Polly Toynbee's Christmas Message

[ciphergoth]

Too good to excerpt, please read the whole thing. Propogated from palmer1984. Now with fixed link :-)

Comments

[zotz]

It is very good (cheers), but you probably need to chop the final 2 off the link.

[robot-mel.livejournal.com]

That was really good. Thanks for the link. (Which actually didn't work but enabled me to find it anyway) :)

[green-badger.livejournal.com]

Your link is broken? Great article though.

[green-badger.livejournal.com]

And it appears that everyone else has said exactly the same thing! :)

[henry_the_cow]

As a Christmas message, I don't think much of it. One might, at this time of year, reach out to people, to build links of shared humanity, to seek to address common problems. Instead, Toynbee creates a crude caricature of religion, constructs some vague, unspecified threat to secular society, draws the humanist wagons into a circle and fires arrows into the dark.

Religious commentators seem to feel threatened by secular society, while at the same time secular commentators feel threatened by an apparent resurgence of religion. This mutual suspicion only benefits the extremists. In fact, most of us muddle along together most of the time.

In the UK, various religious movements have been highly progressive on many issues - with the notable exception of sex and sexuality. Even there, it makes more sense to engage and attract moderate opinion than to push them away into the shadow of the extremists.

To take an example, in the realm of sexuality, some branches of Christianity (most notably the Catholics and the American Right) campaign against the availability of contraception. This stance kills people; I think it is evil. The C of E, for all its faults, supports the use of contraception.

Similarly, it is not the C of E that seeks to teach creationism in science classes.

To take another example, Toynbee complains that faith schools select the brightest children. Instead of railing against this, how about trying to bring the church back to the notion that its duty is to minister to the poorest; that it should select children from poor families and troublesome estates rather than set up havens for the middle classes? Not that I like faith schools, but neither do I like banning people for their beliefs.

I'm an atheist, to the extent that I care little about religion one way or the other. Sometimes I oppose religious groups (as with the Pope's appalling speech this week), when they do good, I support them. Some parts of the Christian message, including tolerance and humility, seem worthy of support, at least some of the time.

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

I agree that you can engage on various issues with more moderate religious elements - I fail to see how Polly Toynbee implies that you can't.

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

Also, wrt to faith school issue, I think Toynbee was pointing out that Labour have encouraged faith schools, but that there was no point in that since they aren't actually better - they just select brighter students!

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I'm re-reading it now looking for the paragraph that you think is no more than crude caricature. How does the picture of religion she draws differ from the reality? She makes no mention of progressivism, or contraception, or creationism, or any of the other ways you seek to show a difference.

For what it's worth, I think humility is overrated, and I think tolerance is about as much the Christian message as peace is the Islamic one.

[henry_the_cow]

There are several such sentences; this is one example:

"Secularists take offence too at the way the religious paint unbelievers as poor desiccated rationalists, not only without values, but joyless, lacking a sense of mystery, devoid of awe."

This is not just a caricature of the religious, but of secularists too. I know several believers who do not "paint" me in that way. When some believers do say such things, I disagree with them, but I don't "take offence".

The fact that she makes no mention of progressivism is exactly my point.