Category Archives: Politics

Congratulations, USA, on healthcare reform

Posted on by
48

I would like to congratulate the people of the USA on the passing of the healthcare reform bill, as reported by the BBC. At last that great country is proving its greatness by ensuring that a small portion of its riches are spent on providing proper access to health services to even its poorest citizens. No longer will we see the scandal of the poor dying uncared for at the rich man’s gate, like Lazarus in Jesus’ parable (Luke 16:19-22).

I am glad also to see that President Obama will continue to ensure that federal money is not used to fund abortion, so removing a weakness in the bill which Michael Barber was right to object to.

But I was sad to see the following in the BBC report:

The Republicans say they will seek to repeal the measure, challenge its constitutionality and co-ordinate efforts in state legislatures to block its implementation.

Do they call this democracy? The elected legislature has made its decision, and do they want to block it? I trust no one who calls themselves Christian will have any part in these continuing efforts to deny to the poor and to sick children (who couldn’t get insurance because of pre-existing conditions) the very most basic of Christian compassion, proper health care.

What kind of political animal are you?

Posted on by
Reply

I thank the Church Times blog for a link to SUSA, which is a new initiative “led by Bible Society with support from 24-7 Prayer” with the vision

To encourage and equip Christians in the UK to become more extensively and effectively engaged in politics and government.

On the SUSA front page you can take a light-hearted quiz “What kind of political animal are you?”, with questions which allow readers to

create your virtual cabinet and find out how your faith and politics match up!

I took the test, with questions which really made me think, for example about how far it is the government’s job to uphold moral standards. I ended up with a personal “cabinet” consisting of Tony Blair, Che Guevara and Bono! Presumably my views are supposed to line up with theirs. I also received a report complete with cute cartoons of my cabinet members, as well as with a personalised list of recommended resources – you may be able to see it here.

But, better than reading my report, take the test for yourself – and let me know in the comments who is in your cabinet.

Freedom of Religion and Its Limits

Posted on by
7

As I mentioned  in passing yesterday, there has been quite a row here in the UK about what the Pope said about British equal rights laws. Meanwhile from quite a different angle I was challenged about the limits of freedom of religion in a comment at Debunking Christianity, from Gandolf who is an atheist or at least an agnostic from New Zealand. He or she wrote (in part):

At which case Peter i ask you do you feel laws of religious “freedom of faith” is so fair? or (HONESTLY completely inline in keeping with the genral golden rule?)

Because right at this very moment somewhere in Africa today EVEN in the year 2010!,somebodys likely even being hunted down to be WRONGFULLY killed!! as a witch.

Simply because humans worldwide still support and even promote,the (willy nilly)! promotion of laws of “freedom of faith”.

So should something that CAN often effect all our lives so very serriously,be promoted to be allowed to be run so willy nilly Peter?.

In reply to this I wrote:

Gandolf, I certainly believe in freedom of religion, even for those whose “religion” is witchcraft. But there must be limits to that religion, e.g. that religion must not be used to harm others – so no Christians hunting down witches, and no witches making spells (regardless of their effectiveness) to harm others.

On that “regardless of their effectiveness” point, even from an atheistic world view (according to which spells are ineffective) African witchcraft cannot be considered harmless, because it often involves intimidating people with spells which they believe to work, and intimidating people is harming them.

Yes, there must be a limit to the freedom of religion when the freedom is claimed to harm others. But who is to define what might be called harm? The Pope is probably concerned about the proposed legislation here in Britain which would, among other things, force churches to offer equal employment rights to practising homosexuals – to extend to youth workers, if not to clergy. (This proposed clause has been rejected by the House of Lords, but may be reintroduced in the Commons.)

Now it is surely fundamental to freedom of religion that a church, or other religious organisation, can select those who uphold its own teaching to work with its own young people. But does this harm gay and lesbian youth workers by limiting their employment prospects? Maybe. I can hardly imagine them wanting to take a job in which they could be required, by the clergy or church board, to teach that homosexual practice is wrong.

But how small an inconvenience can be called “harm”? Some people in this country have tried to have churches closed down on the grounds that they can hear worship music in the street outside, or because of the traffic generated on an otherwise quiet Sunday morning. Clearly some perspective is needed here. If the great British tradition of tolerance and human rights is to be maintained, we must allow that some people will sometimes be inconvenienced by this. But we need to draw a line between inconvenience and harm. The problem is, where do we draw that line?

Haiti: damned whatever I write

Posted on by
Reply

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am happy that atheist propagandist (and #2 biblioblogger) John W. Loftus has linked to my post about Haiti, and has in fact quoted a large chunk of it. I am pleased that, in his own comment, he endorses the Avaaz.org appeal which I also endorsed, for the relief of Haiti’s debts.

But I get the impression from what John writes that I would be damned by him just because I am a Christian, whatever I might choose to say about Haiti. In my post I explicitly denied any intention of explaining why God allowed the earthquake to happen:

That is not an attempt to answer the question of why God allowed this natural disaster.

That is the only place in the post where I even mention God. John quoted these words, but then immediately wrote:

Yet, Christians still try to open any window to show their God is not to be blamed for anything.

Well, some Christians may do this, but I quite explicitly denied making any attempt in this post to show anything of the sort. I can’t help thinking that John would have taken anything I wrote about Haiti as an attempt “to show [my] God is not to be blamed for anything”?

But perhaps I should blame not John but Christian blogger (and #5 biblioblogger) Glenn Peoples for this misunderstanding. In a comment which John quotes Glenn describes my post as

a better representation of a Christian response to Pat Robertson’s unChristian comments.

Well, thanks, Glenn, but it was not really intended to be a Christian response. Apart from that one sentence mentioning God, I wrote nothing in the post which couldn’t have been written by an atheist. Indeed I challenged John to find anything in the post that he actually disagreed with.

In fact, here is my entire comment on John’s post, to which I have now been awaiting any reply for nine hours:

Thanks for the link to my post at Gentle Wisdom. But I can’t help thinking that I would be damned for anything I wrote about Haiti (and you happened to read), just because I am a Christian. After all, I didn’t mention God in this post except to say “That is not an attempt to answer the question of why God allowed this natural disaster.” Is there actually anything in this post that you disagree with?

But in answer to some of your questions, yes, God could have for example spoken to King Charles X (or for that matter to today’s bankers) and asked him to forgive Haiti’s debts. Very likely he did speak to him. But the king, as a selfish and sinful man (like all of us), didn’t do what God asked him, or would have asked him. God could have forced him to do it, but only by turning people into robots.

And he did show the Haitians that their country was an earthquake zone, through devastating earthquakes in the 18th century. But they went ahead and built unstable buildings there anyway.

How about this argument: Suppose you have a teenage child who goes out, with your permission, and commits some minor offence. Are you to blame? Well, you could have locked the young person up at home 24 hours a day, so yes, by the standards you apply to God, that anything you could have stopped is your fault, you are to blame. But is that responsible parenting? No, it is child abuse. Similarly God could lock us up 24 hours a day so we are unable to sin, but that would be to abuse us, not to be a responsible and loving Father.

If atheists like John Loftus and Richard Dawkins want their arguments to be taken seriously, they need to make an effort to understand and interact with what thoughtful Christians write, rather than offering only ad hominem responses to them and directing their only attempts at proper argumentation at extremists and straw men.

Haiti's debts and the USA's benefit

Posted on by
Reply

This morning I received an e-mail from Avaaz.org about a new campaign to drop Haiti’s debt, which has already attracted nearly 300,000 signatures, including mine. I was horrified to read (in the e-mail, the same text is in the “Tell Your Friends” box at the web page) that

even as aid flows in to Haiti’s desperate communities, money is flowing out to pay off the country’s crushing debt — over $1 billion in unfair debt racked up years ago by unscrupulous lenders and governments.

There  was also interesting background which I had not been aware of:

After Haitian slaves rose up and won their independence in 1804, France demanded billions in reparations — launching a spiral of poverty and unjust debt that has lasted two centuries.

I decided to look into this in more depth.

In 1791, following the French Revolution, the slaves of France’s Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue rebelled against their white masters and seized control of a large part of the territory. Partly in response, in 1794 the French National Convention abolished slavery in all French colonies (it was not abolished in the British Empire until 1833), and eventually an uneasy peace was restored to Saint-Domingue. In 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte, now ruler or France, reimposed slavery in some colonies, but not in Saint-Domingue. However, this move prompted a new rebellion there which the French government was unable to put down. So when in 1804 the colony gained its independence and took the name Haiti, despite what is often claimed this was not technically the result of a slave rebellion.

Saint-Domingue, with an area of 27,750 square kilometres, had been only a tiny part, much less than 1%, of the French possessions in the Americas. Within living memory France had claimed almost half of North America, known as New France. The southern half of this area was called Louisiana. But in 1763 the French were forced to cede all of New France. The northern part, Canada, became British. Louisiana east of the Mississippi also came under British control before passing to the United States in 1783. Spain took the part west of the Mississippi, as well as New Orleans.

Bonaparte (who crowned himself the Emperor Napoleon in 1804) dreamed of a new French empire in the Americas. So in 1800 he imposed a treaty on Spain by which the part of Louisiana which had been under Spanish control since 1763 was returned to France. However, Bonaparte never took effective control of this territory. And by 1803, facing the loss of Saint-Domingue and a renewed war with Great Britain, he gave up his plans for a French empire in the Americas.

So, when in that year the young United States sent negotiators to Paris seeking to buy the city of New Orleans, Napoleon offered to sell not just the city but the whole of his newly regained territory, Louisiana west of the Mississippi, which consisted of more than 2 million km² of mostly good agricultural land. The Americans quickly agreed to this purchase, for a price of 78 million francs or $15 million, that is, “less than three cents per acre ($7.40 per km²)”. According to Wikipedia,

The purchase, which doubled the size of the United States, comprises around 23% of current U.S. territory. …

Napoleon Bonaparte, upon completion of the agreement, stated, “This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States …”

Indeed it did, if not “forever” at least up to 2010. This area, sold to the USA at a bargain price for political reasons, has become the breadbasket of the world and a major driving force of US economic strength over the last 200 years.

(Of course all this land, Haiti as well, had earlier been seized with little or no compensation from its Native American inhabitants. But that’s another story.)

Contrast the French response to Haiti. This tiny former colony gained its independence in 1804, but France did not at first recognise this independence. Again according to Wikipedia,

In July 1825, King Charles X of France sent a fleet of fourteen vessels and thousands of troops to reconquer the island. Under pressure, President Boyer [of Haiti] agreed to a treaty by which France formally recognized the independence of the nation in exchange for a payment of 150 million francs (the sum was reduced in 1838 to 90 million francs) – an indemnity for profits lost from the slave trade.

In other words, the Haitians were asked to pay twice as much for the freedom of their tiny mountainous republic than the USA was asked to pay for the Louisiana Purchase, of an area 77 times larger than Haiti. The people of Haiti did manage to pay the 90 million francs, estimated to be worth billions of dollars at today’s prices. But, according to this 2009 article from the Sunday Times (linked to by Avaaz.org), it took them over a century to do so:

In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.

It is no wonder that in recent years, as I discovered in this article, at least some

Haitians Demand Reparations
for the Ransom Paid for its Independence.

I can’t bear to summarise the picture of Haiti last year given in the Sunday Times article, of extreme poverty exacerbated by overpopulation and a series of rulers who have enriched themselves at the expense of their country.

Then into this ongoing disaster zone came this month’s devastating earthquake. Was this a natural disaster? Well, yes and no. The magnitude 7.0 earthquake was of course a natural event. But that was not the main cause of the loss of life. I have lived through a magnitude 7.0 earthquake in a major city, in Baku in 2000. (Well, they said at the time it was magnitude 7.0, but the latest data gives a figure of 6.8.) In that earthquake “26 people died as a primary result, but only three people in collapsing buildings”. The latest (28th January) confirmed death toll in Haiti is 170,000.

Why the huge difference? Yes, there were probably geological factors which caused the ground acceleration in Haiti to be higher than in Baku. But surely there is far more here. It must be the poverty and overcrowding in Port-au-Prince, and the poor standard of building work in a known earthquake zone, which have greatly exacerbated the damage and casualty rate. In addition poverty and poor infrastructure have hampered relief efforts.

That is not an attempt to answer the question of why God allowed this natural disaster. But it is intended to put the disaster in perspective.

So we can contrast here the continuing poverty of Haiti with the wealth of France which enriched itself from reparations from Haiti, with the wealth of my own UK which continued to enrich itself from slavery in the Caribbean for decades after the French liberated their slaves, and with the wealth of the USA which benefited so much from France letting them buy Louisiana at such a bargain price. These are some of the roots of continuing injustice in the 21st century world.

So I urge all of you to support the Avaaz.org campaign:

Petition to Finance Ministers, IMF, World Bank, IADB, and bilateral creditors:

As Haiti rebuilds from this disaster, please work to secure the immediate cancellation of Haiti’s $1 billion debt and ensure that any emergency earthquake assistance is provided in the form of grants, not debt-incurring loans.

This should be done not just as an emotional response to the earthquake but as a way of putting right the injustices of the past. And it should be a step on the way to cancelling all the debts owed by poor countries to the rich ones who have exploited them in the past and continue to do so.

More people are hungry than ever before … what can we do?

Posted on by
Reply

I was shocked to read the following alert from the campaigning organisation Avaaz.org, which I received from them by e-mail (because I have signed previous petitions from them), and which is part of the text of a letter which I am encouraged to pass on to others, and which can be read in full here:

The world produces enough food to feed everyone. Yet the number of people suffering from chronic hunger across the planet has reached the record-high figure of 1 billion this year.

Hundreds of billions are spent by wealthy governments to bail out banks and financial institutions, but the G8 countries are trying to cut a promised $20 billion commitment to agricultural investment to only $3 billion in new money. With literally millions of lives on the line, this is a scandal.

Yes, more people are hungry than ever before, and their number has now reached one billion! Apparently earlier this year wealthy countries, including my own, promised to do something about this, but are now going back on their commitment. Yes, we have our own problems in the West, but nearly all of us have enough to eat. So we really should meet our commitments to help those who do not, and who have become poorer than ever largely because of side effects of an economic crisis largely caused by us in the West.

What can we do about it? Well, when we get the chance to vote we can tell our governments what we think about their policies. And we don’t have to wait to sign the petition which Avaaz.org is promoting, which I just signed. Here is more of their letter:

With the recent financial crisis, poverty is skyrocketing in poorer countries, with 1 in 6 people on the planet now facing life-threatening hunger.

Next week, leaders will meet at the World Food Summit in Rome to address this growing crisis. The best solution is funding to boost sustainable agriculture in poorer countries, but France, Germany, UK, Italy and Japan are backing out on a $20 billion promise made earlier this year.

Millions of lives are on the line. Sign the petition below for rich countries to keep their promises, and it will be delivered directly to world leaders through a spectacular stunt at the Roman Colosseum on the eve of the Summit:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/world_hunger_pledges/98.php?CLICK_TF_TRACK

The world produces enough food to feed everyone. Yet the number of people suffering from chronic hunger across the planet has reached the record-high figure of 1 billion this year.

By taking the kind of action which Avaaz.org is promoting, we can all, without spending even one penny, put effective pressure on our political leaders and actually do something practical about world hunger.

Archbishop preaches to Queen, Blair and Brown about "wickedness in high places"

Posted on by
Reply

It seems to have been the kind of sermon which an Archbishop would only dare to preach at a memorial service, and one which only at such an event he would have had the opportunity to preach to this kind of congregation. The Queen and much of the Royal Family, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his predecessor Tony Blair were among the congregation in St Paul’s Cathedral as, in Ruth Gledhill’s words in The Times (see also her blog post on the same subject, and the BBC report of the event) Archbishop Rowan Williams

condemned policymakers for failing to consider the cost of the Iraq war as he led a memorial service today for the 179 British personnel who died in the conflict.

It was in the second reading at the service, from Ephesians 6, that these sentiments were expressed:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

Ephesians 6:12 (KJV, as quoted by Ruth Gledhill)

Now I’m sure Her Majesty, Blair and Brown are all biblically literate enough to understand that these words “the rulers of the darkness of this world … spiritual wickedness in high places” refer not human leaders like themselves, but to the devil and his minions. Maybe not all of the congregation would have understood this so clearly. So it is good that, according to the words from this verse which Rowan Williams quoted, the reading actually seems to have come from NRSV, which makes the enemy unambiguously other-worldly:

For our* struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

Ephesians 6:12 (NRSV – thanks to Rachel for the link)

So Ruth Gledhill was being somewhat naughty to quote the potentially misleading KJV rendering of this verse, rather than the clearer version read out at the service. In NRSV the reading was clearly not referring to anyone in the congregation, and the archiepiscopal sermon was not directly so either. Instead, it contained something even more shocking to some.

We have come to expect bishops to abuse worship by condemning political leaders in their sermons. But we no longer expect them to preach about the devil or any other evil spiritual forces. Somehow it is not considered politically correct within the liberal establishment. Now even this morning the Archbishop was apparently politically correct enough not to use the words “evil” or “devil”. But he did speak of the “invisible enemy”, and in the context the meaning of that phrase was clear.

So what exactly did Archbishop Rowan attribute to this “invisible enemy”? Apparently it, or he,

may be hiding in the temptation to look for short cuts in the search for justice — letting ends justify means, letting others rather than oneself carry the cost, denying the difficulties or the failures so as to present a good public face.

The implication behind these words seems to be that during the Iraq conflict short cuts were taken, indeed perhaps that the whole western invasion of Iraq was a short cut and “letting ends justify means”. So the Archbishop was suggesting that Satan tempted our political leaders, in the UK context primarily Tony Blair but with Gordon Brown then his right hand man, into launching this invasion, and the leaders gave in to this temptation.

This is not so much Blair the Antichrist as Blair the devil’s dupe. Perhaps the Archbishop’s sermon was after all an indirect criticism of the leaders who sat in front of him. So no wonder that

Mr Blair looked solemn as he listened intently to the Archbishop’s address.

Archbishop Rowan: a prophet after the event

Posted on by
Reply

There is irony in the way that Ruth Gledhill praises Archbishop Rowan Williams:

Repent, or be doomed, is the Jeremiah-style message of the Archbishop of Canterbury over our financial excesses. … Our Archbishop is at last fulfilling his prophetic potential.

But is this truly prophetic? Rowan may look the part of the Old Testament prophet, but is he really speaking from God? Ruth also reports:

We were ‘intimidated by expertise’, Dr Rowan Williams said when asked by Jeremy Paxman [in a BBC interview] why the Church of England had not spoken out earlier on how finance appeared to be operating, and what it seemed to be generating in terms of wealth rather than community.

But the Old Testament prophets were never intimidated by anything. This is not a “Jeremiah-style message”, but only the pale echo of one. The Archbishop has at last found the courage to speak out a year after the events of last autumn. But, as I reported last October, the true prophets were fearlessly proclaiming what God had to say about those events before they even happened. Prediction is not the essence of true prophecy, but nor is comment after the event.

As Ruth writes in her Times Online article,

Dr Rowan Williams … has consistently taken a left-of-centre line on economic issues …

Indeed. His new criticisms of our financial excesses are not so much prophetic as another example of the Church of England timidly following trendy politicians. Now I agree that in this case those politicians and Rowan are right in most of their criticisms. But that is not because God has given me a prophetic message about it, but because my God-given sense of justice confirms it to me.

If the Archbishop cannot find any truly prophetic messages for the country about political and financial matters, he should stick to speaking about the Christian faith and the church.

Tony Blair does God

Posted on by
Reply

His press secretary Alastair Campbell said he didn’t do it. His successor Gordon Brown still won’t do it, at least allow people “to ask him about his own faith, … what he prays about or if he prays before making policy decisions”. But former Prime Minister Tony Blair has now at last broken his silence and “done God”. Recently, for the first time in the UK, he spoke out openly about his faith to a meeting at Holy Trinity, Brompton in London, as reported on a blog at The Guardian and linked to by the Church Times blog.

Indeed this is what I wrote over a year ago, quoting Ruth Gledhill:

he’s not afraid to ‘do God’ now.

But up to this point Blair seems to have “done God” in his works, through his Faith Foundation, but not in his words at least here in the UK.

In his talk at HTB Tony Blair defended his policy of not “doing God” while in office:

If people do not understand how your faith works in your life, they think you go off in a corner and pray and get a divine inspiration as to what the minimum wage should be. People start thinking ‘we have got someone crazy running the country’.

But he clearly doesn’t take the position that faith should in general be an unimportant private matter:

The oddest question I have ever got asked is ‘Is your faith important in your life?’ If you have religious faith, in the end, it is the most important thing in your life; it is not an adjunct, it is the core. …

If I was to say what my Christianity has meant to my life, it would be, that it has given my life more purpose. The saddest thing in any person’s life is to wake up without purpose, and the most joyful thing is to wake up with purpose.

Indeed. He also praised evangelical churches which are

energetic and charismatic, where people are going out and telling people what it is about, you can be better people, create a better world, and go out and do God’s work.

In the light of sentiments like these it is not surprising that the evangelical charismatic audience at HTB accepted him very warmly. Certainly they are not among those  religious nutcases who consider Blair the Antichrist or the false prophet of Revelation. And in view of the limited amount of real change in government policies since Gordon Brown took over I was perhaps too quick to blame Blair personally for his government’s failings. But I do find it hard to forgive him for leading us into the Iraq war. Nevertheless I too am beginning to warm to him.

Gordon Brown: Christians should not have to hide faith

Posted on by
Reply

I thank TC Robinson for a link to this article in the British website Christian Today (not the US magazine Christianity Today, TC): Gordon Brown: Christians should not have to hide faith – based on an interview (17 minutes) our Prime Minister gave to Premier Christian Media, a British Christian radio and TV company.

TC’s reaction to this is that Political Endorsement of the Christian Faith is not A Good Idea. I agree with TC’s sentiment when politicians promote Christianity, and all the more any one particular variety of it, above other religions. I accept his point about:

Emperor Constantine the Great and his embrace of Christianity—an embrace which hurt instead of helped Christianity.

But I don’t think that is at all what Gordon Brown is doing here, from listening to the interview. He was very careful to talk about “faith” in general terms. The words in parentheses in the longest quote in Christian Today, “(for Christians to be expected to detach themselves from their faith as they work)”, are taken from a question he was asked. So he is in no way favouring Christianity above other faiths, and would probably say much the same to interviewers from other religions.

The interview was deliberately different from many others, as seen in this article about it. The interviewer writes:

I was given 15 minutes to interview Mr Brown, and I was also told what questions he wouldn’t answer. I wasn’t allowed to ask him about his own faith, his family, what he prays about or if he prays before making policy decisions.

Scrap first set of questions then….

However, there are still many issues Christians in the UK are concerned about that I could ask him: the fact many feel anti-Christian sentiment is increasing in Parliament, why talking about God is seen as dodgy territory for a British politician, and why many feel the government has become unbalanced in its approach to faith groups.

I also added a few questions to the mix in an attempt to find out what Gordon Brown really cares about.

I was very pleased by this part of the interview, as summarised by Christian Today:

In the interview the Prime Minister also confirmed that the Government would still prioritise foreign aid for those in poverty despite the current worldwide recession. Mr Brown said, “We have responsibilities to those in need and in difficulty and we cannot walk by on the other side.”

He added, “Our responsibilities to the poor are even more acute and obvious at a time when people are facing difficulty.”

I also liked this quote, which can surely be applied to the church as it should be:

Community … is not the buildings but thousands of acts of friendship and generosity and support for people.

The important point here is that the Prime Minister is publicly taking a stand against the kind of position which seems all too common in more liberal circles here in Britain, and in some arms of his government: that religious belief must be kept a private matter and faith-based groups should not be involved in public life or receive public funds for their work. Mr Brown counters this by saying that people of faith cannot be expected to keep quiet

because when we talk about faith we are talking about what people believe in. We are talking about the values that underpin what they do. We are talking about the convictions that they have about how you can make for a better society.

It is when people put convictions like this into practice that a better society results. On that basis Gordon Brown offers his support for faith-based initiatives. As Christians, while being cautious about any restrictive conditions, we should accept public funding when it does actually help to promote our vision of a society built around God’s love.