although it's not at all clear that this applies to all his followers or just to the small group he was addressing).
Whatever, these invocations presuppose that we have the necessary instinctive empathy to understand the needs of another person - which we do, of course, hence it is also central to Humanist thinking. And this view seems to have been well founded judging by what the research team found.
A sure sign that a religion is losing its grip on the people is when public opinion differs markedly from its teachings. This is a manifestation of an increasing tension as social ethics progresses and leaves behind the fossilised ethics of religion from an earlier age. The local religions then have to change to keep up but in doing so, they alienate the traditionalists who tend to become an ever-diminishing minority, pushing it further out to the fringes, or leave the church in protest at its increasing abandonment of sacred principles.
The problem is a direct consequence of the control of public morals religions presume they have entitlement to and their claim of the divine authority of an omniscient god for so doing. This means they can adopt change only by abandoning their justification for their control and in effect, giving up the pretence that morals come from an omniscient deity who, by definition, is never wrong. The reality, of course, is that morals are a social construct that change and develop according to the developmental needs of society, and have no divine, objective basis save what goes to create a cooperative society that is pleasant to live in.
So the progressive forces in society produces a tension between them and the regressive, traditionalist forces of religion and the needs of religions to keep control of their people and so the livelihoods and power of the priesthood. A useful analogy is that of a rope by which religions try to hold back social progress until either the rope snaps and the people give up on that religion, or the religion is dragged, kicking and screaming into the modern age.
According to a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology recently, people who reject the idea of human evolution are significantly more likely to be racist, homophobic, intolerant of other political opinions and supportive of political violence. This was true, not only of the USA, where the tendencies were especially marked, but also in Eastern Europe, Israel and Islamic countries.
Fulfilling the Christian Churchs' historic roll of supporting right-wing
totalitarian nationalism, the Russian Orthodox Christian Church is backing
Putin's murderous and unprovoked attack on Ukraine and the territorial ambitions
of Vladimir Putin.
For Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church, the war against Ukrainian democracy
is wrapped in the Russian flag and shrouded in religious zeal, since Kiev is the
home of Prince Vladimir the Great of Kiev, the legendary founder of the Russian
Church who , in about 978 AD, was responsible for making Byzantine Christian
Orthodoxy the official religion of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
The Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
Legend has it that Prince Vladimir the Great of Kiev was so impressed he
adopted the Orthodox Christianity of Byzantium as the state religion for
Russia, Ukraine and Belorus.
The legend is that he invited missionaries from Eastern (now Orthodox)
Christianity, Western (now Catholic) Christianity, Judaism and Islam to persuade
him to adopt their religion. He rejected Islam because of the prohibition on
alcohol and pork, saying that the Rus couldn't do without alcohol and Judaism
because 'God had allowed the Jews to lose Jerusalem'. He eventually settled on
Eastern Christianity when his emissaries reported the magnificence of the Hagia
Sophia Church in Constantinople (now Istanbul).
On Russian National Unity Day, 4th November 2016, with Patriarch Kirill, the
oleaginous head of the Russian Orthodox Church, at his side, smiling and
applauding enthusiastically, Putin unveiled a huge statue of Vladimir the Great
outside the Kremlin. On the day that Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine,
Patriarch Kirill
published a grovelling and nauseatingly obsequious statement which read:
